Warlords of Draenor Will Merge Auction Houses

[MarlaDesat]

Warlords of Draenor Will Merge Auction Houses

Separate Horde and Alliance auction houses will be no more in the next World of Warcraft expansion.

World of Warcraft has maintained a strong separation between the Horde and Alliance factions. Even Pandaren characters, who Beta Forums [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/135594-World-of-Warcraft-Player-Reaches-Level-90-Without-Choosing-a-Faction] that the next expansion will merge the faction-specific auction houses. "Yes, in 6.0 auction houses are unified between factions on a given server," says Hazzikostas. The major reason cited for the merger is to reduce the imbalance for servers where one faction is in the minority. A server with a low population for one faction can have significantly fewer items available on the auction house, leading to scarcity of resources and high prices.

Currently, players can sell or buy items from the opposite faction only through Joystiq [http://wowpedia.org/Auction_House#Neutral] has confirmed that the neutral auction houses will be connected to the cross-faction auction houses in Warlords of Draenor. The merger won't make getting items to your Alliance toon from your main Horde character easier, but you won't have to go out to Gadgetzan just to use the auction house any more.

What do you think about making the World of Warcraft auction houses cross-faction? Will it improve your experience with the auction house, or is this merger just a push by the goblins to make some more cash?

Source: Battle.net Forums [http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/13271497607#3]


Permalink

 

[crepesack]

As someone who just started playing WoW. I really like this change. It makes it so you don't have to find horde/alliance worlds. When I first rolled my character I accidentally rolled horde on an alliance world and the prices for AH were terrible

 

[NortherWolf]

Words

That particular part of the WoW community is why it's so toxic you know, fans really go into the "Us or THEM!"-mentality. And that ain't pretty. However , this won't do anything to disturb that particular brand of fanaticism so why is it so bad?

 

[Ninmecu]

Seriously you guys? Fuck you Blizzard. Who bought out Blizzard and killed it? Activison? Fuck those guys.
There already WAS a cross faction AH, and it made sense, (Edit: As it says in the article). Now, NOPE, let's just make everything easier and hold our players hands. God dammit. FUCK WoW, now. They killed it a long time ago, now they just keep desecrating the corpse.
I keep wanting to give you guys another shot, but then you keep pulling this shit.
Let. it. die.
Edit: They claim this is to try to make it so the character imbalences are fixed? Bullshit. There are SO many easier ways than that.
1. Offer free server transfers
2. Shut down some servers
3. Offer incentives to go Horde on an "Alliance server" or w/e.
4. Show the stats of each servers on entry.
5. Put some items in the AH your damn selves to even out the prices.
And those are off the top of my head. Holy shit people.
Edit Edit: Bonus, this'll just encourage the gold farmer/bots that they claim to despise.
BLIZZARD entertainment: Why fix the problems?

You seem irrationally upset by this, so I'll break it down bit by bit.

Offer Free Server Transfers.

It's a nice idea, but let's be honest. People don't like change. They find a server, make friends, join a guild, raid, quest, do their dailies,learn the economy. They get into a cycle. Free Server transfers only reduce the problems by an infinitesimally small amount, especially for high population servers. I've been on several high population servers and although I wouldn't want to make a living there, there are certainly far more opportunities for individuals who aren't keen on guilds to raid, amongst other things.

Shut Down some Servers.

How is this even related to the issue you're raising with regards to making the game easier by allowing both auction houses to be faction independent? Also, server imbalances won't simply "dissapear" should they delete a handful of servers. I may not be a server technician but I can almost guarantee that's far from a "simple" task.

Offer incentives to change factions

You can't say one thing and do another. You just complained about the game being made easier and how upset you feel with regards to that and then turn around and say "well maybe if they just give you a reason to switch sides that will make everything better." Disregarding whatever trinket they might offer(not an armor piece, I'm meaning a literal trinket, a bauble, a shiny toy, whatever you want to call it.), people won't switch over to a different faction unless their friends do. The differences between the Alliance and the Horde from a social aspect are like night and day on some servers, that solves nothing for the imbalances.

Show the Stats on server selection.

This I agree with and have been a long time supporter of such a function. Having to bounce around from server to server looking for a good solid place is a chore, breaking it down so I know which side has what % of players on which faction would certainly be lovely.

Put some items on the damn AH yourselves to even out the prices.

