Gonna link my original post here for visibility as to how this negatively affects the average user and the economy as a whole: Auction House Much Slower Today - June 16 - #82 by Powerworduwu-wyrmrest-accord
And with that, I’d like to propose two potential solutions based on the discussions here.
Solution 1: Buy Orders
This was a hot topic on the revamp post for the PTR. Buy Orders are extremely beneficial to average users by allowing them to set their own price and let the economy naturally favor them. They also allow very casual players that want to sell goods but struggle to compete due to lack of time/interest in monitoring the price to guarantee quick and easy sales at a price they are happy with.
For enhanced convenience and ease of use, posting items at or below the highest Buy Order without actively using the Buy Order interface automatically triggers the sale, and vice versa.
- Performance Gain: Fewer Auction House searches overall. People can set their prices and forget them. People can still search and buy like usual when they have a fuzzy idea of a reasonable price.
- Average User Benefit: Convenient purchases and sales. Buy Orders are a no-brainer in an MMORPG economy in 2020.
- Economic Benefit: More goods and gold change hands. Listing prices are naturally stabilized.
Solution 2: Throttle Cancellations
If some sort of throttling is absolutely necessary, then limit it to cancellations. The average user uses item cancels for the purpose of undoing a mistakenly listed item, or occasionally relisting a handful of high-value goods. Mass-cancellations are a goblin-only tactic.
Mass-cancellations also translate directly into mass-posts. People with items they are mass-posting also often have a stash of items that are rarely undercut and thus does not need to be cancelled (or scanned for). TSM in particular allows you to select groups to scan for cancels and posts - those low-competition items can easily be omitted by cancel scans for those users so that the throttling minimally affects them, and their cancel scans are less detrimental to the servers.
- Performance Gain: Fewer cancellations means fewer reposts. This is a significant net reduction in overall Auction House traffic without affecting the total number of goods available.
- Average User Benefit: They are completely unaffected by the throttling change. Also, with fewer cancellations across the board, item prices remain steady longer unless there is actually more competition in terms of total players trying to sell an item. Average users have more room to compete in a system they feel is inaccessible due to the current “cancel-scan” paradigm.
- Economic Benefit: The total breadth of posted goods remains unchanged. Players would not be deterred to post low-demand items such as transmog or old-world materials because they would not be throttled for doing so.