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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria news3 things that need to change about WoW's auction house
by Basil Berntsen 
Mar 16th 2012 at 9:00AM
Of all the many things that could be done to make the Auction House a less frustrating and intimidating experience for players, three stand out to me. First, Blizzard needs to fix the insane inflation in the economy. Second, it needs to fix what people see when they click on an auctioneer, and lastly, it needs to allow farmers to fill buy orders instead of posting stock for sale. These three changes, if made, would greatly equalize the economy and serve to reduce the drudgery that the vast majority of players have to deal with.
What the heck are buy orders?
I'll start with buy orders because it's the least obvious issue. Right now, when a farmer wants to make some gold for a BoE or a mount or whatever, they go and farm and then come back to a city and dump everything they've made onto the AH. Nobody likes waiting for their money, and most farmers have been burned by a huge batch of goods coming back, minus the auctioneers' listing cut, unsold due to too much competition. In order to have to wait to lose money for all the hard work they did, they'll list their goods more cheaply than they're perhaps worth.
A buy order would allow sellers to come back to the city, check the AH, and withdraw their gold immediately if they like the price. These orders would be posted by people who need farmable goods, and since the first buy order to be filled would be the best-priced ones, there would be more competition between buyers.
Right now, the people who have to compete the hardest and tie up their money are the farmers. Their buyers typically have many times more gold than them, and get what they want with no uncertainty and no waiting.
Of course, buy orders don't work for everything. I imagine that there will always be both auctions and buy orders for everything, and anyone willing to wait a bit stands a better chance of finding someone in a hurry. Buy orders would also help people who are trying to find rare items. Instead of having to stalk the AH from their cell phone at work looking for that elusive mount or rare recipe, they can simply keep an attractive buy order posted at all times.
The AH interface
Speaking of the mobile AH, it's time that the in-game interface inherited some of its features. Right now, most people still use the default UI, which won't save searches, can't categorize very well, and sorts auctions in the least sensible way possible by default.
Anyone who takes the time to install and learn any AH addon has a significant and, in my opinion, unfair advantage over someone using the basic interface. They spend less time finding what they need or posting auctions and are less likely to accidentally post something for less than they intended. There have been other parts of the game where addons used to be absolutely necessary, and almost every single one of these has led to an interface upgrade so the general population can compete (like when the default Arena frames became less terrible).
I understand the presumable business appeal of making the better interface hidden behind a paid feature. If the reason Blizzard hasn't made the in-game interface stink less is because anyone can opt to pay and get a more functional tool, though, I'd like to point out that the mobile AH doesn't officially support modifications like the in-game one. It's basically useless to serious AH users. It allows us to stalk rare items and repost a few undercuts, but it's not a serious competitor to the in-game experience of Auctionator or TradeSkillMaster, with its limit of 200 actions per day and the fact that it takes so long to do anything.
Inflation
Blizzard raised the gold cap in Cataclysm, and for every gold sink it introduced, it seems the designers made three more ways for gold to be created. On the surface, it doesn't sound bad; the gold being created is always spread across the general population, so it seems to be designed to spread the wealth. The problem is that in-game wealth, no matter where it starts, tends to pool on players who play the AH.
Again, that doesn't seem too bad, right? Some players may have millions of gold, but overall everyone has more gold so can buy more. Unfortunately, that's not how it works. The number of dailies it takes to gem and enchant an average raider's gear has gone up, not down. In essence, people who don't hustle for gold will have to work more now than they did in Wrath or earlier just to keep up with the basics. Also, the goods a little higher up on the hierarchy of needs like BoE gear, offsets, mounts, pets, etc. are farther out of reach on average unless you work at maximizing your gold per hour and dedicate some time to gold making.
There are two solutions. First, make more gold sinks. Make them target people with large pools of wealth -- maybe some sort of incredibly expensive in-game cosmetic bling that would appeal to people with gold-capped bank alts. How much would Fox pay for a floating golden top hat that followed him around and told others how amazingly good-looking he is? (OK, I'll level with you: I'd make a terrible item designer, so please take this as an invitation to fill up the comments page with ideas about how to separate the gold-capped from their wealth.)
Second, and possibly in addition to gold sinks, introduce more BoE items on the Blizzard store. Every time someone buys one of those and sells it for cash, it spreads the wealth around.
Maximize your profits with advice from Gold Capped. Want to know the very best ways to earn 10,000 gold? Top gold making strategies for auctioneers? How about how to reach 1 million gold -- or how one player got there and then gave it all away? Fox and Basil are taking your questions at fox@wowinsider.com and basil@wowinsider.com.