That removes the feeling of agency from the players. It no longer becomes a player driven borderline anarchic economy but instead becomes a controlled communistic view where everything has a set value as set by the dev team. No one wants that.

There already WAS a cross faction AH, and it made sense, (Edit: As it says in the article). Now, NOPE, let's just make everything easier and hold our players hands. God dammit. FUCK WoW, now. They killed it a long time ago, now they just keep desecrating the corpse.
I keep wanting to give you guys another shot, but then you keep pulling this shit.
Let. it. die.

Yes, there was a cross faction Auction House and it made some sense lore wise but we're beyond the point of ridiculous laws in place to support the pre-existing lore. This in no way is hand holding, you're acting like a child who doesn't like things to change. I keep hearing people complaining about how they killed WoW and how they keep holding our hands for everything but I've never seen someone argue that in a quantifiable manner. They just spout on about how LFR made the game too easy and how Raids have gotten simplistic and Epics are welfare level tier given out for the most mediocre tasks. All of which certainly made the game easier, there's no argument about that. Do you know what else that did? It made the game approachable. It allows for new players to tackle the challenges and see what the end game content has to offer. It's no longer a game for the elitist of the elite anymore. If you want a challenge hit up the Heroic Version of the raids when they go live and work with your raid team to ascend beyond those challenges, there's no hand-holding there. Most of the complaints I see these days regarding the game being easier is "it takes less time to do XYZ". Got some news for those types of people, time required to complete a challenge does not equal difficulty.

And before you ask, Yes I was a raider. I was a damn good one, I did tanking and dps throughout Lich King, Cataclysm and parts of Pandaria. I know how challenging the raids can be and how much easier some of them have become. But, that doesn't bother me. Because I still have the good memories of raiding with some truly talented players who were able to one-up me and force me to improve myself. Yes the raids of today have gotten easier in some ways, but if you've been a longtime raider you've seen a lot of the gameplay mechanics Blizzard has in store and you've likely mastered them in the past. There's only so much you can do with raid bosses when you've got over 100 raid bosses in your Roster. Eventually there's going to be some overlap in technique and in dispatching. It doesn't mean their easier, it just means you've gotten a lot better.

 

[Muspelheim]

What I find interesting is that it (almost) makes some sense.

The Great War of Garry's Daddy-Issues is winding down, after all. Varian & Company decided to give the reasonable Hordies a second chance. World War Emo must've been a terribly expensive business, with both parties in poor economic shape. Creating a unified market under the truce to shore up the economies might be an effect of that. Although I imagine the Goblin cartels won't be happy. Not happy at all.

Of course, the more elegant solution would be closing servers and redistributing population (and ensure that it gets done evenly), but closing servers would probably imply they've lost players since the peak. Which won't be allowed to happen.

 

[anthony87]

Seriously you guys? Fuck you Blizzard. Who bought out Blizzard and killed it? Activison? Fuck those guys.

Yeah, because what really made World of Warcraft was the bustling auction house meta-game.

 

[elvor0]

Seriously you guys? Fuck you Blizzard. Who bought out Blizzard and killed it? Activison? Fuck those guys.
There already WAS a cross faction AH, and it made sense, (Edit: As it says in the article). Now, NOPE, let's just make everything easier and hold our players hands. God dammit. FUCK WoW, now. They killed it a long time ago, now they just keep desecrating the corpse.
I keep wanting to give you guys another shot, but then you keep pulling this shit.
Let. it. die.
Edit: They claim this is to try to make it so the character imbalences are fixed? Bullshit. There are SO many easier ways than that.
1. Offer free server transfers
2. Shut down some servers
3. Offer incentives to go Horde on an "Alliance server" or w/e.
4. Show the stats of each servers on entry.
5. Put some items in the AH your damn selves to even out the prices.
And those are off the top of my head. Holy shit people.
Edit Edit: Bonus, this'll just encourage the gold farmer/bots that they claim to despise.
BLIZZARD entertainment: Why fix the problems?

And did anyone use the neutral action house? No. It was just full of pages of stranglethorn, junk, and people hastilly trying to transfer gems. But of course the logical reaction here is to act like a child and throw a tantrum. Of all the things, you want to scream about this, /this/ being for casuals and noobs, and hand holding? This does not make the game easier, it makes things cheaper, or normalized. It is NOT HARD to get gold.

