This Item Is No Longer Available and other Auction House problems

It’s becoming incredibly frustrating that trying to use the Auction House at any time other than 3 AM means that purchasing anything takes about a dozen attempts because of items no longer being available. Searches taking multiple attempts before things show up properly is annoying enough, but it should not take me minutes to purchase something; it should take less than a second.

I can’t say for sure, but it seems pretty likely that the ridiculous levels of lag and failure might have something to do with the AH right now being totally plagued, more than ever, by people trying to ‘bait’ other players into selling their materials for less than half of their actual worth. They put a minimal amount of the material on the Auction House in hopes that someone not paying attention will accidentally put dozens or hundreds of the item up for that extremely low fee, and then they are purchased before they even notice, nevermind cancel. This has been happening for a while, but feels worse than before this time around, as the ‘technique’ has spread. It’s fairly scummy behaviour and I’m probably not the only one to be suspicious that it probably isn’t being performed on this scale by real people.

Please look into a solution for this, because the AH being frustratingly unusable for the first weeks of an expansion is one of the reasons given as to why the AH was updated in Patch 8.3. At least with the old AH I could decide to purchase a slightly more expensive listing (i.e. the actual price and not the bait prices) and have my buyout be accepted immediately. But you can’t do that with the new AH, if you select to do so, you have to buy everything that’s cheaper.

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I believe this problem is related to the number of requests being made to the database servers responsible for storing all the information players are posting in the Auction House, which might be resulting in a response time that is longer than necessary or usual.

Didnt Ion say recently, “I dare you all to try to have 60 APM on the AH at all times.”

I kid.

The AH is sure getting a stress test. I find myself counting to see the longest amount of seconds Im stuck in a loop. If its not over 6 seconds. Go again.

Yeah, this has been rough as someone who has been power leveling professions on several characters to get them up and running. I think bismuth has been the largest offender for me as it’s constantly getting bought out. At times I’d even take the slightly higher priced stuff, but the AH doesn’t work like that anymore.

Hopefully things even out soon and it’s not as constant as it has been. Thankfully I did stock up on basic materials during the EA so that I’m not as impacted by this. I feel bad for people just starting to touch crafting and having to fight just to get mats.

So the ‘fix’ helped things to begin with, but over the course of the day it’s getting slower and slower and the same issues when buying are appearing more often and selling takes an age. Surely there’s a proper, actual fix coming, right?

A side grade fix I have found is to use the Auctionator AH addon. It allows you to buy whatever amount of anything without the window resetting.
It will give you a dialogue box with updated costs, if something was bought out.
Guaranteed one time buy. Its bliss.