A couple of weeks ago I made a thread in the CC forums about why these features should be disabled. It’s kind of long since I included several updates as I found more information and tracked down more groups of people abusing these features to flood the AHs on many servers. Here’s a link to the post in case you’re curious.
Some players have reached out to me in game to share similar experiences that they’ve had as they couldn’t comment on the CC thread. After exchanging notes, I decided to create a thread in GD so that more people could share their experiences here.
I would also love to share screenshots and name drop guilds or character groupings to provide proof, but I believe that would be considered calling people out on the forums which is frowned upon.
The Premise
Cancel scanning and relisting with addons like TSM is annoying enough to deal with when people from your own server doing it. However, with the addition of the warband bank, it’s incredibly easy to craft items on one server and then access them from AH alts across numerous servers. I’m not talking about one or two, I’m talking about 50+ servers.
Even on my cluster of 4 medium pop RP servers, I’ve tracked down at least 8 accounts with AH alts on my server that also have them on 50+ other servers on average. They are easy to track because they are in the same guild, are all the same race/class combo, and have server names in their character names like xxxxcenarion or cenarionxxxx. There are several more that I am suspicious of but can’t confirm because they aren’t in a guild.
There are a few bots taking advantage of this as I’ve received in game letters saying that accounts were actioned due to my reports, but a new character from that same guild will pop back up a few days later to take their place. But this post isn’t really about bots as many of the people doing this seem to be actual players.
A while ago, Blizzard made crafting materials and reagents region wide in order to stop players from cornering markets on smaller servers. In the spirit of that, these features should be disabled as people are abusing this and driving away players who might otherwise engage in professions and the AH. Players logging on like clockwork to cancel and repost with a few button clicks make it incredibly frustrating for everyone else. Dealing with a couple is bad enough, but dealing with 10 or more players doing this make it impossible unless you’re willing to dedicate your entire day to relisting auctions yourself.
Tl;dr
The warband bank is an amazing feature, but with it, some players are abusing certain AH addon features to flood numerous servers with auctions. This essentially allows players to automate the AH, corner markets, and force other people out. Blizzard should disable these as it would be in line with the reasoning that they used to make crafting materials and reagents region wide.
Plus Auctinator warns me if a posting price seems to low.
