The Black Market Auction House has been a great source to obtain otherwise unobtainable gear. However in order to engage with it you either need to be on a small realm, or have access to people with large amounts of gold on a small realm as larger realms will be gold capped near instantly on anything elusive.
There is one item however that is never gold-capped, but that’s due to the sheer amount of luck required to get something good from it.
Unclaimed Black Market Container
This item can contain anything inside which is great for the gamblers out there, but there’s a definite cost/value point where it becomes pointless to purchase.
Here’s where I have an idea to turn this into a regular gold sink.
Just make this item purchasable all the time for a fixed price. Let people sink however much they want to fulfil their gambling urges. Say if this was 50-100k gold each this would be at a definite cost/value point to just try it out or to even sink millions into if you’re that way inclined.
However, something I must stress is that the cost must remain fixed. If it fluctuates then the value is lost.
There are opportunities to also increase the cost of them but have limited pools of items (basically bringing back the TCG packs). This would be similar to what happened with Island Expedition loot towards the end of BfA.
40 Likes
This is a great idea. The BMAH’s entry barrier is pretty steep (which is of course the intent), but this seems like a good compromise. As long as it doesn’t cause players with gambling addiction to not sink too much money into buying tokens in order to play the lottery, at least.
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I feel like this would take the “auction” element out of it, and make it more of a vendor situation.
I think the BMAH is generally fine, but I wouldn’t mind seeing a few more items up for auction at a time.
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Box was definitely something i always felt stupid buying when it would be a recipe or a transmog for a class I wasnt until I got the sha of anger mount from a 80k box in BFA. I think it would lose some greatness if they changed it. Wish it didnt go for 500kish now so I could buy more again.
Thats the beauty of the gamble, and why it can be good. Sha of Anger mount is worth millions, and you only paid 80k for it, but you probably also paid 80k for those recipes haha
That’s why I’d like to see more options. I’m not sure if more boxes would drop the price in general, but I wonder how the auction prices would change if there were always 3 boxes available instead of one.
1 Like
The fact its an auction in itself leads to wanting to use gold transfer services to get gold on a dead realm to do the gamble there as it’ll be sold for the base price rather than an actual auctioned amount hence the request for a fixed price always purchasable option to kill this off 
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The fact people can just bid the gold cap and win the item automatically kinda already does that, though?
There’s dozens of items that get auto-gold capped as soon as they end up on the BMAH. They really need to find a way to address that, or just add the items as a rotating vendor with set gold-sink prices, not an auction house.
2 Likes
Thats a fair point - maybe add a maximum bid increase? Though I suppose that might just lead to jockeying to be the first to hit gold cap. I’m not sure.
With the BMAH there should be a larger flow of items available. Why not 2 containers at once or a minimum of 10 items total? Going to the BMAH and seeing only a Flintlocke’s Blasthammer and a Misc Pattern that NO ONE wants for the umptenth time is kinda sad and makes the BMAH less fun.
8 Likes
I guess the BMAH could have an uncapped bid, being able to pull gold from multiple characters at once. Alternatively, remove the gold cap per character? Does it even serve a specific purpose?
Agreed, it’s especially tiring to check seven days in a row and only have 2-3 ‘‘junk’’ items, then have one day with somehow 7 items including 4 of them on your wish-list.
2 Likes
Looking at the BMAH there are 4 items listed.
Unclaimed Container
Pattern: Robe of Eternal Rule
Rising New Moon Talisman (IL 35 Neck)
Parrot Cage ( Green Wing Macaw)
Out of all of these the only item that could potentially be of any value is the Container. These stay up for 24 hours and only 1 will be bid on with any actual effort.
If the BMAH was designed as a gold sink. It is currently failing. The additional of more extravagant or rare items / mounts and pets would make this worth players time.
1 Like
Keep in mind that theoretically each character gets 2-2.5k gold per day from the callings. Larger server (groups) should see an influx of more than 50 million (new) gold each day just from that. Rarely does my home servers BMAH reach more than 10m spending in one day.
I don’t have numbers on this but I kinda doubt that lesser populated realm(group)s see a weighted listing of items. In the past I’ve heard from many other players that they specifically target these servers to snipe cheap T3 listings.
On the other hand there is the problem of focus on rather old items with the plethora of listings being solely the T3 items. Putting CM items on there is probably a hard risk for complains.
And then there are the crown jewels with insta cap being both ZG mounts (mostly the tiger) and probably the Brutosaur. Add to that the BoE mounts that many times end up on the AH to make a profit again or some well known 3rd party sites for offer.
The market for certain items is probably in the high tripple digit millions therefor only super regular/mass listings will drown out the gold market cap for these. The 1 week of Garrosh shoulders last year (tied to the Garrosh SoD cinematic) has shown how prices develop when a situation like that is expectable.
The biggest blunder are the items on there that NO ONE wants, misc pets, patterns old gear like necks that don’t do anything. Maybe put some items like world drops that are stupidly low drop rates from Legion or BFA.
I would sink millions into the unclaimed black market container in a heartbeat if it was some item with a set price but we could buy multiple of. Although at that point it wouldn’t exactly be an “auction” item - maybe a vendor something a la Mad Merchant?
2 Likes
At some point a bigger variety of additions should be considered. Just adding the former 100% mythic endboss drops doesn’t make it that much more interesting. Over the years we have gotten a lot of mid-raid and 5man mythic drops. Especially the latter could be farmed much better when these m+ dungeons where current content. Now you are running for 1% rolls every week for up to 10 drops or more that are rather “easy” to farm but the amount of runs is getting quite huge.