To prepare for the upcoming region-wide commodities Auction House update, all auctions that are still listed when next week’s maintenance begins will be cancelled and returned to players’ mailboxes. There will be a notice that appears in the Auction House 48 hours before the maintenance begins informing players of the update, so be sure to set your listings to end before the servers go down.
Cheaper mats here I come!!
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Was there some post I missed about how exactly this will be implemented?
It seems that due to the sheer competition that will be involved (a fundamentally good thing), if the current LIFO system is maintained, unless an auction sells in the first 5 seconds, it probably just won’t sell – which isn’t at all the case now on low/mid pop realms.
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Incoming people complaining about the deposit fee for listing…
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This is balanced by the fact that there will be a LOT more buyers. Sure, prices will drop somewhat, but they will settle out in the end.
The premise that things are balanced by an increased number of buyers assumes 1) all realms have a roughly equivalent supply/demand ratio and 2) that demand is relatively close to supply, and 3) that an individual transaction scales up quantity bought/sold relative to the total. None of these are accurate. Additionally, prices going lower or higher is largely irrelevant – this is purely a queuing problem as it relates to increased scale.
Supply generally far out-weighs demand. Unfortunately, the dynamics likely don’t play out the same when you scale a system up to hundreds of realms, even if the “average” remains the same. My thought process (and I’d love Blizzard’s data to prove me wrong) that by scaling up to region wide, the “gaps” where supply is added but not removed have a higher likelihood of becoming wider (more specifically, more individual auctions between and not necessarily more quantity per auction) such that if an auction does not sell almost immediately, it won’t.
Again, this is all entirely in the context of a pure LIFO system.
Oh man, those AH bots are going to be BUSY.
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This is precisely why I’m concerned about this. On a good number of low/med pop realms, while it is rare, you have slightly improved odds of being able to sell an auction by being able to drop the price and either hope that A) the “goblins” won’t follow or B) will buy you out for quick wholesale.
At scale, that becomes nonexistent unless it’s automated to the point where you have fleets of bots dividing the “load” across multiple accounts/realms due to API rate limiting. You can’t compete on price because you’ll just immediately be undercut because there will always be someone somewhere in the region willing to do so. And it’ll likely be high enough quantity that individual “goblins” or “bots” won’t be able to handle that quantity of product for flipping. As such, the only reasonable way to sell volume is to chain repost/cancel, which will be compounded by the fact that there’s now 50x more doing it in the same queue.
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Well you have servers where there is no supply and lots of demand, and some that have lots of supply and little demand. Merging them should in theory balance it much better than it is on a lot of realms. Sure, not “everyone” benefits from this, but at the same time, we’ve been watching the rich get richer and the poor staying poor long enough. This whole one guy taking over a realms market and raking us on the prices is over. Everyone benefits from this but high end gold farmers, which I’m sure it will take all of 5 seconds to find another niche. At some point the sellers need to understand they’re not the only players, and we’re tired of y’all putting stupidly high prices on stuff.
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No
LoL
No
High and full pop servers will end up paying in some areas 30% more to subsidize the low pop realms once this goes live.
As is typical. The successful subsidize the unseuccesful, who complain about the successful but refuse to do anything on their one to fix their position even when the tools are available for them to do so.
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I don’t think you understand.
This will lead to the 1% of the 1% of the 1% of the “high end gold farmers” being able to dominate the entire region.
This entire problem goes away if there’s some mechanism in place which moves it away from a pure LIFO system (as it exists today), to one where there is some form of distribution of transactions across the system. Even a FIFO system would be better in this scenario, because then that would force prices down to their absolute minimum since the only way to “jump the line” is to reduce the price.
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So… boosters? Other than the token one booster that also knows how to play the AH, I don’t think this is going to be a problem.
Let’s just say that someone bought out the US Region’s entire laestrite ore market, which would cost a cool 8.7 million gold as of the writing of this post.
Where are they going to store all 1.98 million ore? That’s 9900 inventory slots worth of space! Even with an entire 8 slot gbank, 32 slot bags in every bank and bag slot, and playing on a vulpera, there’s still another 8,708 inventory slots worth of materials they have to go through. (If they do this after DF releases, it’d be a lot more feasible, since there’d only be 788 inventory slots worth of material left to go through with crafting mats stacking to 1k each).
