[Wrath Classic] Retail features we would welcome

Community WoW Community Council
1

Hey everyone, I want to start this topic off saying that we have to be pretty careful about the features we take into consideration. I think the optimal future of the classic wow series as a whole is to be different from retail as we know it, and to maintain the spirit of classic that blizzard is also trying to maintain.

Taking that into account, that doesn’t mean all of retails features are unsuitable for the classic series. Some systems are just outdated and would greatly benefit from a more modernized system. I have two specific features in mind:

The Retail Auction House:

The retail auction house would be a great addition to classic, it reduces scanning lag, makes posting and purchasing auctions MUCH easier and greatly prevents people from being scammed from malicious auctions. It also makes the auction house useable without any addons!

For any classic players that don’t know how it differs from the auction house in classic:

As a seller:

  • Instead of posting stacks of items, you just enter the quantity of items you want to post, and all of it will be posted.

  • You are incentivized to list your item for the same price as other people instead of undercutting.

As a customer:

  • You can just type the quantity of items you want to purchase, instead of buying odd stacks trying to reach the amount you need.

  • It will automatically buy those auctions in the cheapest way possible.

Those are just some of the features that the auction house brings, if you don’t know much about it, I recommend you check it out!

Edit: This video explains the auction house pretty well

Another feature I’d have in mind for wrath (it was also semi-confirmed already, but we haven’t seen what blizzard has in mind yet) would be:

Premade Groups:

The premade groups feature that retail has would be a great replacement for the LFG/LFM tool we currently have in TBC.

It allows you to create custom groups for different categories like Raids, Dungeons, Questing, PvP or Custom.

Instead of listing yourself up for a dungeon or raid, it allows you to make your own group with certain specifications that others can apply to. Blizzard can change these specifications to whatever they see would fit most for wrath.

It’s overall just like the auction house, a big improvement to an outdated system, that doesn’t really affect blizzards vision for classic in a major way.

Feel free to chime in your opinion about these features, or other feature suggestions that you think have a place in classic!

10 Likes
2

I don’t have any experience with retail’s AH system, so I’d love to hear some input from others who have experience with both retail and TBCC AH UI, but hard for me to imagine it could be worse than the default AH UI of TBCC.

Care to elaborate on this? How can an MMO marketplace not incentivize undercutting other players?

3

Undercutting is a big part of the marketplace economy and I disagree that it should be like retail.
Stack selling is also a great way to sell stuff at a higher market value for convenience. It’s why I much prefer the Classic marketplace than I do the retail one despite the lag, because it feels like you’re actually interacting with other players auctions rather than just talking to an NPC vendor.

I’d rather they either make the auction house work like the Auctionator addon or for them to make the API more open to things like paging and sorting to avoid the need for auctionator-like addons to have to scan every auctions for a given query.

I haven’t checked the API itself so I do not know if it’s already an option and addons developers just aren’t using it, but I can only assume it’s not.

2 Likes
4

If 10 people list the same item for 1 gold, the customer will see “10 items available for 1 gold”, and they will be sold in the order of who listed the most recently, which incentivizes more frequent cancelling and reposting over undercutting. Of course people can still feel free to undercut and that will naturally happen when the supply is too high.

5

I think a good addition to the original post would be a video that shows off the features of the modern AH for those like myself who don’t have enough info to have an informed opinion. I found a few videos on youtube that seemed helpful, but I don’t know if they’re up to date.

1 Like
6

Done! I added a pretty good video from Hazel that explains it pretty well.

2 Likes
7

I actually happen to use both Auctionator and TSM, and from my perspective this just seems to be an inefficiency on the part of Auctionator, because in my experience with TSM, the first page loaded from a search is always the page that contains the lowest prices per unit. With TSM, you can stop a scan after only loading one page (the one with the best prices) and buy items from that page.

Then again, I don’t believe Auctionator was actually properly updated for TBCC, so maybe it made sense to do things that way in vanilla classic.

8

If that’s the case then yeah, it would either require the base UI for the AH to be updated to make it more like Auctionator and/or TSM or the addon developer need to make it better if the tools are there to do queries with paging and sorting.

I don’t think a significant change mechanically for the AH would be a good change.

Overall I think a lot of issues, small or big, on Classic stem from old outdated UIs that could use an update without changing the core gameplay loop.

9

I’ve said elsewhere that retail tools could be a fine fit for Classic where appropriate.

Case in point, Classic uses a more modern version of the Mailbox.

10

One thing that stood out to me in the video is the fact that you can’t see the names of the sellers in the “Buy” tab. We know that community is a big part of the spirit of Classic, and I don’t think I’d really like this, since currently I sometimes choose which auction to buy based on who’s selling it. If someone I don’t like is selling it, I might wanna buy from someone else even though theirs is the cheapest. If my friend is selling it, I might wanna buy from my friend even though theirs isn’t the cheapest.

Overall though, my initial impression is that it would be a really positive change.

I’m curious about what the community thinks about it so I made a thread here: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/do-you-think-the-retail-ah-system-should-be-implemented-in-wrath-classic/

1 Like
11

There are plenty of nice features that could be included but I would prefer they don’t do that. The reasoning behind this is to preserve the game best as we can. I feel if you asked me this even just five years ago I’d be singing a different tune, I’d be asking for AOE Looting, the more modern UI, and other conveniences the retail version of the game has.

But that isn’t what Classic is about to me, once I actually got to experience it again I realized there are some things that should just be left alone to how they were. That isn’t what I feel the team needs to do for the game. The Modern AH would be very nice, but it wasn’t in the game at the time so I disagree it shouldn’t be added.

We should have what they put in when the game existed and that’s it. You get every pro and every con from the design decisions at the time. Classic isn’t a remaster, I think you can leave for future Season of Masteries or alternative realms down the line. I’d be interested in that for that kind of thing, but not the core Classic experience.

2 Likes