How long till we get Cross-realm AH?

[Deleted]

Odd I haven't seen thousands of threads asking for this. Most are content with what they have.

Not everyone creates a thread for what they want, not nearly everyone even visits the forums. Doesn't make their preferences any less valid.

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

Blizzard is looking at small servers for possible ah merging down the line. Though they probably won't merge the ah of large servers.

[Xeraxis]

No?

The majority of WoW's playerbase is in Asia. If you look at the US/EU numbers each game has about 2.5m

And how many units has GW2 sold? Last number they gave was 2mil still rather short of the 5mil from US and EU that you claim WoW has. That is unless you think 2 million and 5 million are close enough to call them even. In which case WoW's recent competitor SW:ToR laughs at you as it's fully aware they are no where close to being the same.

[Deleted]

Blizzard is looking at small servers for possible ah merging down the line. Though they probably won't merge the ah of large servers.

Which is completely fine, larger servers most likely have more than they need. It's low populated servers that could really benefit from it.

[Kaleredar]

Raw materials would go for mere silver, as you'd have constant, cyclical, undercutting, impossible to keep up with. Only botters would be able to profit, as only their cheating would be able to keep up with it.

The only way I could imagine this working is if Blizzard hand-selected the lowest population servers and merged them with ONLY one another, or affixed one low poplation server's AH to a high population server's AH. Not "smacking them together" like they've done for servers in CRZs.

[Mosotti]

It won't happen. And CRZ really has not much impact on gathering, since now the resources are WAY WAY WAY abundant compared to before Cataclysm. Also, if I'm not mistaken, the nodes are respawning based on the number of players in the area, like mobs do...

The truth is this: unless they fucking start merging servers, the problems with the bad economies, the horrible faction ratio and all that shit will NEVER go away. While CRZ is awesome to provide a great MMO experience in the lower levels which would be deserted otherwise, the servers must also be fucking merged. And after that, a mechanism to lock them must be put in place. Messages like these would be awesome: "motherfucker, Outland is full, pick something else" or "you can't choose horde, they're too fucking many and it will fuck up the game experience for the alliance"

[Deleted]

It won't happen. And CRZ really has not much impact on gathering, since now the resources are WAY WAY WAY abundant compared to before Cataclysm. Also, if I'm not mistaken, the nodes are respawning based on the number of players in the area, like mobs do...

The truth is this: unless they fucking start merging servers, the problems with the bad economies, the horrible faction ratio and all that shit will NEVER go away. While CRZ is awesome to provide a great MMO experience in the lower levels which would be deserted otherwise, the servers must also be fucking merged. And after that, a mechanism to lock them must be put in place. Messages like these would be awesome: "motherfucker, Outland is full, pick something else" or "you can't choose horde, they're too fucking many and it will fuck up the game experience for the alliance"

Merging servers have other issues though, such as duplicate names... Also telling a player they can't play on a certain server is probably not a good idea either. I would say expanding on CRZ making more similar things, such as Cross Realm Auction House is much better because it won't matter what server you choose or how empty a server becomes, you will always have enough of all the things you need because it's shared with other servers.

Considering we haven't seen any server merges that I can recall in the past, and they recently made CRZ, I think cross realm AH is far more likely than server merging.

[Deleted]

with the ah at its state right now it wouldnt work good. the undercutting would be monstrous with every auction shown in itself.
with an ah like gw2 where alle auctions of one item and price are "merged" it could work.
BUT i dont see the reason for them doing so.
it would be a hell of work just to better the economie on lowpop servers.

the closest i would imagine them would be merging some picked servers together (the ah, not the whole server) and MAYBE if that works good increasing the merges

[endersblade]

I'd say once we lose another 2-3 million subs. That's about what it took to get CRZs, so why not?

[Gerion]

GW2 and WoW have about the same playerbase numbers in US/EU and the AH is shared for everyone in GW2 and this does not happen.

The demand would also increase with the supply. And supply has already been severely cut with the addition of CRZs

Have you even seen the TP in GW2? Crafted items go for absolute jack shit. People resorting to selling crafted items at 1 copper over vendor prices with thousands going unsold. The only things that make good money are rare items like sigils or legendary pre-reqs. CRZ-ing AHs would have a disastrous effect on non low-pop realms.

[Deleted]

They might as well merge some servers instead, with all this Cross Realm bs

[Deleted]

The AH interface as it is doesn't support cross-realm Auctions, it would need an overhaul in its tools and functions in order to support many minor problems, one that springs to mind is "Auction no longer exists" when a million people are on the AH at a given time and everyone's trying to buyout the cheapest thing I would imagine that to be an extremely common occurrence. That's just an example of one thing I can think of, there are many more.

[Pann]

As others have said once the AH were merged you would encounter problems with the sheer number of auctions, an average auction house has roughly 30-35k auctions up at any one time, at peak times on the larger auction houses it can be problematic trying to buy mats as others are buying them at the same time and you are faced with error "there is already a higher bid on this item." Imagine the chaos when you have ten or even twenty times the amount of auctions to search through and ten or twenty times as many people trying to buy from the AH.

Sellers would also face the prospect that they are are unable to sell their goods as they are immediately undercut. Faced with the prospect of constantly losing their listing fee people will stop farming leaving the market for mats at the mercy of bots, it is also likely that people will stop listing items on the AH altogether and just vendor them to save on the hassle.

Although I have not played either (so correct me if I am wrong) but I have read that both GW2 and D3, which both have similar systems to cross realm AH, suffer from crafted items being sold at just above the vendor price thus making crafting professions useless for anything other than the personal bonus.

