So I imagine a segment of the population of the world, of Warcraft, is pondering the consequences of being able to move BoE transmog gear instantly across realms.
I’m not sure how I feel about this, although it would be simpler for the world, of Warcraft, economy to have BoE items continue to be “trapped” on their home (connected) realms. Of course, for most players, being able to send any player anywhere any piece of BoE gear sounds like a pretty great deal. For a transmog AH goblin it mostly just sounds like a lot of potential extra head-scratching.
I wonder how much additional scraping is going to go on here and how this is going to affect the Blizzard APIs used to scrape AH data. It could be a shocking change or it could be no big deal.
An obvious (non?) solution is to unify all the AHs in a region, taking that final step from reagents to “everything,” but that would make “day trading” resale vastly different than it currently is (and awkward and complex), and might not be supportable by the AH backend at the required scale anyway.
Bear in mind that a healthy transmog gear market currently relies on sellers who maintain 1000-3000+ active auctions along with more items in inventory. Would a regional AH for everything work? Probably, although I think it would be the end of most short-term resale. AH resellers would just bank items they expected to appreciate in value and not bother buying anything that trades in volume, as there would no longer be profit in it.
Or, alternatively, what happens if the AH doesn’t change but it’s easy to move an item from one realm to another? Some folks are going to start watching multiple realms for bargains. Some will probably use some significant automation. Will this affect performance somewhere, or cause Blizzard to throttle or eliminate some APIs? Will it be a soul-sucking drag, or no big deal?
So I’m just curious what Blizzard has thought about this and what if anything has been done to keep this (major!) change in the handling of BoE from being disruptive to the economy and AH.
People already do this. A person could get a friend to make an alt on a different server, trade them gold and friend buys the item on the AH then trades the item.
You can trade everything cross-realm and have been able to do so for awhile now
If I’m understanding how this works correctly, I have to admit I am very surprised they are going to allow us to do this (transfer items across servers through the warbank to sell without without going the extra step of making the AH region-wide).
This is such a deeply data-driven playstyle that it’s almost certain to be purely the domain of add-ons and bots.
(edit: turns out I’ve been oblivious to a major change in how items can be traded)
( I knew they allowed character-to-character trading of lootable drops, but I thought that was just things with the limited-time tradable flag? Are you saying this has been allowing trading of any non-soulbound item? If so, I completely missed this change )
Really, after they made gold transferable across servers, server economies stopped existing since people can easily transfer in and out to get the best prices.
And I agree, they should cut out the extra steps and just connect all items on the AH.
Right. The ability to trade cross-realm player to player has been around since Cataclysm or MoP, when merges/connections and x-realm features started appearing.
But at the moment, a single account can’t move BoE gear between characters on different (non-connected) realms, without using someone else or another account to facilitate the trade with a “hand to hand” transaction. With warband banks, as far as I know (and I’m not on the beta, at least right now), people will be able to do that on a large scale all on their own.
anyone who has enough items to sell that is on a large enough scale (to potentially disrupt any server economy as you describe) would already have multiple accounts as they can buy expacs and gametime with gold via wow tokens.
so if it hasnt been an issue in the past, it wont be an issue now.
As far as I know, you can’t automate trading between two accounts. Someone has to be there running each account to meet, open trade, etc., etc.
This change will, as far as I can tell, make moving items between realms subject to automation and as easy as (or easier than) mailing them.
As I say this, it occurs to me that if Blizzard provides no API for interacting with Warband banks, so that moving items in/out can’t be automated, the effects to economies and auction players would be mostly minimized.
There are many, many players with inventories of thousands of transmog items. Hardly any of them do any significant amount of cross-realm activity using multiple accounts other than to move a specific item or handful of items around.
I do this on my guys and use my wife’s characters to pass them along.
For awhile BOP armor for fresh 70s was a lot cheaper on my alliance server so I would buy it there, group up with one of her guys on my horde server, hand it off and mail it to its proper recipient.