One Auction House for All Realms

[Howard Moon]

Everyone will undercut each other.............

Because the supply would be higher. But the demand would be higher as well, wouldn't it?

IMO it wouldn't be much different than now.

[Daimon]

big servers will break small servers economy...or not?

[Herecius]

Horrid mess. An auction system really is not at all ideal for dealing with that many people. The AH already is rather awkward on very high pop servers as it is.

[Deleted]

big servers will break small servers economy...or not?

Small servers already have broken economies.

[Deleted]

The AH is one of the main reasons I still subscribe and I'm now pretty good at playing it. The trouble for me with a realm-wide or continent-wide AH would certainly be the undercutting. All you have to differentiate from the competition is price - virtually nobody remembers the name of who they bought from before. In WoW there is no such thing as 'paying a premium for better support' or 'buy one get one free' deals, at least not on the AH itself.

It was summed up earlier in the thread; those who want cheaper prices will vote it as a good idea, those who 'play' the auction house as their enjoyment of the game will vote against. Entire communities have sprung up around the auction house, and much of the spirit of sharing when it comes to info stems from the fact that many of the contributors will never directly compete due to server differences.

I don't play the glyph market now, for example, but when I used to play on Twilight's Hammer Alliance I 'owned' the glyph market there, but would still need to keep an eye on certain individuals. When glyphs became one use items, it became more difficult as the demand went down and being the cheapest became paramount. This was at a time when TH-Alliance was dead - just as dead as now, but there were profits to be made. Every scribe in Europe undercutting would destroy markets for sellers, although conversely making any glyph available to any buyer for an extremely reasonable price.

Similarly, part of the 'plan' is limiting the supply available to competition. If you run the gem market, as I do, then you don't want your competition getting access to too much Elementium Ore. Having to buy out millions of stacks kind of ruins this strategy. Someone could argue that you shouldn't be able to monopolize in this way. Its a fair point, we shouldn't, but we can now and we're used to it.

I was working from home at the time of running glyphs and monitored my auctions almost to the point of obsession - most bots would have had nothing on me. A continent-wide auction house would be much worse. Every market has someone utilising every niche on every server. Combining them all would drive most to insanity and lose a few subscribers purely through frustration. Prices would be dirt cheap as already mentioned, but many of the goblins/wind traders/any other name for gold making players would be lost.

Of course, with more sellers come more buyers. However, I feel that the higher number of sellers would be more significant as people plan to undercut and repost, while nobody plans to buy a certain something at a specific time. Extremely rare items such as the Spectral Tiger would have much more chance of selling, while anything else would shrink in price to the point that it is not worth selling. Then we enter the realms of 'if it isn't worth selling, will anyone bother to produce'. I'd guess not as most players of my ilk attach a gold value to time, meaning that the supply solely relies on bots or players that would be the raiding equivalent of casuals.

Overall, it would ruin the game for me, while improving it vastly for the 'only gold from quests and raiding' crowd.

On a somewhat unrelated note, I think the WoW economy overall has developed into such an entity that it is a valid playstyle. Some raid, some PVP, some challenge themselves to make gold. It is one of the best implementations of economics I have ever seen in a game, and often find myself primarily enjoying this aspect, even at the expense of core features such as PVE/PVP.

Also (finally) I've just noticed one of the latest posts regarding it being fine as long as it is separate from the server AH. This idea I'm all for - somewhere to sell Dirge's Chops or a Spectral Tiger, just like the neutral AH, I'm on board with that one, unless its popularity exceeded the server AH - that one I can't predict. If it was a specialist tool/last resort like the neutral AH then yes; replaces server AH's then no.

[WretchedSimmons]

So long as it would kill the cost of herbs or glyphs being hundreds of gold a stack/each I'd be behind it, but it probably wouldn't as everyone would just adjust their prices and muzzle players anyway with cost.

[Deleted]

Try imagining the nightmare of trying to actually sell something without a hundred people undercutting you two seconds after you posted it. You can't do it, but try, anyway. Worst idea I've heard in a long, long time.

*Bonks on head*

Engage brain, please.

Obviously because population or audience for distribution has increased, yes, supply will increase and so will demand for those goods. So, yes, there will be a lot of undercutting. However, those 'cheap' products will INSTANTLY sell if presented to a world-wide set of players. It's all relative, christ above.

[MoanaLisa]

Horrid mess. An auction system really is not at all ideal for dealing with that many people. The AH already is rather awkward on very high pop servers as it is.

eBay would like to have a word with you. AH would need to be changed in some ways though, no doubt. I'm not convinced that auctions don't scale to the order of millions of buyers though. 10 years ago I might have thought this, but now...not so much.