EDIT: Ooh, forgot about the crafting mats tab in the bank (another 98 slots), but still…
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Maybe I’m not explaining the problem well enough. I’m not suggesting that buying out the entire region’s inventory and reposting will be the strategy or reasonable (although I think some may underestimate how possible it is with 10+ accounts spreading the inventory, and just how little 8.7M gold is at the top end). I’m saying that at region scale, the current system will skew even more in favor of those who are willing to cancel/repost continuously for 14 hours a day.
My entire point is that, with a LIFO system as designed, doing this is only possible for those who are the most dedicated to the AH, who’s cancel scanning on 10 accounts and being willing to “undercut” one of their other 10 accounts simply to have the most recent items on the AH at all times. If the goal is to keep the rich from getting richer, this isn’t it.
This change will benefit those that do nothing but buy, which is likely the plurality of players. And I’m all in support of that and implementing systems which aid keeping those prices lower for those players. But what I also want is a system where the average player can make a small side income by listing a few pots or flasks or enchants without needing to babysit their auctions.
A pure LIFO system at region scale doesn’t do that for the reasons I discussed above. There’s a curve where the likelyhood of something selling decreases exponentially in a high-volume, supply heavy system, such that the strategy for selling is to ensue you wait no longer than some unknown threshold of time (I believe that window will be extremely short) before reposting, regardless of the quantity of auctions in front of you. That’s already true today, but my argument is that it will be even worse with this.
I’m totally all for region-wide AH, even for non-commodities. But pure LIFO will cause issues. Again, this is a pure algorithmic/queuing problem of how these systems behave (sometimes unpredictably) when targeted with what is effectively random transaction order.
To summarize since I likely won’t be posting here any further:
- I agree that region-wide AH for commodities, at a high level, is beneficial and desirable and I’m glad it’s being implemented.
- I believe that this change will benefit buyers, especially those on lower pop realms that have supply issues.
- I believe that it will do little to nothing to address “the rich getting richer” or to curb total profits for the top end of the AH market.
- I believe it will make it harder for the average player to sell commodities.
- I, however, believe this change is a net-positive for the game.
- I believe that much more can be done in the future to make the system better for all players – including those who wish to sell commodities on the AH in any quantities, small or large.
- Most Importantly: I would like to see Blizzard be more transparent about this aspect of the game and actually have conversations and brainstorms with the community, much like how class designers have (mostly) been extremely good about conversing with the community regarding Dragonflight talents and design, etc. I want more transparency about how things work, why decisions are made, what data and metrics they have to back up said decisions, and what future plans are across all areas of the game, including the AH.
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Ultimately, there’s very little anybody can do about that. This change will put a stop to certain forms of abuse but as-is, without further insight into how the infrastructure will work, all we can do right now is speculate as to how the next mega-whales will emerge.
Every mechanism Blizzard can build will be gamed in some manner. If Blizzard throttled AH transactions, the biggest goblins will just distribute their listing activities across even more accounts. If Blizzard moves to a FIFO methodology, you’d just see pricing iterate by copper changes all day between market resets. Higher listing costs? You’d probably just see more frequent listings of smaller batches of merchandise.
I get that you’re concerned but I’d be very surprised if Blizzard isn’t also concerned. Unfortunately, being aware of something and being able to fix it (or even figure out the littlest evil) are very different things.
what are they changing?
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Commodities (ergo, stackables) are going to be region-wide.
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There’s a nice system in TERA ONLINE for AH where you can directly offer/negotiate a price directly with the seller that has their items posted on the AH if they are online. They can decline or accept your lower offer. Not sure why WOW has not implemented this kind of transactional system. It’s probably not hard to code since it’s like a direct trade
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I am not on top of any of the latest goings-on with WoW… why is the AH getting updated? What changes are being implemented?
** Auction Houses across all realms on a given region will now share commodity listings (gems, herbs, flasks, consumables, etc.). Items that aren’t commodities–like armor and weapons–will continue to be realm-specific.*
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