To address some issues related to the Auction House, we’re reconsidering how deposits—the refundable fees you pay to list your auctions—are calculated. This fee is based on the item’s vendor price, and for profession materials in particular, vendors offer very low prices, so these mats have a low deposit cost. Deposits are substantial on items such as BoE uncommon gear, gems, and so forth, but not trade skill materials (trade goods such as cloth, ore, leather, etc.).
One thing we’ve identified as particularly troublesome is a large volume of trade skill materials being auctioned off in stacks of 1. Some addons make posting quantities of this size trivial to do, resulting in dozens, if not hundreds, of pages of auctions for a single item. As we looked at ways to change this behavior and improve the overall Auction House experience, we found that we prefer to avoid inflexible solutions such as caps on the number of listings a player can make, or increased minimum stack counts, which might interfere with many players' common gameplay habits.
Our current plan is to increase the deposit cost of some profession materials on a per-stack basis, which should provide incentive for players to post items in larger stacks.
Here's an example:
• Let’s say that a player is trying to sell 200 Tidespray Linen for 10g (gold) each. Today, each item has the normal deposit cost of 1c (copper), with a 1s (silver) minimum deposit, so 1 auction of 200 linen requires a deposit of 1s, and 200 auctions of 1 linen each adds up to a total deposit of 2g.
• Now imagine an additional 20% deposit added to the listing fee per auction. With an asking price of 10g each, that raises the deposit by 2g per stack. In the case of 1 stack of 200 linen, the total buyout price is 2000g, and the new deposit is 2g1s. In the case of 200 individual stacks, the new deposit of an additional 2g per stack brings the total deposit up to 402g.
In either case, the deposit is returned to the seller if the item sells. Successful auctions aren’t affected by this change.
Our goal is to give players some forewarning on this change, and to gather feedback. We’re putting together a list of the items that would be affected by this deposit change, which we expect to be limited to high-quantity trade goods. Furthermore, we’re deploying the change to the PTR first, so that addon authors can work through the change while we test it thoroughly.
This change will likely be a temporary measure, as we’re also working to broadly improve the default Auction House in the future. It’s clear to us that many players use addons because they find the default Auction House interface inadequate. A temporary change to deposit fees will help with this in the short term, and we’ll continue to work on overall improvements to the Auction House for a future patch.
This is a nice step towards improving the auction house, but can you guys PLEASE remove or reduce the "cooldown" you added to the "next page" action. It's stupidly slow, and just makes it that much more annoying to use the AH. Players wouldn't need to use an AH addon if your default UI was remotely useful (such as showing the current listings/unit prices of the item you are trying to sell. If you guys just built in the function of Auctionator, it would reduce the amount of queries sent by the addon. OR You could simply add a way for auction addons to query for ALL listings, non-paged of a specific item, so that it only takes a single query. (this has pros and cons) Another option would be to simply return more results per page!
As far as I can see, this is going to kill any auctions for high value items on low pop servers, where a 1% sell rate is not uncommon. A 20% deposit when putting up veiled crystals at 10k gold each, or a mount or BOE for 500k gold, isn't going to fly when I'm going to have to put them up multiple times before they sell.
Then don't do it. They aren't forcing you to use the AH. You can also use trade chat.
This doesn't solve anything because people who post thousands of stacks of 1 are too stupid to even notice the listing fee. Sorry, ban me if you like, but it's the truth.
I agree most people don't pay attention to forums and patch notes but unless they are just really not paying attention, they should notice how much gold they just lost once the auctions expire.
In either case, the deposit is returned to the seller if the item sells. Successful auctions aren’t affected by this change.
So nothing will change then?
Maybe maybe not. If the auctions do not sell and I am pretty sure at least some of them won't, the sellers will start to notice the higher deposits from looking at the gold.
Some addons make posting quantities of this size trivial to do, resulting in dozens, if not hundreds, of pages of auctions for a single item.
Alternatively you could break said addons.
The addons you speak of do not benefit the community... they benefit the individual, resulting (typically) in higher prices overall. The ability of people at or around gold cap can quite effectively monopolize the economy for any commodity they desire.
No addon should be able to do something a normal player (sans addon) couldn't be able to do on their own. The amount of manual labor that would be required to monitor prices, and buy up bulk items that are under the average sales price... would be infinitely more intensive.
What kind of load are we looking at coming from the constant scans/queries coming from these addons? I find it hard to believe the lag is ONLY the result of mass single stack postings.
