A big plan in World of Warcraft went horribly wrong. Instead of a big monopoly, a player now has a huge pile of junk.
With Patch 9.2.7, the probably last update of Shadowlands went live a few days ago. In addition to new rules for boosting, there was also a significant change to the auction houses, as they are now cross-region. Some players saw this as a great opportunity to make some serious gold – and ended up losing it all. The result is an inventory that is bursting at the seams.
What happened to the auction house? Patch 9.2.7 has connected the auction houses for consumables. All realms in Europe now share one auction house, at least for items like crafting materials or consumables such as potions and flasks. This means much more supply, but also many more potential customers – depending on the realm, this has advantages or disadvantages for prices.
A player wanted to live the “wet dream of an anarcho-capitalist”
The adjustment of the auction house has awakened the urge in some players to dive deeper into these mechanics and possibly even build a monopoly. Because if you own all the resources of a certain category, you can dictate the price – or so goes the tempting, basic idea. An idea that also led Reddit user “Federal_Pop_9580” (in-game “Nashadar”) to fail.
What happened then? Nashadar spent real money on two WoW tokens and then converted them into gold to subsequently buy up all resources from 4 categories:
- Linen Cloth
- Wool Cloth
- Silk Cloth
- Solid Stone
With his gold, he bought up all available materials from these regions – seemingly monopolizing them for himself.
Why did this fail? For several reasons. For one, the market for the purchased resources is extremely niche. These are low-level resources that hardly anyone needs – except perhaps collectors who want to create old recipes as transmog templates. At the same time, all these resources are extremely easy to farm if needed. They drop while leveling, so most characters have plenty of them anyway.
What is now the problem? Inventory space. Because Nashadar has purchased over 800,000 items that are now waiting in his mailbox to be collected. That is an amount that is nearly impossible to manage. After all, most items are available in stacks of 200, but even then there are still 4,000 stacks of “useless” resources that no one wants. With an average inventory of about 130 slots, he would have to run back and forth for a very long time between mailbox and auction house just to put the offers back on the market.
Wannabe monopolist seeks help from Blizzard: When Federal_Pop_9580 realizes his mistake, he sees no other choice but to write a ticket to Blizzard and hope that they can take care of the problem of his clogged mailbox. In it, he states (translated):
Last night, one of the best changes to the auction house came into World of Warcraft, the opening of the cross-region market. I thought I was clever and spent $40 on WoW tokens to fulfill the wet dream of an anarcho-capitalist: complete control over the supply and demand of Linen Cloth, Wool Cloth, Silk Cloth, and Solid Stone. I have failed.
As Illidan himself once said: “There can be no chosen one.” I tried to be the chosen one and failed to understand what a burden [800,000+] items are – something no one should have in this game. I implore you, Game Master, please eliminate my little “f*ck up” and erase my mistake. If you could remove this horrendous amount of auctions and the associated items, I would be very grateful.
Your foolish Nashadar
Community enjoys the incident greatly: As expected, the incident is well received by the community and leads to a lot of mocking comments:
- “Tricking a market for which there is no demand. A perfect ‘Big Brain Move’!”
- “No chance Blizzard will do a rollback for you. You made your bed, now sleep in it. But at least you have the good feeling that it’s extremely soft, padded with 800,000 cloths.”
- “As someone who works in customer service (not at Blizzard): Please write normal tickets.”
Have you also tried to establish an auction house monopoly? And did it work out as well as in this example?
