Hello guys.
To preface two things:
1) This is 100% hypothetical. The point of this thread is not to get something done but to merely talk about it.
2) I 100% suck at explaining. So if a point seems weird to you, please point out what doesnt make sense to you and I will give it my best to explain it better and in more detail.
I know many people are talking about what features from retail could be brought over to Classic, without infringing on the games design philosophy. In this thread I would rather do something different; I want to look at a vanilla feature that actually is detrimental to what Vanilla is about for many people. As you can allready tell by reading the title, I am talking about the auction house.
So whats my problem with the auction house? Well, it trivializes trading and the distribution of goods. Ok, that sounds a bit abstract. Let me give you a comparison: What the auction house is to trading, that is LFD to doing dungeons. Some may now get an idea of what I am talking about. The auction house makes trading a mundane activitiy. No player interaction, no looking for the items you need. No supply routes, no managing of anything. When someone tells you he makes gold off of the economy, you automatically (and rightfully) assume he is standing at the auction house flipping items.
Removing the auction house would make trading a lot more interesting. A lot more tedious too, without a doubt. But I guess vanilla enthusiasts wont inherently mind that. It would make players organize themself, it would make them assume roles. It would elevate your existing role within the economy. You would deal with people and build relationships with these people, instead of just trading with a mindless machine, aka the Auction House.
Trade chat still exists and is used for services and big ticket items. For most mundane items that need to be purchased in quantities (venom sacks, cloth, herbs, etc), a mundane solution is actually preferable.
This was definitely something people thought when WoW was new. WoW was the "casual" MMO back in the day -- games like EverQuest and Ultima Online, from what I understand, did not have anything like this in place. However, the result was intense amount of spamming on public channels trying to sell items, which required a strong devotion of time. The Auction House serves the purpose of letting one aspect of the game that really offers no benefit, in my opinion, be automated.
I can see your analogy with it being comparable to LFG, but in my opinion, there is nothing to be gained from spamming a Trade channel for hours trying to sell potentially dozens of items. Could it make trading and the community stronger? Sure, that is definitely likely, but given that WoW has always had an auction house, we have no real idea of what that could be, or if it would even be desirable. Traveling to real world locations for dungeons adds a bit more to the importance of dungeons, social aspect, world exploration, etc. Blizzard eventually abandoned this assuming that was also a waste of time, and suddenly dungeons became quiet and something you ran through and kicked anyone who died... the community sense of adventuring there died completely when LFG came to be.
I agree that the removing Auction House alone would create a void, one that is not sufficiently filled by just spamming the trade channel. What I would be proposing is a more diversified solution. Player owned shops for example. Obviously they should not be instanced but rather be physical spaces in the world.
I guess the missunderstanding here is that I am not advocating for no trading tools at all. Thats not the case. I just consider the Auction House a rather bad solution as it is too powerful of a tool.
The LFD tool is fine. The only problem with it is that, for normals and heroics, it instantly teleports you to the dungeon. If LFD worked the same way for normal and heroic dungeons as it does for mythics (i.e., you still have to go to the dungeon entrance on foot and maybe even put a group together manually), then it would be perfect.
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Even though its not really the point of this thread, I have to disagree with you there for the sake of the comparison. Triviliazing travelling is only one negative aspect of the LFD. The other two are a) difficulty and b) community.
Difficulty: Content that can be accessed by just entering a que must be doable by nearly all people. If the expectation is not certain success, people would not use the tool, but rather build their own groups, in order to apply filter they deem necessary. We can see this by looking at the LFDs introduction: It was introduced in 3.3.X, at a time when gear inflation made then-current heroic dungeons a rush and zerg fest. It was pretty much impossible to not rofl stomp through the instance. When Cata came around heroics suddenly became challenging again. Guess what happened? People queued, people failed, people cried. So Blizzard nerfed heroics into the ground - despite them being easier than BC heroics.
Community: Many people say that an enclosed server community weeds out bad behaving players and/or forces them to behave good. Personally I think that is nonsense. Assholes gonna be assholes no matter what. The benefit I see is rewarding good (behaving) players, as the scarcity of players means you are always driven to proximity of good players. If you are a nice guy and even just a decent player, people will want to play with you again. Its really rewarding a good attitude.
I could also begin to talk about how it removed the idea of having a support role, but I think that point is rather mud considering the community overall rejected that concept allready. (And now cries for a bard support class... oh the irony...)
I think this will be the biggest problem with the absence of an AH.