08/27/2018 05:59 PMPosted by
Kriggs
It's impossible to know if a change like this is going to work or not, until it shows up on live servers.
If I were making the change, i'd probably opt for a somewhat hamfisted "minimum 20 stack" on crafting reagents. Storing all of these one item auctions is probably a contributor to the immense lag the AH has seen since BFA launch.
And yeah, the AH interface needs all the help it can get.
I like this idea except that it then truly does penalize people who have less than your minimum stack size to post as well as the people who need to buy less than your minimum stack size.
Please remove confirmations on buying from the AH. Bids especially. Or at least make it an option I can turn off.
There used to be an add-on that let the user click directly on the item and, depending on modifier key, instantly his or buyout. If the game emulated this functionality, that would be wonderful.
While the AH on my server doesn't suffer the same lag as some other servers, it is still majorly annoying to see dozens of single stacks by the same poster. Many people will pay more per item for a bigger stack just because we want to click once not 20 times. So I am hoping that sellers with high amounts of mats to sell will start doing so in reasonable stack sizes. This deposit plan might work.
Just implement a centralized auction house for all both factions, all servers. Something similar to GW2's Trade Post.
How would this help?
The issue is overloading an AH with numerous auctions to the point of causing incredible lag. Consolidating the thousands more onto 1 AH defeats the purpose.
And even if it fixed the problem by some miracle, you would ruin the economies of the servers involved.
We’re putting together a list of the items that would be affected by this deposit change, which we expect to be limited to high-quantity trade goods.
Did this list get created and posted somewhere?
Sounds like a sensible change. I almost always have about 600-1500 auctions going. I would love to see a smaller deposit on gear being posted. I love tmog and much of it doesnt get posted because the seller cant make a profit after posting fees. A lot of the stuff sells really slowly but someone often finds the perfect piece they need.
I never post large quantities of 1 stack of trade goods but I do hope the lag is resolved.
Alternatively you could break said addons.
The addons you speak of do not benefit the community... they benefit the individual, resulting (typically) in higher prices overall. The ability of people at or around gold cap can quite effectively monopolize the economy for any commodity they desire.
Having a variety of goods from all expansions is a community service. Someone has to go fetch them to post them. The effort to post hundreds of items using the default interface is a huge burden. The game is larger than the current expansion, and the Dev's have been working on making the old world more relevant to those of us in end game. A market needs both a buyer and a seller, so making zero gold does not make it worth the effort for sellers. That would dramatically affect the community. Farm your own mats for everything? Think the grind is bad now for rep.... add in everything else?!?!?1111111
The Shadoweave Mask for the lucid nightmare is a recent example, both from the gameplay and old world mat/recipe perspective. :-)
08/28/2018 09:51 AMPosted by
Invy
This is ridiculous because you've (Buzzard inc.) penalized people for not selling items and made it financially impossible to address the ridiculous amount of undercutting that takes place especially when you release a new expansion (largely due to the incredible influx of drooling and developmentally challenged noobs who think undercutting means posting an item at 1/2, or less the value of said item simply to get a sale).
So aside from regular sellers having to deal with the destabilization of the economy (which btw I want to congratulate you on the outstanding job you've done with that) due to the large influx of people who really don't seem to understand the long term degeneration of value to any item they sell vs a "quick sale," NOW we must also anticipate what and how much of any given item will sell?
To put in numbers; If I sell 1 piece of 'whatever trade item' at 286gold+ (normally 5 individual pieces and 2 - 5 packs and maybe 3 - 10 pks) I have to pay 59g20s70c to post/sell ONE 10pk, 57g51s95c for a SINGLE INDIVIDUAL PIECE and 58g26s95c to post a 5 pack and I ONLY GET A REFUND IF IT SELLS?
HOW EXACTLY DOES THIS 900 - 1k % increase in FEES SEEM REASONABLE TO ANYONE?
I'm literally paying 1/5 of the asking price on anything I'm trying to sell, with ABSOLUTELY NO CERTAINTY THAT IT WILL SELL, OR THAT I WON'T HAVE TO take it down and repost again at a lower price it to combat undercutting!
I'm sure the "brilliant" solution of both Buzzard employees and Buzzard apologists will be something to the effect of "Oh why don't you just have your mommy/daddy/husband buy your gold (via token) with their credit card like mine does," but when one doesn't have any of those options (or simply not of such a dependent nature to ever consider using them, if they did) and a significant amount of the enjoyment of this game actually comes from making money/gold on your own with your chosen profession, such ridiculous suggestions becomes moot!
