In World of Warcraft, there have been significant problems with the auction house for about a week. A player recounts: He wanted to buy an item in the AH, purchased hundreds, and paid nearly 200,000 gold. Now Blizzard has acknowledged these issues in WOW, but players say: The difficulties are huge. The economy of the game will take weeks to recover.
What is the auction house in WoW? The auction house is where most of the trading in the MMORPG WoW takes place.
It works like eBay:
- Vendors list items, set a minimum bid and auction duration, and a “buyout price”
- Buyers can bid on items or buy them immediately for a higher price
- For some, the auction house is a game in itself
This change caused difficulties: In WoW, patch 9.2.7 changed how auction houses operate a week ago: The trade of consumables was expanded to the entire region, allowing herbs to be sold all over Europe.
A player wants to buy an item, buys hundreds, pays almost 200,000 gold
What impact did this have? The change to the auction house has led to significant problems for Blizzard over the past week.
A current bug is particularly serious: Players report that they wanted to buy a single item from the auction house but ended up purchasing “hundreds of items” instead.
In the forum, level 60 human paladin Atryk (via blizzard) says: He wanted to buy an item but unintentionally acquired much more than he needed and lost 197,000 gold:
How is this even possible? I wanted to buy an item, and it automatically bought hundreds. Is there a way to undo this? I don’t even use an auction house addon, and I don’t see how I can report this in the game.
Atryk, Paladin
Other players have the opposite problem: They say that even though thousands of herbs are offered in the auction house, they cannot buy a single one.
Some lose a lot of gold, others make it
How severe is the problem? In the forum, a player named “Angrychair” discusses the issues with the auction house and its consequences for WoW (via blizzard). He says:
It will be interesting to see what Blizzard does to compensate for the damages, if they do anything at all. The economy will take weeks to recover, a lot of people have been swindled out of a BUNCH of gold, and a lot of other people have made a bunch of unearned gold and plan to make even more. Additionally, players have been prevented from really playing the game due to the issues, as they couldn’t buy consumables, craft legendary items, and so on.
Angrychair, Demon Hunter
How did Blizzard respond? On Sunday, after days of issues, Blizzard acknowledged that there is a “major issue with the auction house” causing auctions to stall. It is important for Blizzard to fix this.
On Tuesday morning, a hotfix was also released to address the problem. It remains to be seen whether WoW will return to normalcy now.
The auction house in WoW is a case of its own:
WoW player wants to establish auction house monopoly, buys 800,000 items, regrets it immediately