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Economy, Gold Capped, Mists of Pandaria
Reader Comments (Page 4 of 6)
Berna Mar 16th 2012 10:27AM
Oh yes, I want buy orders sooo badly!
coreyniegle Mar 16th 2012 10:46AM
I don't see what the problem is with the ah at all. I've been farming it for years. couple weeks work, i've made a few hundred K now for next xpack.
same thing buying things for alts.
with a bit of pre planning you can watch for cheap mats, buy what you need and relist at a markup.
the AH is fine. leave it alone.
Elionene Mar 16th 2012 10:52AM
Bank Space
That's my suggestion for a gold sink. Either through the current banks or more void storage or whatever. I don't play the auction hall, but my wife does, and she's constantly needing more space for the items she farms, buys, and sells for the auction hall.
We have an alt guild bank, and she has several auction alts. She uses the mail system to store things short term in addition to all of their bank space. If a one time gold sink for bank space isn't sufficient, perhaps there could be a rental system set up. You pay 500 gold a week to have an additional 100 bank slots or something along those lines. Or maybe the void system of paying for deposits and withdrawals would be all that was needed.
andrews Mar 16th 2012 10:52AM
You are never going to take all the gold from those who make money for one big reason - they are generally willing to wait for rewards, thus they are able to amass gold. The ones who would get stuck wanting the cool new gold sinks would be those who don't make much of it anyway.
Socialism doesn't work. Taxing people to equalize things doesn't work. Some people will always have much more money than others.
Kind of funny talking about delayed gratification in a video game....
tokig0313 Mar 16th 2012 10:53AM
I gotta admit that I've never pimped out my bank alt so the whole floating top hat - that'd just be an "ohhh shiny" vs "must have to pimp out alt".
Honestly, I'd love to see more storage options. As GM of a fairly active and social guild, I don't have my own personal bank guild like some members have as all my toons are in the guild. Currently, I've hijacked a tab in the guild bank, but I'd pay some serious gold to have a bank where I could view not only my main's random items and withdraw from her, but also look at the banks of all my other toons vs have to character hop to get something on another toon and pull it out of her bank and then mail it to my main if I need something. Heck - I'd even be willing to pay something like "goblin transaction fee" for that kind of bank and service.
steve Mar 16th 2012 10:55AM
Another gold-sink option would be a portable auction house. Obviously, it would appeal to people who play the AH.
Jon Mar 16th 2012 3:56PM
I LOL'd at the "spread the wealth around" line.
It's not hard to make gold - there are a multitude of blogs and forums out there for anyone to learn for FREE.
You can't multiply wealth by dividing it!
styopa Mar 16th 2012 11:40AM
The third point is technically not something wrong with the AH, it's wrong with the economy, but it's a good point nevertheless.
So let's look at it in terms of basic economics. It's obvious why there's an inflationary economy - money isn't zero-sum. Essentially, you have an infinite input (essentially, it's player effort (hours) * reward factor) that's been increasing steadily - some would say grossly - in each expansion as that "reward factor" has overscaled costs, which pretty much have remained fixed.
Sure, costs have inflated slightly, as each tiers' mats are a wee bit more expensive, and repair costs have also slightly increased, but nowhere near the comparative income players are making in dailies and instances today.
So cash increases, costs don't = inflation. It's pretty basic money-supply stuff.
I know, as this column is focused on the AH, the impact here is always about "that darn inflation is making stuff expensive" but any AH-directed repair is only treating a relatively trivial symptom, not the actual disease.
For the (obviously) perfect view Blizzard has of their economy, they've really not spent much time implementing money-sinks to offset this, which could have been pretty simple (lots of data and calculating, of course, but computers are rather good at that):
- at the most basic level, they could simply scale input/output to drain out the excess tomorrow. (Yesterday, 4.2 billion gold was rewarded in PvE drops; 2.1 billion was spent in sinks, so tomorrow all sink costs (repairs, vendor items, will be increased 100% *or* drops cut in half, or some combination of the two). Of course, they could be more sophisticated and segment this by a 10-level bracket with a single segment for lvl 85 cashflows (as I suspect that the huge imbalance really is only there).
- I've always thought that banking was an opportunity to drain out cash from players. No bank in the world says "sorry, we're not going to store your stuff, we're full". (OK, then, not many would let you store a bear carcass, either). I'd dispense with the 'bags' mechanic, and simply say that every bank space costs you a copper a day (ie 100 spaces for 100 days = 1g). (Personally, I'd make it even more interesting, and make players pay in advance for secure storage like a real business, and if your "bank account" runs out, the items get AH'd for 20% below market-average in LIFO order...also then working to keep commodity prices down. :) I'd also let anyone pay for anyone else's storage charges, if they want.)
- tax: there are benefits to being part of a society, and we pay for them with taxation. Maybe every faction has a tax rate; if you don't want your standing to decay to neutral, you have to pay their periodic taxes - whether they be income-based, transaction-based, or property-based. Higher reputation might give you a discount, but it would be more ephemeral and also fade faster. I haven't talked to the dudes in Ogrila for 4 years, why would they still love or even remember me? "Welcome to Stormwind, ser. I see you are clad in mighty epics? Please understand that Stormwind costs money to run, and we try to keep these costs scaled to ability to pay to help the poor, so today's entry tax for you will be 10g."