[Herecius]

eBay would like to have a word with you.

eBay, unlike WoW, deals with actual cashmoneydollars. You can't 'flood the market' or 'dupe items' on eBay. If you notice that there aren't many, say, PS3s on eBay and you want to break into that market, you can't whip out your mining alt and go farm up a bunch of PS3s to sell.

As others have pointed out, the most useful items will have their prices tanked so low that they'll hit vendor value - something that may sound appealing as a buyer, but is borderline useless otherwise. To make gold at that point on the auction, you would have to move MASSIVE quantities of goods, and that is anti-fun.

It's not about price gouging. It's about being reasonable.

[Vulpei]

'I wouldn't be able to price gouge anymore' is all I hear in this thread.

[Tziva]

Well, it would suck for people who use the AH to make money, but it would be great for buyers. You'd be able to find everything you wanted, and it would likely be cheap. No more checking the AH every day looking for rare patterns or items, etc.

[analmoose]

Yes.

One AH to rule them all,
One AH to find them,
One AH to bring them all
and in the darkness bind them.

[varren]

This would be a good thing. The only people against it are those who buy up all of X item on the AH and triple the price.

I think eventually we either won't have servers at all or they won't mean anything at all. Open your eyes people: LFD, LFR, RealID, Battletags, Cross realm raids, account wide everything. These are all steps towards a server less WoW. The AH will follow suit sometime.

[SamR]

eBay, unlike WoW, deals with actual cashmoneydollars. You can't 'flood the market' or 'dupe items' on eBay. If you notice that there aren't many, say, PS3s on eBay and you want to break into that market, you can't whip out your mining alt and go farm up a bunch of PS3s to sell.

As others have pointed out, the most useful items will have their prices tanked so low that they'll hit vendor value - something that may sound appealing as a buyer, but is borderline useless otherwise. To make gold at that point on the auction, you would have to move MASSIVE quantities of goods, and that is anti-fun.

It's not about price gouging. It's about being reasonable.

There are way more factors at play than "lots of sellers means ore is going to go to vendor price". The demand will increase along with the supply.

It's similar to saying that there will be so many buyers that ore is going to cost 1000g a stack. You can't ignore the other side of the equation.

PS: Is everything on the Diablo 3 gold AH going to be priced at vendor price because there are so many sellers?

[FailCow]

Items wont necessarily be cheaper or more expensive because supply goes up but as well as demand.

What will change is the speed in which the market can change. With so many people I think that prices could insanely fluctuate.

[SamR]

Items wont necessarily be cheaper or more expensive because supply goes up but as well as demand.

What will change is the speed in which the market can change. With so many people I think that prices could insanely fluctuate.

Actually, prices would be less likely to fluctuate wildly. On my server, I've seen Obsidium Bars go from 3g each to 9g each in the span of a day. The supply is low enough that over night they might get bought out and someone jumps in with expensive ones. I'm sure this happens with tons of items on all servers. The most visible items that do this are glyphs because the turnover is so low. Overnight a glyph that's been 3g for weeks might get priced for 300g. With a large enough pool to draw from, these types of fluctuations are far less likely.

[ziggler]

It would be way too complicated to buy anything. The time it took you to move your mouse from search to the item, it would no longer be there.
All your searches would be "search item, nothing in that page is available, move to the next one, the same".

[GhostSkull]

People have said much of this, but not all in the same place. By increasing the scale of the market would increase the range of prices. Common items will hover above vend-price and rare things will top out in the hundreds of thousands. The mid-range items like top-end crafting materials might not change a lot, but supplies will become more dependable. Crafters will need less storage, but market manipulators might need more. Nevertheless, sales will go to those who work the AH by undercutting. The money will go to the day traders, but using auction addons may become very dangerous. One misclick and you'll buy 8000 of something.

[mvaliz]

Reading the negative responses makes me happy knowing more-and-more that my theory on Diablo 3's AH (RM or Gold) might be a VERY bad thing.

Right now what you're proposing OP is EXACTLY what D3 is doing. Within D3 - Not only will there be no individual server economies within a region, but also absolutely no horde/alliance division either as there is in WoW.

Do you KNOW how many people will be competing with each other!? It's going to be a madhouse! :P

Do they have the tech to do it on WoW? If they can do it in D3, I have to say "yes" the can. However, the one thing D3 AHs don't have to worry about that WoW ones do is Auctioneer botting. Competing with auction bots is already pretty horrific... now try to compete with a THOUSAND of them! >_<

As somebody said, prices will hit rock-bottom... which could be a GREAT thing for some people. :P

[araine]

excellent idea pure capitalism not the communism of protected market we have now.