The auction house in WoW Burning Crusade Classic is extremely slow – and that is fully intentional. A hotfix has caused this.
The launch of Burning Crusade Classic went quite smoothly. But a few days after the launch of the first expansion of WoW Classic, an unpleasant problem arose. The auction house lost a large part of its functionality, and requests were being answered increasingly slowly. Blizzard had to pull the emergency brake and released a hotfix – but this has frustrated some players.
What happened? The auction house became difficult to use for many players in Burning Crusade Classic. Search queries sometimes took several seconds and sometimes were not executed at all. Anyone wishing to buy or sell in the auction house had to invest a lot of time or postpone the endeavor to a time when fewer players were present.
What did Blizzard do? Blizzard implemented a hotfix that affects many players. The mini-update is supposed to bring about mainly two changes.
- Settings changes were implemented to reduce search times in the auction house.
- Players who list, cancel, bid on, or buy many items in quick succession may now experience a delay between actions.
Anyone who wants to manage particularly many auctions – for example through an addon – now has to live with a waiting period.
Why are players dissatisfied? Especially the “power users” who spend many hours each day in the auction house are dissatisfied. Because of the changes, their daily gameplay takes much longer. What previously took only a few minutes can now stretch over an entire evening. Processes automated by addons like “Trade Skill Master” now take much more time, such as the extensive scan of the auction house.
What solutions are there? For most players, it seems clear that the current state is only a temporary solution. There are several suggestions from the community, but all are hotly debated. These include:
- The implementation of the “Retail” auction house: This runs much smoother and removes the need to post numerous individual auctions, such as for fabrics or ores. However, this auction house is precisely what many consider part of the Classic experience that should be preserved.
- Change of addon settings: The creator of TSM demands that Blizzard change the rules for addons so that addons can query more than 50 auctions at the same time. Then addons would only need to send a single request instead of hundreds or thousands.
How Blizzard plans to proceed with the situation is still unclear. However, for most, there does not seem to be a clear, perfect solution.
Have you been suffering under the new restrictions? Or have you experienced any improvements in the auction house since then? Let us know in the comments.