YOUR DEVELOPERS HAVE RUINED THE GAME IN NUMERABLE WAYS with this latest expansion and this the is THE LAST STRAW!
Man shut up. If you people quit posting single stacks of bull crap in the auction houses that nobody wants just clugging up the game we wouldn't have this problem.
Obviously you are one of those blind apologists who don't bother read.
Some people post single listing for items that will only, or may only sell in singles (due to high price, limited necessity, etc.) responsibly. If you BOTHERED to read what I wrote (which you obviously can't/didn't) you would see that I stated I usually post FIVE (5) pieces in singles. NOT PAGES OF SINGLES.
It's people like you who come in here not knowing what they are doing, or what they or any one else is talking about and not paying attention to what others are doing, that RUIN THE GAME and create problems.
We need another drooling illiterate raising her single digits in the air, stomping on the keys and shouting out "LOOK MOMMY, I'M POSTING ON THE INTERNET" like a hole in the head.
I hope you at least managed to get that coveted star next to your name for managing to turn on your computer. Don't forget to put on your helmet when you get up from your chair, so you don't cause any more damage to your already dysfunctional comprehension.
Buzzard apologists, the blight of reasonable and intelligent discussion.
Some addons make posting quantities of this size trivial to do, resulting in dozens, if not hundreds, of pages of auctions for a single item.
Alternatively you could break said addons.
The addons you speak of do not benefit the community... they benefit the individual, resulting (typically) in higher prices overall. The ability of people at or around gold cap can quite effectively monopolize the economy for any commodity they desire.
No addon should be able to do something a normal player (sans addon) couldn't be able to do on their own. The amount of manual labor that would be required to monitor prices, and buy up bulk items that are under the average sales price... would be infinitely more intensive.
What kind of load are we looking at coming from the constant scans/queries coming from these addons? I find it hard to believe the lag is ONLY the result of mass single stack postings.
This can be done without an add-on, using blizzards own auction house UI. It takes a little longer but there's nothing stopping a player from listing single items en masse without an add-on. Every player that opens the auction house and searches for an item sends a query to the database searching through every item for the one searched even without addons.
Add-ons are about the only way to make the auction house usable for someone who plays a little more than casually. It needs the whole UI to be redisgned and the database rebuilt to make it less of a server strain. There have been very few changes to the system since vanilla and it's gotten to the breaking point.
As many have suggested making it similar to Guild Wars 2 would be an amazing change. Even everquest had buy orders that would be a good system to help.
TLDR; breaking the add-ons isn't going to help. Need to rebuild the code of the auction house as it's at its breaking point after 14 years of money nimum updates.
This change is a massive barrier to selling on the auction house as the chance of a listing not selling now means you are out a large amount of gold even if you are listing stacks of 20+ ore, or bars (I am primarily a miner) because the chance that you will need to list a lot multiple times is very high. I know with the mining materials that I sell on my server I typically have to list them several times before they sell.
This change put players at risk of loosing serious amounts of money if their auctions fail to sell due to the steep deposit fee. Has it ever been considered to switch the way the deposit fee works to charging you the fee if your lot sells and returning it if it fails to sell? This way the 20% up charge still dissuades people from listing hundreds of single stacks but does not cost you serious amounts of gold if your auctions fail to sell. To me ( granted I am a novice at designing fantasy economies ) this seems like a way to deal with the problem as it makes it a question of profit rather than penalty.
Also changing the default UI to be much more like addons like Auctionator where it stacks single lots of the same price would go a long way to making this a non issue.
I feel the change to AH deposit is completely WRONG. Quite frankly, I feel they should just set limits on # of stacks you are allowed to post of each item. i.e. You can post a max # of 40 stacks of any items. Each stack can contain how ever many items you wish... i.e. 40 stacks of 1 or 40 stacks of 200...
Additionally, possibly add a maximum number of stacks overall.... I feel that the problem is created by less than 1% of the population. By putting in this style of a restriction, it would be a pretty immediate solution to the issue.
Sure, this will major league affect many of us, I often have 400+ auctions active at any one time... but, I try to not be part of this problem... mine are spread among many categories of stuff. I try to post a max of 50 stacks of each item at any one time.
When the Auction House doesn't work, It's Everyone's Problem. So, what would be the best compromise to the AH revamp? Well, a good start is for Blizzard to acknowledge that they've had their heads in the sand about this issue for the past several years. Several posters have given feedback and stated that they would like to see a limit to the amount of 1 stack items. Others have complained about people who undercut. I'm going to DA for the people who undercut.
