Also, I think it's exaggerating to say "Critical AH addons broken by patch 4.0.1." One feature--the ability to make batch posts--has been broken. The addons can still scan the auction house, maintain databases of auction data, break your items into stack sizes and numbers of your choosing, suggest prices for your items, etc. They just can't do quite so much of your work for you.

The real question: will you cry if the result of this is increased prices to the consumer and the gold from those auctions mostly going to goldselling botters who *can* still automate their processes because they don't care about the ToU? Because that's a possible outcome of this move.

@Pfooti:

And those people will get banned. And there will be much rejoicing.

I enjoy Playing the auction house, and would probably argue to put up the numbers currently does require amount of work, it is not all automated and does require time.

I do agree that the title is seems to by crying wolf, I was expected changes similar to that 3d deadly boss mods type addon that happened this summer. Not 'you can't batch post'

yay. no more hundreds of 1 dust\cloth on the AH.

You really think they'll get banned? Because they aren't getting banned right now. Almost every server I've been on has botted AH players. Every couple of months they get banned, prices go crazy, and then they come back in a few weeks. Watch herb prices fluctuate too- botters drive herb prices way down (especially lichbloom), after a month they're banned, and then two weeks later, they're back.

I honestly wish Blizzard could do something about that. But they aren't- they either cannot or will not effectively crush the botters.

Odd thing for a consumer to be complaining about undercutting

"I honestly wish Blizzard could do something about that. But they aren't- they either cannot or will not effectively crush the botters."

With this change, any automation would be a hack, the botters would stick out like a sore thumb instead of there being some question 'is it someone using an addon?'

I suggest you look to the various regular blizzard forums where people talk about watching underground miners in wintergrasp (they hack the terrain so they can still mine, but they do so from underground so you cannot stop them), or look at the many posts about reporting botters made by people like Gevlon on his blog. What we have observed is that it can take months of continual reporting before blizzard will ban a bot, even if they're so obviously automated that anybody could notice that automation in no time.

So yeah- I still think that Blizzard's track record on banning obvious botting and automation is so abysmal I'm not very optimistic about this.

And @relmatos- these changes will not affect that in the least. Posting 1000 individual auctions of 1 infinite dust still only requires one mouseclick. It's one mouseclick per item type posted, not per auction, as you can still in the default interface (with no addons) say, "Please post 25 stacks of 5 of this item, please". Sorry to disappoint.

@Pfooti:

"What we have observed is that it can take months of continual reporting before blizzard will ban a bot, even if they're so obviously automated that anybody could notice that automation in no time."

Blizzard has said time and again that if you report something like a botting farming or goldselling body spam to not think you're being ignored if it doesn't immediately disappear. They leave them active *to gather more data on them*.

"Posting 1000 individual auctions of 1 infinite dust still only requires one mouseclick."

Yes, but these sellers aren't just posting one type of item.