- life costs: we all have all sorts of life costs that our toons don't have; rent, food, etc. these could be rationalized as sort of a simple cost/day to be alive. Mighty god-slaying lordling can't/won't pay it? He can live in squalor, sure, but his reputation is going to suffer when he shows up smelling of dung from the barn he slept in to speak with the king. Maybe he won't get the sorts of rewards he's used to, since obviously he's willing to work cheap?
I think just building more shinies and hoping people are willing to drop the cash for it is, well, a fairly lazy and ineffective solution that shows no real understanding of the economics at all. It depends on people making all sorts of choices that nobody can control AND is in itself subject to extremely steep value-fade directly proportional to the success of your sale! Ie: if you're going to be one of 10 people with a sparklepony it's cool and might be worth a lot, if you're one of 10 million, not so much.
pace9 Mar 16th 2012 12:16PM
I agree 100% that the auction house interface needs a serious overhaul, but I think there might be some better solutions than presented above (same goes for the inflation):
LARGE ORDERS
(stock market model)
To fix the needs of high volume posters (e.g. farmers), the best solution would be linking the auction houses among realms and factions on an auction house server, and running it much the way the stock market is run today (market orders, limit orders, and maybe ever short sales! - god I'd love short sales, but it'll never* happen) This isn't exactly a UI change though; its an entire redesign of the auction house system. However, if Blizzard would be willing to do it, sales would become nearly instant for anyone who places market orders. People who places limit orders could wait for the price to rise or fall to the price they want, but it would be a choice.
(Ebay model)
If this solution were infeasible, there is still the option of getting rid of the AH posting fees, and creating a way to post much more quickly. My vote goes to being able to click and drag over items in your bags to create a group and post everything in that group at a given price all at once. (Similarly, I'd love to be able to buy all stacked up to a given price with one click)
I also propose getting rid of the auction price part entirely - does anyone still use it?
INTERFACE
Lets sort by buyout price per unit in the default UI! Just imagine the possibilities... And if we keep the (insert expletive adjective) auction feature, lets get a column to sort by auction price per unit. Lets also make opening mail not require addons, one-click open all please!
(As for the more advanced features of our mods (knowing what we can craft for the most gold/hr etc., I think that is best left to modding community)
INFLATION
(/tangent) I just can't bring myself to accept the idea that blizzard wants to sell things people can turn into gold. I have a lot of gold - if blizzard can sell it why can't I sell it to other players for game-time credit! (/end tangent) Anyway, under the current model where as the level of the mobs increase, the amount of gold the drop rises, inflation is impossible to prevent. Allowing players to spread it around doesn't change the fact that 1 gold today will not buy nearly as much as 1 gold did three years ago. To fix gold inflation, Blizzard would need to make the amount of newly created gold equal to the amount of gold leaving the system (repairs, AH fees, stuff bought from NPCs, gold leaving through players retiring, etc.) that would include doing a gold crunch on the amount of gold mobs drop each expansion so that the amount of gold introduced is controllable, among other things.
The short and simple of it all is that gold inflation would be highly complicated to control, even though gold distribution is easy to control.
The best we could hope for is increased repair costs and smaller changes in the amount of gold a mob drops (remember, no gold made on the AH is new gold, newly created gold has to come from someone looting it)
Jack Kelly Mar 16th 2012 12:22PM
Somebody reads Gevlon's blog.
Basil Berntsen Mar 16th 2012 5:44PM
I've been making the case for open orders since early 2010: http://wow.joystiq.com/2010/03/02/the-case-for-open-orders-on-the-auction-house/. That said, I did read his blog while it was about making gold in WoW.
Lhivera Mar 16th 2012 12:34PM
Simple example of buy order:
I put up a buy order for 500 chicken gizzards at 2g99c per gizzard. 1495 gold leaves my bank and goes into escrow.
Joe Schmoe says, "I have 60 chicken gizzards." He could list them normally, or he could look at my buy order and sell them to me immediately at 2g99s each. He receives 179g40s. I receive 60 gizzards in the mail. My order is automatically reduced to 440 gizzards. The AH still has 1315g60s of my money in escrow.
If my order expires before it is filled, I receive any remaining escrow funds in the mail.
Boobah Mar 16th 2012 3:42PM
More likely, it'll pull more than 1495g out of your wallet; since you're the one placing the order, you're presumably the one paying the listing fee.