I intentionally undercut in a few stacks of 1 because as a longtime player, nothing offends my sensibilities of fair play more profoundly than profligate postings of wanton greed. A truly new player who needs mats to make a vest for themselves, and sees Copper, and Tin Ore going for 4 gold each? Level 10 to 30 armor/weapons going for 20G+? That player would be discouraged from further playing. If you posted prices like this pre-BG, then you'd be threatened with being blacklisted. A solution could be that NPC' s start selling low level mats in addition to low level green armor. Would that ruin the economy? Somewhat, but the economy is already broken...(to those people who bought riding crops for 100g each, and the pattern for 750g..caveat emptor)
Players shouldn't be penalized for posting a few dozen stacks of 1. Those who post over 200 stacks of 1...no AH for you. Please bring back mobile AH. Whoever made that decision was probably the same group of people who thought of the idea of introducing new Coke or resort fees at hotels.
Epic mats and things like Living Steel need to be exempt. Those are always put in stacks of 1-5 because otherwise they'd be too expensive and most only need a few anyway. No one is going to buy 200 Living Steel or Veiled Crystals when they need three.
All this is going to do is make it where sellers are spamming trade chat and buyers better hope someone is on doing just that when they need something, because it won't take long for there to be either none in the AH or so few that many won't find what they need. Most sellers aren't going to risk their epic mats coming back to them at a cost of upwards of 800g loss every time it takes to post it until it sells. No.
In one fell swoop you just screwed up the auction system in this game blizz. Good job!
When the Auction House doesn't work, It's Everyone's Problem. So, what would be the best compromise to the AH revamp? Well, a good start is for Blizzard to acknowledge that they've had their heads in the sand about this issue for the past several years. Several posters have given feedback and stated that they would like to see a limit to the amount of 1 stack items. Others have complained about people who undercut. I'm going to DA for the people who undercut.
I intentionally undercut in a few stacks of 1 because as a longtime player, nothing offends my sensibilities of fair play more profoundly than profligate postings of wanton greed. A truly new player who needs mats to make a vest for themselves, and sees Copper, and Tin Ore going for 4 gold each? Level 10 to 30 armor/weapons going for 20G+? That player would be discouraged from further playing. If you posted prices like this pre-BG, then you'd be threatened with being blacklisted. A solution could be that NPC' s start selling low level mats in addition to low level green armor. Would that ruin the economy? Somewhat, but the economy is already broken...(to those people who bought riding crops for 100g each, and the pattern for 750g..caveat emptor)
Players shouldn't be penalized for posting a few dozen stacks of 1. Those who post over 200 stacks of 1...no AH for you. Also, bring back mobile AH. Whoever made that decision was probably the same group of people who thought of the idea of introducing new Coke or resort fees at hotels.
Quite frankly those who post more than 50 stacks or so of ANYTHING should be slapped... with the market as soft as it is atm, posting more then a couple dozen stacks just doesn't make sense.... but in the frenzy that is early expansion, people are just trying to cash in on the lazy people trying to rank up professions as much as they can. As such, all intelligence and logic is left at the door. :(
Alternatively you could break said addons.
The addons you speak of do not benefit the community... they benefit the individual, resulting (typically) in higher prices overall. The ability of people at or around gold cap can quite effectively monopolize the economy for any commodity they desire.
Having a variety of goods from all expansions is a community service. Someone has to go fetch them to post them. The effort to post hundreds of items using the default interface is a huge burden. The game is larger than the current expansion, and the Dev's have been working on making the old world more relevant to those of us in end game. A market needs both a buyer and a seller, so making zero gold does not make it worth the effort for sellers. That would dramatically affect the community. Farm your own mats for everything? Think the grind is bad now for rep.... add in everything else?!?!?1111111
The Shadoweave Mask for the lucid nightmare is a recent example, both from the gameplay and old world mat/recipe perspective. :-)
I didn't suggest players not be able to make a profit for how they play the game.
With the most recent change to professions we should see a tremendous decrease in the demand for mats outside the current expansion. There will always be completionists and there will always be some who care to craft a specific item from an expansion long past, but for the most part now that you don't have to level a profession from vanilla to bfa... anything pre-bfa will become somewhat of an oddity.
My post was addressing those folks that DON'T actually go out into the world and collect and profit from gathering. Those that simply play the auction house and either buyout everything from a select few items/mats, to maintain a high price on those items (monopoly) or are constantly buying out items lower than the average price, and relisting them at a higher price. (This has a singular benefit to the individual and NO ONE else).