Please for the love of Thrall go back to server based AH. The region wide AH has only made botting worse. This because bots farm on dead servers like Grizzly Hills and then chucked it on the region wide AH.
Blizz has proven to either not care about the bots in the Z. Caverns or they don’t have the resources to curb botting.
They’ve always cared about botting, it’s just important to remember that no matter how aggressively they action them that they’ll always come back because they have so many willing customers.
You are going to be very disappointed with War Within then.
When Warbands show up, server specific AHs will be in name only. Functionally, there will be no difference. It will be trivial for folks to move product from one “server” and/or faction to another, as they only need to park an alt, and use the in game, instantaneous email.
Many do it now, but at least they have to log in to two accounts and trade. Next expansion, they won’t even have to do that.
Bots are a hydra effect. Cut off one head 2 more grow.
There are benefits to a regional wide AH. Those players on lower pop servers that enjoy the friends they’ve made there and call it their “home” dont want to leave for various reasons, be it the guild (changing in TWW), they have a unique name taken on higher pop servers etc. They benefited from this change. Having access to more mats and such as a reduced price because the market increased. They have more people to sell to if they farm.
Do bots benefit from this? Yes, bots will always find a way. But, the benefit to the average player is also there and they deserved the change imo.
Buyers are happy with region AH, things have never been cheaper, farmers needs to find new hunting grounds.
Grizzly Hills is connected with 5 other servers and is considered high population as a consequence. The RP servers like Ravenholdt would fit your description better.
As someone who sometimes plays on a dead server: nah.
Yeah, I have been very happy with the region AH.
Please for the love of god no.
Please for the love of god expand the AH to be truly region wide for every item. Because having to find someone on another realm to buy something that’s cheap compared to yours, then pay them a small fee is ridiculous. We can trade items and gold cross-realm now. Just open the hatches on the AH.
I still like to believe hiring a small team to surveil in-game for active bots is not a hard thing to get up and running. Suspend and ban bots on the spot as most of them are obvious. Even teleporting them to a temp holding cell to make them verify legit play.
Doing a sweep every month or so after all the items have already flooded the market is just done to give us the illusion they care.
Even when we had active GMs actually in the game, they failed to stop botting. I’m not sure why you think it would be any different now.
Not only that, how big does this “small team” need to be to actively police the 240 retail servers? What is the cost offset where Blizz isn’t losing a ton of money between employee cost and account bans? Do you really think policing bots more aggressively is going to have a significant impact on player retention or increase revenue?
And of course, lets not forget that you can play up to SLs for free without buying WoW now so the cost for botters losing accounts is just a monthly sub…which they probably make back pretty quickly.
Make your own level 1 human and run them to SW. Find a friend on your realm, pass them some gold to pass to your new level 1. Buy what you want then trade it back through your friend. (TWW you can pass items through your war band bank)
And I am in full support of a full cross realm AH.
A team? of multiple people? To do nothing but watch for botting?
Thats sorta a huge investment.
I would rather not see a whole region wide AH, as it would absolutely plummet gold farming via the market and turn the activity into raw-gold only to be viable (thus chasing off a decent percentage of the playerbase by destroying the activity they play to participate in, as yes, there is a decent population who plays just to play the market via AH). That said, I don’t necessarily hate the region wide AH for certain goods like consumables and reagents. I used to play on a fairly dead realm (my main still lives there until TWW, once guilds go cross-realm I’ll be moving her to the full pop server I now primarily play on) and definitely agree that certain goods should be available without needing to jump through hoops.
Because player enjoyment can’t cost anything? That’s a weird take.
We’ve reached a point the whole CS is ran by a skeleton crew because Blizzard thought it was too much of an investment to hire real people and just went with AI responds to tickets. It’s clear people love that…
3 month ban for anyone caught RMTing first offense after that perma ban.
Blizz can easily help the material market too.
Blizz can reintroduce vendor shuffling to set a price floor. Blizz nuked those because they were embarrass by the shrouded cloth robe shuffle.
Blizz can double the materials needed in each craft too.
Blizz can raise the turn- in requirement of the weekly profession quest too.
Blizz can capped farming after 3 hours per 24 hours. Most players only farm for a hour two. Only bots farm for more then three hours.
All Blizz needs to do to stop AH cancel scanning is to put a cap on the number of items you can cancel like 50 items per 24 hours.
I’m just saying.
This would cost what? Millions a year? With a job that has lesser job security the better you are at your job?
This pretty much describes all gaming related jobs atm.
There’re still customers to service with open tickets that are more than happy to finally have a person respond. It’s not like their CS jobs end when the bots are vanguished.