Neirin Mar 16th 2012 12:37PM
The problem with expensive cosmetic rewards are that they are 1 time purchases that ultimately make very little dent in the pockets of WoW's super wealthy. 300k is a lot easier to swallow if you have a few million gold. Even making it an item you can buy multiple times (one suggestion earlier in the comments was the Call to Arms satchels) are unlikely to really make a difference since most people I know who play the ah have a minimum amount of gold they want on hand at any given time (usually some value several times higher than your average WoW player has dreamed of). Moreover, this would encourage people with less gold to buy more from disreputable sources. I know people who bought gold for the Traveler's Tundra Mammoth in Wrath and that was only 16k - still quite possible to farm up if you put in some time. If a mount is so expensive that most people could never dream of earning that much it stops being a matter of dedicating yourself to earning the money and becomes an excuse to buy gold - "I wouldn't be able to get it legitimately anyway" sort of thing.
Even assuming only rich ah barons bought the cosmetic items and no one bought gold to get them (i.e. ideal circumstances) someone like Basil makes several times more in a day what most people make in a week. In his intro to "Fastest Way to Make 10k Gold" he said that for him, the fastest way was to log on and check his mail. There's just no feasible way for some cosmetic items to keep up with that.
Even more daring solutions like Blizz offering every mat in the game from a vendor for a certain cost would ultimately just devalue gathering professions. There would be a price ceiling set, but mat farmers would obviously have to sell for less than that ceiling, allowing ah gurus to still earn their profit margin from crafting.
Some sort of marginal income tax seems like the only practical solution, and even that has plenty of pitfalls and shortcomings. Moreover, I have no idea how blizz could introduce it in a way that's clearly understandable and accessible for your average player. Some sort of bar like we have for VP that fills up as you move towards your cap of untaxed income maybe? The limit would also have to be account-wide to prevent people from simply spreading their ah dealings out across a multitude of alts.
A 15%+ (number chosen for the sake of argument) tax on your ah earnings after a certain amount would probably push a lot of items into unprofitability, which would either cause ah kingpins to simply withhold their stock until next week or bump up the price so it's profitable again. Either way, the average WoW player is the one that suffers. You end up with supply chain issues getting a gem for your new upgrade or you have to pay 15% more for it. I think the end effect would probably lean towards lower overall sales volume - it's harder to set a 15% markup when there are hundreds of more casual players also crafting and not having to worry about taxation - though there would also be some price increase to make up for the lower volume. Also worth mentioning, high-end items like BoEs would likely just get that 15% increase straight up due to their high value potentially pushing people into taxation very quickly.
Taxation would likely slow the wealth accumulation of WoW's 1% relative to the 99% (slowed, not stopped), but I don't think blizz will risk causing problems for PvE/PvP for the sake of messing with people accumulating a virtual currency. This game is supposed to be about killing dragons and/or other players, and that's always been job #1 at blizz (hence why people need to make posts that boil down to "FIX THE AH UI GODDAMN IT").
KPB Mar 16th 2012 12:42PM
The money sinks to control inflation are a hard thing.
If you make them cosmetic items you can't guarantee the money sink will actually be effective. It may also lead to frustration other players who don't have huge amounts of money who happen to be interested in what ever the item is (pet collectors, mount collectors, etc)
If you make it something that is mandatory you will likely end up affecting the players who don't have much money the most. Frustrating them because they can't afford to store things in their bank or repair their armor or what ever.
emberdione Mar 16th 2012 1:03PM
Am I the only one who noticed the inaccuracy of saying the mobile AH lets you do 300 transactions a day?
It's 200 right? I didn't miss that somewhere? I swear it stops me at 200 every day...
Basil Berntsen Mar 16th 2012 5:38PM
I remembered 300, checked it and found 200, thought 200, and the wrote 300. My bad, I fixed it.
emberdione Mar 16th 2012 5:59PM
hehe, I was pretty sure I wasn't going crazy.
On a side note, I find the mobile AH wildly useful, but I always try to list things at home and use the mobile for sniping or re-listing big ticket items.
Basil Berntsen Mar 16th 2012 7:10PM
It's good for microing niche markets, but I'm more of an aoe AHer, and it doesn't help me much with that.
Yoco Mar 16th 2012 1:10PM
One of the issues with the current AH design is how stacks of goods are handled. In my opinion stack size should not play a role. If I have five stacks of 20 copper ore for sale, and a buyer wants to 6 ores, he should be able to do so, leaving 94 of my original 40 ores up for sale. Or if he wants 26 ores instead he should be able to buy that, leaving 84 ores, and he gets two stacks in the mail (one of 20 ores, another of 6).
On the seller side, I don't want to be bothered with stack sizes. If I have 40 copper ore for sale, I don't need to care about it being 2 stacks of 20 or 4 stacks of 10 in the AH.
For the buyer, getting rid of the "stack" concept in the AH means the default sort order can be based on price-per-item, making it easier to fairly compare prices.
If I understood correctly a system like that actually is already what Diablo III will use.