You think undercutting is bad now?

Imagine being undercut by every person on the AH on EVERY server.

They won't combine the AH's. The very reason we can't exchange non-summoned items and non-dungeon dropped BOP items in cross-server dungeons is economy explotation. Imagine your server has a lack of Miners. But another one has a surplus. Someone meets up with you in a cross-server dungeon, and you buy 10,000 stacks (as an example) of the current high-priced Ore. You go back, and dominate the AH.

Or, your server has a high but thriving gem market. You meet someone who's server has a surplus of a specific gem. You buy a ton cheap, take them back, and just for the hell of it, flood the market with cheap ass gems. You now crash the market for that gem.

umm, Drak that is what he was referring to. He was talking about how bad it would be if they had a cross-server auction house.

I wasn't disputing him, I was backing him up.

Yup, that was definitely what I was referring to. Though to be fair, Drak, not allowing cross-server trading is completely separate from combining AH's. There can be no cross-economy contamination and manipulation if there is only one economy. (Actually, for modeling and academic purposes I'd *love* to see an artificial economy of several million participants; it's just for practical purposes that the concept makes me want to cry.)

I understand there is a difference, but until the prices settled out, it would throw the entire AH into a spiral. The same guy who had a surplus of Ore would simply flood the AH with it, instead of having to sell it to someone in a dungeon. The person with the cheap gems could do even more damage since the entire population of a region would be affected.

As we both said, combined AH's would be a bad thing.

I kinda like the idea of a cross-server AH. But then, I do a lot of personal farming and I never have enough money. I feel like a cross-server AH would equalize itself by slowly resulting in a lower buyer:seller ratio than we have now and lower prices, and professions would see a lot more use for perks rather than money-making ability. As an engineer, I'm afraid I have to approve of other professions offering less money and mine becoming more awesome.

With that said, multi-server AH isn't coming anytime soon. All the other things like that(BGs, dungeons, raids) are all run on instance servers. No one wants to have to open an instance to get into the AH. It's also a very large amount of code and mechanical figure-out-ing.

The difference between the AH and the cross server options we have is that the AH has always been run in-server, while the others were already running instances, and only needed to pull people from multiple servers to work.

I would love to see combined AHs:

- One less reason to jump away from the smaller faction. Being in a small population realms, or in the smaller faction on an imbalanced realm, wouldn't be such a bad thing.
- A larger market means a more stable market, slower price fluctuations, a way harder time for players to try to corner the market, etc.
- Integrated economies means Blizzard would be able to drop the silly trade restrictions in cross-realm content.

The AH would need a better interface to handle it, though. Something that would allow players to comfortably browse the AH even with an increase of AH posts in the 100x range, when compared to already active realms/factions (though the increase would likely be way lower; the sheer increase in both posts and purchases would mean a fair part of the transaction volume increase would be absorbed by decreasing the average time until an auction sells). It can be done, and I think it would really help the game, but only if the UI is made good enough to handle it.

@Bellajtok:
The AH, just like the Chat, is already run on it's own dedicated servers. Anyone who ever saw an AH outage while the servers were, otherwise, fine can attest to this fact.

So, unless there is some quite dumb programming done in the AH code, they might be even easier to combine than dungeons/BGs/raids/etc.

I think a battle group AH would on balance be a good thing.

1) WoW is shirnking. The last reason you need to close a server is you can't find stuff, especially things like primordial saronite/living embers. Cross-BG AH solves that.

2) Someone buying or selling 100 stacks of ore on a server with 300 active 85 players is far more disruptive than if there is 100,000 active players.

3) It would take the value out of camping by being a much more efficient market. WIth dozens of times the volume, the buyers and sellers would quickly find the market price. There is a price at which the supply and demand for whiptail or elementium ore meet. It will change over time, but it will quickly get there and move by a few silver a day (barring news/patches). Rather than something being 35g/stack at 4AM and 9PM and 64g/stack at noon.

WoW desperately needs Buy orders; some way to buy 24x7 the way you can sell. A cross-BG AH where you placed only sell orders, 200 max per day, neutral AH high commission, would help eve out servers without being too massive.

As someone on a tiny server, I would love to see a cross-realm AH. Sometimes I go to an alt on one of the larger servers and just bring up the AH to look at all the STUFF. On my server, there are no buyers so no one bothers to list anything and eat the deposit cost because there are no buyers because there are no sellers because there are no buyers... you see where I'm going with this? And one person can buy up all the ore/gems/etc. in a second and control the market no problem. I can't sell a single glyph because the market is too small and the Glyph Cabal has enough time to get online and undercut.

A cross-realm AH would be the exact opposite. No one could corner the market when you have a million supply points. You'd be able to list anything-- SOMEONE out there wants that green for their RP set, their alt, whatever. No more searching for weird reagents for that old quest or rep grind, someone out there happens to be emptying out their bank and has it on for cheap. I'd actually be able to sell glyphs. It'd be awesome.

Heck, they might as well just eliminate the entire concept of having these seperate servers and ... ugh no, I don't even want to think aout it ... :-/