For many high volume commodities, I can’t get TSM to stop scanning the available stacks to let me buy anything. I literally have to switch to the default AH interface to buy those types of mats.
It is combination of both, yes. As my original post suggests.
To suggest high traffic is the only issue but completely dismissing bait and snipers as not part of the problem is really odd.
They need to throttle people like they have before because again, most of this traffic is generated by a very small subset of people as it was last time. Watch me be right in about 48 hours.
I just want to level my crafting professions and I’m so sick and tired of “The Item is no longer available” message from the AH.
2 Likes
We’re gonna need the SEC involved, we need regulations!
2 Likes
No. They need purchase orders.
Allow everyone to have something like 50 of those active account-wide. You can still manually buy stuff from AH, assuming whatever you want to buy has more sellers than buyers. Whenever a seller posts something that has competing purchase orders on it, highest bidding buyers who beat the minimum asking price get served first.
If the AH had purchase orders, then bait listings on high-traffic items would get instantaneously completed until purchase orders are exhausted, making it impossible to bait sellers. At least not until the early cash-in phase is over.
I agree that the commodity AH needs to work this way. It could do it essentially invisibly, turning any purchase into a market order with, say, 5% upward leeway, or a tunable range.
Man enough with the bad AH takes. So I’m sitting here with a small pile of rank 3 iron claw and I’ve gotta farm for hours just to get it to 100 to sell it?
To be honest, I liked the old final fantasies auction house system with hidden bids. You bid on something and if your price was above the cost of the lowest priced item placed (you wouldn’t know the cost its hidden) You would be the winning bidder and the seller would get the full amount you bid. Undercutting was still a thing but it hurt the sellers less and gave buyers a chance to get items really cheap if they attempted to. Only downside was the lack of a buyout with this style of system.
Well, a purchase order cannot be “invisible” since the whole point of it is to leave your purchase pending until fulfilled, which would only happen when there are no sellers - at least none willing to meet your buying price.
If there are more sellers than buyers at your intended price, then you just buy from stock listed on AH as usual - buy the X cheapest Y, up to Z cost.
How would you fixed people trying to bait people by posting one item for 1 copper? All of people trying to bait people is causing the “internal AH error.”
I mean I wouldn’t do something so stupid and drastic as to say “you have to have 100 of x item before you post”
Maybe I just have one bismuth in my bags and I just want it gone. Maybe I have 15 of them. I shouldn’t be screwed over because someone else is abusive.
I’m not sure about that. The other night I was trying to buy bismuth ore for 20g (at the time the next lowest were in the 45g range). There were put 100s up at a time but by the time I clicked to buy they were always gone. This process went on for about 15 minutes before I just gave up.
“Baiting”? The cheap items can be causing problems buying, but they are absolutely no problem for people posting.
With the default UI, the default price when someone posts stuff on the AH is whatever the cheapest instance of that item on AH is. “Baiting” is when people post a one-off grossly marked-down item to trick people who don’t double-check what price they are posting things at and snipe those items off the market - baiting sellers into posting well below market value.
While dumping stuff on AH, I often see a stack of 2000+ ores, then 3-4 orphan stacks bringing the price down by a few golds, another stack of hundreds, more baity-looking entries driving prices down some more, another small stack from someone who likely posted to a bait listing, etc. In those cases, I list my items with the highest non-baity price I see, ignoring the 200-1000 cheapest items on the market. Usually sells within minutes.
Baiting is a trap for sellers, not buyers. There is no risk to buyers, only the inconvenience that by the time you try to buy, the baited stacks are almost certainly gone.
Already suggested to make empty the price so the player has to select the min price on the right.
You have no idea how many scammers here on the forums started attacking me. This is their lives. They’re literally scammers.
A scam usually needs to be somewhat covert to actually work. People have all of the data they need to not get had here, just got to pay a bit more attention and “bait” listings wouldn’t affect them.
Changing the UI to make it more difficult to make such mistakes might help… but then again, mistakes are always an option and people will almost certainly screw that up too.
Bait listings are most effective early on when people are in a hurry to list early, list often while the prices are still generally high. Once the market settles down, having to manually pick a price with every listing becomes a mostly unnecessary extra step.
I suppose they could add a toggle/checkbox for “sell price auto-fill” on the stock UI. People who don’t trust the default price can tick that off, people who like the convenience or are satisfied that market prices have stabilized enough that they don’t need to triple-check every listing for bait posts before posting their own can turn it on.
Hilariously I’ve found the opposite to be the case. I cannot buy high volume items that are flying out of the AH using the normal Blizz interface, it tries then freezes and fails repeatedly with errors. But with the TSM interface open? Easy, it just goes and not only buys one but tracks it at the bottom so when I buy another it shows that and I can see how many I’ve succeeded in buying.
This issue 100% is the fact that the AH requires you to buy the cheapest available material.
You want 100 Mycobloom? You have to buy that stack of 5 before you can get the rest from the stack of 2000. That stack of 5 is only 4g, while the rest is 35? Guess what, you have to fight the entire region of wow players to buy that stack of 5. You didn’t get it? The entire order is cancelled, thanks for your time!
For real though, if you require someone to buy something at the lowest price available on a single type of item before buying anything higher priced, everyone in that region is always competing for those same items. If you don’t have a lowest stack of at least 2000, more than likely most of the people trying to buy that item will receive an error.
The fact that people are baiting 5g items that are worth 30g just makes the issue that much worse. If it only happened once in awhile, people might not notice it. But there are hundreds if not thousands of players/bots doing this every second on every material. Just go watch a material on refresh. Click it every second. You’ll see people posting literally every second. This makes it almost impossible to buy anything.
I’m not sure what a good fix would be. Return to the old AH method of being able to buy a specific item for sale (Not suggesting to return everything to the old AH, just the ability to buy a set amount at a set price). This could just be as easy as allowing you to click a price that has mats as it is in the current AH and buy from that price. Easy simple fix. Other suggestions have been given as well, and they all have some amount of merit. But honestly, this is Blizzard and they would take the most minimal amount of work required to fix this.
TLDR: AH issue is caused from being required to buy lowest priced mats first. Easy fix is to allow us to click the price of certain mats (like you currently do) and buy an amount at that specific price. (removes the need to buy every stack above that price also).
1 Like
Simple fix: pick the highest price you are willing to pay on AH from listed sales, then the back-end auto-buys all stacks up to that price until your quantity is satisfied. If your quantity cannot be met because stacks disappeared, then it could either fail or buy whatever remained within your price cap.
The default AH already kind of works that way: you enter the quantity you want, the AH auto-selects however many stacks are necessary to get you that amount and tells you how much it’ll cost. Only problem is the part where the purchase fails if he stacks disappear in the meantime since it cannot complete the transaction as-displayed.