What if you want to buy 100x [item=3818] - there would need to be exactly someone online at that time, wanting to spend their time selling exactly those items. Ofcourse many will transfer all their mats/items to a bank alt to spend some time selling their stuff in a capital city. But that results in less time spending the game doing what you find fun (questing, leveling, dungeoning is what I find fun, not standing in a city trying to sell stuff), and more time doing what you don't like will. This will eventually result in less subscriptions I guess. There could be an alternative way to sell items, I agree. But the AH as it is right now is just fine if you ask me.
This seems like it would descend into the Ragnarok Online solution of having shop bots afk in major cities. That seems less elegant than a dedicated auction house.Samaraner wrote: ↑5 years agoI agree that the removing Auction House alone would create a void, one that is not sufficiently filled by just spamming the trade channel. What I would be proposing is a more diversified solution. Player owned shops for example. Obviously they should not be instanced but rather be physical spaces in the world.
I guess the missunderstanding here is that I am not advocating for no trading tools at all. Thats not the case. I just consider the Auction House a rather bad solution as it is too powerful of a tool.
Remove the AH and people (developers) will make an addon/website for trading goods.
It wouldn't be hard to make an addon were a trader can set a price of an item at the bank/bag and it get listed on a website, the reason something like this (poe.trade is an example) doesn't exists in WoW is because it isn't needed with an in-game AH.
This was the Wow companion app in Warlords of Draenor, and it created a huge amount of inflation in the economy.C4N wrote: ↑5 years agoRemove the AH and people (developers) will make an addon/website for trading goods.
It wouldn't be hard to make an addon were a trader can set a price of an item at the bank/bag and it get listed on a website, the reason something like this (poe.trade is an example) doesn't exists in WoW is because it isn't needed with an in-game AH.
sorry but removing the AH would really hinder a lot of people of playing the game. I played a lot of Ragnarok Online and hated that you have to spam the chat or searching every player kiosk for the items you were looking for.
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I completely agree with you: in fact AH was not planned to be in game. When the game was in beta someone developed an add-on that worked like the AH. Since everyone started to use it Blizzard decided to develop this feature and included it in game. But it was a very late addition
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AH was actually removed for a few days during the Plague event, there's a neat documentary on the effects of the plague from a social level that touches upon the fact players could not use the AH and had stay away from major cities and venture into the wild in mass.Samaraner wrote: ↑5 years agoRemoving the auction house would make trading a lot more interesting. A lot more tedious too, without a doubt. But I guess vanilla enthusiasts wont inherently mind that. It would make players organize themself, it would make them assume roles. It would elevate your existing role within the economy. You would deal with people and build relationships with these people, instead of just trading with a mindless machine, aka the Auction House.
I've spent the past 3 or 4 days farming mats on retail to sell on the AH so I can pay my Classic sub with BfA gold. I usually had over 700 auctions on the AH at any given time. I still have about 500 up.
People who are seriously considering getting rid of the AH have no idea of the sheer volume of trade that happens through it. Getting rid of it would kill the WoW economy, period. Moving that traffic into trade chat would cause messages to go by so rapidly that no one could read them.
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One of the main reasons WoW was so appealing to me back in the day was exactly the AH.
As a former Lineage 2 player I can safely say this: AH is a major step forward. In L2, if you wanted to sell something, you had to open up shop (you could do that), name your shop and sit on your butt all day long hoping someone will actually pass by you and buy something. You had to be online 24h/24h to sell something.
There were countless forum topic to allow players to at least setup shop and be able to go offline, while your character still remained in game, selling stuff.
You had to be there, online, to actually deal with your money, instead of out in the world questing, ganking, or generally having fun.
I played diablo 2 before WoW where the only option was to spam 50 different chat channels with buy and sell messages over and over for hours. Removing the AH would be a dealbreaker to me I think.
The AH was really the only 'sane' solution back then when the MMO era was about to explode, having un-instanced shops takes space, and instanced ones break immersion (look at player garrisons), the auction house solved that.
Having thousands of requests to buy would flood any dedicated trade chat (just look at Diablo 2 trade channels in 1999-2000, and that was only a fraction of requests) where chat would flow faster than human readability, the auction house solved that.
Having to waste time browsing player shops, instanced or not, for the items you seek instead of a single search bar to look for a specific item, again the auction house solved that.
Having player shops/stalls is a faux romanticised solution - with spamming trade chats being no solution at all - that in the end would be too cumbersome to use, whilst the AH still keeps immersion to a satisfactory degree (it helps that it's an actual physical location unlike Diablo III's was).
It is widely acceptable that if you go out shopping for something specific, or just general goods, you might be out the house anything from 30 minutes to 2 or 3 hours. However it's unreasonable to expect people to want that type of borderline annoying inconvenience from a game for the sake of immersion. The AH was a stupendous idea, and it shows. I'm happy to visit Stormwind's streets for my shopping immersion fix. 
