Region wide auction house and the billion gold capital

I am really worried about giving players that are sitting on hundreds of millions of gold if not more than 1 billion the access to a market with 100.000s of customers with the same convenience as for a server by now.
Currently it’s already a battle of buying out current high value markets and dictating the price with reset battles (or auction reset bots/scripts, had my XP with that in early SL and reported those). Maybe a larger influx can (!) compensate and throttle the impact of a few but once it shifts towards very few players controlling a market I don’t see an economy that is lucrative for the individual player/crafter.

In addition:
Since restricting auction posting numbers is a bit risky, increasing the auction deposit fee is another way to deter players from reset-spamming the same auction over and over. Tying it to the intended price and maybe having way less return on cancelled auctions could be a posibility. Especially stuff with a really low deposit value (long term enchants only ever cost 1s to post, it was a reset fiesta for years) finally has to reflect the profit players intend to make.

7 Likes

I don’t think region-wide auction house is going to be a bad thing. I have characters across 8 realms, and on the “low pop” (aka not Illidan-sized) servers, mats for consumables and BoEs are absolutely ridiculous. The region-wide AH should bringing those prices down and help normalize things and make things better for people (and the individual) as a whole.

Some people are always going to have ridiculous amounts of gold, and many of those people already have gold capped characters spread across multiple servers. This doesn’t change much because while a52 and proudmoore were separate markets, they could have already had 20-30mil on each of those servers. I doubt it’s going to affect the individual much at all beyond better prices.

4 Likes