In World of Warcraft: The War Within, the auction house was unusable for about a week. However, contrary to assumptions, the problem was with the game itself and not with bots.
What is the problem? The trading in World of Warcraft: The War Within was disrupted for about a week. Anyone trying to shop in the auction house was met with a red error message stating that the sought-after items could not be found.
Players speculated widely about who might be responsible for the broken auction house. Many players thought of bots trying to earn gold or quickly buying up cheap items. Others believed that many players were trying to buy items cheaply and then resell them for a higher price at the same time. But the reason was different.
Blizzard is to Blame
Where did the problem come from? The problem with the auction house came from Blizzard itself. “Senior Game Producer” Tom Ellis explained on X.com where the issue truly originated. Instead of bots, a simple design change in the game’s code caused the issue.
He explains there that a database that usually had 20,000 to 60,000 lines now has several tens of millions of lines due to the change. This significantly increases the demands on the hardware.
So what is happening with the auction house is an interesting technical problem. A well-intentioned and simple design change has led to a DB table that previously contained 20-60k lines now containing dozens of millions. That in itself is not a problem, but we need to make some code changes to support this new world we live in. We will address the problem with more hardware and maintenance while people who are much smarter than I work on actual solutions.
Tom Ellis on X.com
How was the problem solved? As a temporary solution, the developers, according to Tom Ellis on X.com, added more hardware so that the search could function. However, this is not a real solution. Over the weekend, a team continued working to get the auction house back on track.
Some developers, who likely sacrificed their weekend for this, were ultimately able to improve the performance of the auction house so that the issues should now be resolved for most players.
In the comments under the post, players express their happiness about the good news and also thank the developers who sacrificed their weekend to get the auction house back in operation. However, other problems have arisen with their villains: The chief of WoW admits that they burned through villains too quickly
