One Auction House for All Realms

[mvaliz]

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

It could very well be! It will most certainly be interesting to see, won't it!? ^_^

[xskarma]

My guess is the AH would not be able to function in it's current form. We allready need add-ons of various sorts to make buying and selling items, especially in bulk, easy enough to manage, now imagine that with the enormity of a world market. Can't be done with what we have now. I mean imagine something like a shopping mall built for a city or neighbourhood, but that then suddenly has to work for a whole continent. Wouldn't work. We'll always need a way to differentiate our markets, break them up in smaller parts to keep it manageble, and WoW is no different.

That said, if Blizz ever did lump everything together people would adapt. People will remain too lazy to get stuff themselves sometimes, items will remain very high in demand on patch days, and going down further and further the farther away from patch day you get. People interested in making gold will find ways to make gold, people with no knack for doing this will remain broke. I don't see that ever changing.

My guess is supply and demand would smooth out, but prices would remain at a relatively normal level, because there is always going to be a threshhold of when people stop buying stuff cause it's too expensive, and a similar threshhold where they don't find it worth it to farm stuff. Prices will be set, like today, somewhere in between.

[fredrasaurus]

No, this would destroy the game completely. What would be the point of farming for hours only to get 1% of the normal price... I would like to see merged auction houses on low pop servers though, that would help bring their really over priced items to on par with high pop servers.

It's like the world merging GDP, not viable.

[Spoiledkid]

Imho there should be a region-wide AH but it should have higher cut (15% for example) and minimun deposit fee should be higher (10g per item for example). Then it won't get flooded but there would be those rarer items you can't get on every realm.

[Hoticehunter]

Assuming the tech were in place and it was simply a matter of Blizzard wanting the players to come to them saying they wanted it, I think I would want them to combine a bunch of smaller servers' AHs into one first and see how that goes before combining everything.

[SamR]

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".

Blizzard is one step ahead of you. In the Diablo 3 AH, stackable crafting items are sold in a pool. You pick the item and put in how many you want. You then get a confirmation screen of what the total cost will be and what the total per item cost is. No more clicking on single listings over and over again.

On the sell side, you specify how many you want to sell and it goes into that pool. You can ask for however much per item that you want and if it sells, you get the gold.

Much like Ticketmaster locks your ticket as you decide to buy or not, the Diablo 3 AH locks the items you searched for until you hit confirm. It's actually a very nice improvement and I can't wait to see it make its way over to WoW.

[varren]

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

Well you do have a point, D3 everyone uses the same AH thing is being used as a guinea pig. If it works well in that game then you can be darn sure they will bring it over to WoW.

[Nexsa]

It would allow gold farmers to x-fer gold around easier. Also one huge market + bot/gold farmers = Disaster.

[asharia]

no thanks

i like playing the AH as is

[Kharli]

i would honestly like it

[mvaliz]

My guess is the AH would not be able to function in it's current form. We allready need add-ons of various sorts to make buying and selling items, especially in bulk, easy enough to manage, now imagine that with the enormity of a world market,

Speak for yourself... I found auctioneer to be a hinderance rather than a help and eventually deleted it. Everything I need is right there in the default UI.

Just because you might be an AH spamming Jewelcrafter/inscriber doesn't mean we ALL need that kind of stupidity. :P

I for one would love Auctioneer to get banned. I'm so tired of people uploading stacks of stuff based on the price of their one-and-only-scan showed one guy uploading 1 item for a third of the price just to get it out of their inventory quickly... you can't buy them out, as they'll just brainlessly upload again. I tried - it doesn't work. >_<

[Howard Moon]

Mat prices sink -> People stop farming -> Mat prices go up again

Just as it is now.

I don't know much about economics, but it seems to me that supply / demand == 1000xsupply / 1000xdemand.

[Deleted]

Its a good idea.

Many are saying that prices will crash, but I doubt that. It will not only increase number of sellers, but also number of buyers, so supply/demand ratio will stay the same. What it will help with is instant undercutting and market cornering and it will save economies on low populated servers.

[DraconusIX]

Bad bad idea. Prices might be a little more uniform, but it would give the AH an...uhg...feel. I do think however there should be a way to transfer items across realms without paying for a character to be transferred. Would provide some nice arbitrage for merchants to move items.

I keep thinking back to the trade system in EVE with different stations. While it would not be that complex, it could still be moderately more complex then the current system. In any system with individual AH you would get a dominant AH then also have lesser AH closer to the front lines where you could find supplies more used in combat.

Think of it this way - you would have a capital city with everything, then river cities that have arbitrage, then backwater hovels. i always think a game that could design something like that could create a very dynamic and interesting world.

[Deleted]

- Less fluctuations in prices and in the quantity supplied.
- Perfectly competetive market
- All suppliers becomes price takers, meaning no market power to the current monopolies (which will benefit the population as a whole)
- No lack of certain rare goods such as epic gems or raid drop items (think first weeks of DS), Spectral tigers or Teebu's Longsword

Economically this couldn't be better.
The only flaws (in general) in this potential implemention would be that it hurts the current suppliers with a lot of market control and power (which is the reason some players play), it will become a POSSIBLE (but luck based) way of transfering items/gold cheaper than market price cross servers, and the last thing is that it will be hard to buy popular items seeing as someone already bought the item faster than you (though it shouldn't be hard to change the AH interface).
In the short run it will cause prices to go up on servers who have endured little inflation since Classic and the prices will go down on servers that have endured a lot of inflation since Classic.