Even if Blizzard were able to find a way to overcome these disadvantages I cannot see them implementing a cross realm AH. Any such system would require significant investment and would impact on the sales of realm transfers.

Why would any company spend money developing a system that will hurt their bottom line?

[Deleted]

Personal thoughts: For reasons pointed out by Hanto (#6) this won't likely happen, any time soon.

What Blizzard could do, however, is creating a scondary AuctionHouse system, that is region-wide available. Right now, we have three markets, and expanding it with a fourth one would be easiest, most elegant solution, with the least direct impact on individual economies. The way I could see this being implemented is the following:

* Faction market
Orgrimmar, Darnassus, Stormwind, Ironforge, etc.

* Neutral market (Goblins)
Booty Bay, Gadgetzan, Ratchet, Everlook, Future Goblin city

* Black market (Madam Goya)
Veiled Stairs, Future high level zone

* Regional market (Ethereals?)
Stormwind, Orgrimmar, Shattrath, Dalaran, Future capitals

Admittedly, this will start with items being posted for insane prices, followed by an massive undercut period, up to a point where an epic lvl90 item is worth as much as stack of Wool Cloth. But after a while, I could see things spread out, because people will buy cheap things and list them for normal prices at their local Auction Houses.

Another benefit of this system (assuming it is technically possible with the current WoW technology) is that it would allow cross-realm transactions. If you can not find a buyer on your low-pop realm for that cool epic you just looted, you might have people standing in line for it on another realm.

Obviously, it would also allow goldsellers to flourish, but every addition to the game brings new challenges.

[Alvito]

I fail to see how merging them would become in any way disastrous. It would provide a more balanced supply and demand for everyone, especially smaller servers.

On several servers being gold capped or close to it isn't all that rare in some casses common. Mix their AH with others and now ppl from the bad economy server would not be able to buy things still until month passed and ppl made money off of the AH and a few caught up to the richer servers. This kinda happened in SWTOR when they did the servers mergers from 123 servers to 12 in the US. The prices in the GTN didn't budge and now hundreds of players couldnt buy anythng at all.

[Windfury]

It will have to happen to some extent if blizzard seriously want to deal with the low pop realms without forced mergers. Personally I'd welcome it.

[dokilar]

id be surprised if you dont see within a year or so.

[BenBos]

I don't see what the problem is really. Considering all the resources are now shared it's a logical step to combine CRZ'd realms economies.

There is NO functional problem. The bigger the economy, the better. No one can control the NY stock Exchange either.

---

BUT Blizzard already said ... there is a technical problem.

It is apparently an old legacy problem with their independant AH based data bases.

All these trading databases need to be linked and as is the problem with all old systems, it is quite a task to rewrite the routines between the server based economies.

That being said... The last time a blue mentioned something about it was almost 2 years ago. But even then they were "working on it". Posters have been asking this since the cross server dungeons were introduced back in 2009. Players want to trade when they play together.

---- So in view of these blue posts and the time passed already since they mentioned it, I would guess we will see the cross realm based economy emerge in 2013.---

Although Pardo said they would need to introduce it step by step, so probably personal trading first, then limited to the earlier Battlegroups, then AH's ... Etc.

But it is a certainty for the near future.

Btw as a comment to earlier posts: WoW still far outnumbers the Gw2 players as can be seen on the number of servers and on some sample sites like Xfire. In fact Xfire shows WoW having double the numbers AND since patch 5.0 (new expansion) Xfire is no longer tracking non 64 bit systems for WoW, which is at least half of the WoW player user base...

---

----> So regrouping 4 million+ western players on one trading system takes time. Because we talk about 500 independant databases to be merged for trading purposes. Not only in tables BUT rewriting a complete new interface I guess.

[Pann]

There is NO functional problem. The bigger the economy, the better. No one can control the NY stock Exchange either.

---

BUT Blizzard already said ... there is a technical problem.

It is apparently an old legacy problem with their independant AH based data bases.

All these trading databases need to be linked and as is the problem with all old systems, it is quite a task to rewrite the routines between the server based economies.

That being said... The last time a blue mentioned something about it was almost 2 years ago. But even then they were "working on it". Posters have been asking this since the cross server dungeons were introduced back in 2009. Players want to trade when they play together.

---- So in view of these blue posts and the time passed already since they mentioned it, I would guess we will see the cross realm based economy emerge in 2013.---

Although Pardo said they would need to introduce it step by step, so probably personal trading first, then limited to the earlier Battlegroups, then AH's ... Etc.

But it is a certainty for the near future.

I have never seen anything from Blizzard stating they are working on this system, could you link the blue posts?

By your own admission it is problematic to implement such a system so why would they go to the time, trouble and expense of doing so when ultimately it would impact on server transfers?

It will have to happen to some extent if blizzard seriously want to deal with the low pop realms without forced mergers. Personally I'd welcome it.

My server has created with the launch of TBC and it became clear pretty quickly that there was a major imbalance in the faction populations, yet in the, almost, six years that passed nothing has been done to alleviate this problem. By no means is my server in as bad a state as some of the other servers out there but if they have not done anything during this time it is unlikely they will address the problem anytime soon.

[SamR]

The big problem is they would need some drastic redesigns on the interface. Having to flip through 20 pages of gems to find the one I want sucks. Without AH addons like Auctionator, I would go crazy.

They would need to switch a lot of the items to the commodity system like in the D3 AH. It would be a pretty big undertaking and a lot of stuff could easily go wrong and piss players off. At D3 launch, there were tons of issues of stuff being bought by someone else the split second you went to pay for it. And the server load was crazy with people constantly refreshing the search to catch a lower price.

I would love a game-wise AH, but a lot of work needs to be done to the backend systems first before it would work.