And NO, the prices wont drop to 101 % of the vendor price.. lol.. It will be based on the principles of the free market (supply and demand). Everyone has access to dailies, not everyone had access to specific profession recipies nor does everyone want to be bothered with it.. So of course will you earn more by supplying goods on the auction house in comparison to doing dailies.

[kaikoraimi]

Effects on the WoW economy:
If we consider the ~10 million active subscribers, across the 557 realms (counted from US, EU, and TW battle.net's realm status pages), and assuming that each player plays only one faction on one server (an assumption that will make the following number lower than actuality), we get ~9,000 subscribers per faction per server.
That corresponds to approximately a thousand-fold increase in the number of buyers and sellers relative to the current markets.

Because of the way the AH currently functions, the supply of any particular farmable material item (ie, obsidium ore) is usually at least marginally greater than the demand. Lets just say the daily supply of obsidium ore for a 9,000-population faction is 450 stacks, and the daily demand is 445 stacks. A difference of 5 stacks on this average server would correspond to a difference of 5,000 stacks on the Grand Unified AH. This *would* bring down the average price of readily available farmable goods from the present, but only proportionate to the amount by which supply outpaced demand. On the other hand, items for which there is generally greater demand than supply (say cata greens with desirable stat combos, equippable at levels 77-80), the price would get nudged up slightly. On the whole, the average prices would be fairly constant for readily available items. For the substantially more rare items (I'm looking at you, Mr. Crimson Deathcharger), it is possible for the prices to go up, on average, as the extremely wealthy players are the only market for these items, and the seller is motivated to get the maximum amount possible. (If someone posted a Crimson Deathcharger for 300k, the guy who posted one moments before for 150k is likely to cancel his auction and bump up his price to 290k). For items that are hard or sucky to find now (i.e., Small Flame Sac, used for Dragonbreath Chili), the market won't really improve, as the few that are posted are likely to get snapped up as quickly or more quickly than they are now. Factions with populations substantially larger than the average would see overall less change in prices than particularly small factions. The demand side of small factions would generally benefit substantially from the larger AH; the supply side may experience substantial detriments (particularly due to the loss of one or more near-/actual monopolies), and would generally see less income per item than they do now. (Yes, specific situations may not fit these general trends. The price of, say, Zephyrite could easily 'crash' down to near vendor value and stay there.)
TLDR: the market averages would stay about the same as they are now; the most expensive items would probably go up a bit; the most common items would come down a bit. Small realms would be happier, briefly.*

Players from richer realms could have a substantial initial advantage over players from poorer ones; this would smooth out in the long run, but would take a few months at least.

*The big issue is that gold selling, botting, and account hacking would explode. The gold sellers would suddenly have their individual (server & faction-specific) markets opened up a thousand-fold and would have a massively easier time moving their wares before Blizzard could respond and shut them down, and thus would be incentivized to hack more. (If this happened, I wouldn't be surprised to see hackers figure out how to crack the authenticator code system.) For this reason alone, merging 1671 auction houses (counting the neutral ones), or even a portion thereof, would be a terrible move for Blizzard's profitability.

[Deleted]

It would lead to a massive crash in the prices of stock due to the fact your current population would change from thousands or hundred in most cases to literally millions. There would be no ability to monopolize the market as undercutters would be able to do so without the fear of being caught due to the servers never being he same. Farming would die as it would become a cast that auctioned goods would simply be going for slightly more than the price to sell them to a vendor.

So pretty much this: Only good things

Indeed, it would be amazing for everyone, from people who feel forced to farm stuff to people who don't have enough gold for some stuff.

The only losers would be the people who actually want to monopolize something.

[underdogba]

Economically feasible.

That doesn't make it any less imprecise.

[Herecius]

Indeed, it would be amazing for everyone, from people who feel forced to farm stuff to people who don't have enough gold for some stuff.

The only losers would be the people who actually want to monopolize something.

Or the people who make any gold from the AH at all. In order to make any gold, somebody using the AH would have to move INSANE amount of goods. More than they could possibly fit into their bags and their bank, people would practically need their own dedicated guild banks to move enough goods to make a profit of any kind. It's just not a viable system in WoW at that scale. Using a comparison like eBay or any other real economy doesn't work because in the real world, we have warehouses to store our metric craptons of stuff to sell.

Comparing it to Diablo 3 doesn't work either, because D3, while it does have crafting, will not have the sort of crafting/farming economy that WoW does right now. The majority of goods on D3's auction house will be items, of which there will always be a limited supply due to rarity.

[guff]

People in this topic forget that there isn't only the supply side od things but there's demand too. You worry that you would get undercutted after 2 seconds? Well within 5 seconds both yours and the undercutter's auctions will be gone anyway....

Prices would certainly drop though... And btw if they dropped to a point where items go almost for vendor prices, people would stop farminf and prices would go up again, thats basic supply and demand.

Im inclined to agree with this person. I don not think prices would plummit and stay down forever, I see no reason for that. They may drop to the levels of the cheapest realms today, or maybe a bit more.

Supply AND demand is strong