Even if you want to complain about difficulty, that's bollocks. You want hard raids and the best gear? Go do Heroic mode, your gear will dwarf that of people doing LFR, especially when it's fully upgraded. WoD is going to have mythic mode, an ultra hard mode. Here are the difficulty settings currently: easy, normal, hard, very hard. You want it even harder than that? Go for achievements. I mean you are doing heroic seige orgrimmar right? You've got it on farm, right? Your guild eats heroic SoO for breakfast?

And if you have been playing since the game launched, you know why you find raiding easier than most? Because you've been playing the same game for 10 years. Anyone can do something for 10 years and master it, especially with plentiful guides, theorycrafting, mods and everything else. Unless your the dude writing those guides, everyone reads the fucking guide, which again, as long as you can read is not hard to do. Still doesn't make heroic Siege of Orgrimmar easy though, that shit's hard.

Frankly, I don't believe most people who say vanilla was better these days. I think they just say it for the sake it. I played and raided in vanilla, I've been playing WoW since 2005. It was not harder, nor was it better. It was tedious, grindy, padded and broken. Half the classes didn't work properly, and some specs just didn't work at all. If you played Paladin, Druid, Shaman or Priest, you healed. Warrior Tanked. No questions. Terrible stats on gear, horribly unbalanced PvP, PVE gear dwarfing PvP gear, unnecessary repuation grinds to gate content off. Bosses with shit tons of health and no mechanics beyond hitting it for ages. Weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks trying to get that one item, all gear is Hunter gear. Managing 40 people, when 20 of them didn't know what the fuck they were doing, and slacked off most of the time.

Shutting down servers would force people to change their character name and break up guilds, which of course, does not lead to happy customers. More unhappy people than the ones swearing and shouting because they made the auction house cross faction. Boo frikkin hoo.

Cross Faction auction houses doesn't really effect faction identity in any meaningful way, you never so much as see or interact with the person you buy an item with from the AH anyway.

Besides, 7 million players, with a certain rise when Warlords of Draenor comes out, is far from dead. Put your sandwich board away, it's still more than the popular MMOs combinded.

I do not envy the Blizzard PR or community relations department, anytime they do /anything/ the community collectively shits their pants in a raging temper tantrum like a fucking 3 year old. About the only reasonable thing you said was stats for faction balance on server select, which I totally agree with.

Of course, the more elegant solution would be closing servers and redistributing population (and ensure that it gets done evenly), but closing servers would probably imply they've lost players since the peak. Which won't be allowed to happen.

They...er release player figures every quarter. Blizzard themselves are the ones giving us information on how many people are still playing. Which at the moment is about 7, 7.5 million.

 

[VanQ]

Snip.

This game sure is easy. It sure is easy when only 1% of the playerbase has seen a kill on the last3 bosses of the current tier of raiding. It sure is easy when it took my guild 157 wipes to get a kill on Heroic Blackfuse and we're one of the top 10 guild on the top 3 most progressed US servers. It sure is easy.

Seriously though mate, if you never tried to get any further than LFR then you have no right to complain about how easy the game is. There is easy content in WoW. There is also content so difficult that you and 24 of your mates will spend weeks trying to make progress.

I've been playing this game since day 1 and raided since BWL was a thing. The raiding isn't a ballbusting grind over years like it once was. It's now ballbusting through mechanics and and expected level of coordination and skill at the Heroic level. Which would you say is better?

Snip.

Well said. When did you stop raiding? I found the earlier raids in MoP to be quite underwhelming. It wasn't until ToT and SoO that Blizzard really pulled out the big guns and showed us what they could do.

 

[Kungfu_Teddybear]

I think this is a great idea. Auction houses on some servers are just so barren. And it kinda makes sense in a way considering the end of Pandaria. After Garrosh's little outburst is over the factions come to at least some measure of peace with each other.

 

[Ninmecu]

Snip.

Well said. When did you stop raiding? I found the earlier raids in MoP to be quite underwhelming. It wasn't until ToT and SoO that Blizzard really pulled out the big guns and showed us what they could do.

I was kindof forced out of raiding. My friends quit before I was geared enough to earn "the gearscore" to do dps. Despite knowing my rotation well enough to out dps people with much higher gearscores whilst simultaneously not standing in shit. So I kinda got kicked out of raiding around Cataclysm, only to languish in terrible raid guild after terrible raid guild. Eventually made good friends with a like minded raider who saw my skill and potential and told me to "go solo the old content" to learn the old mechanics because he was a long time raider and discussed strategy based on old school raid boss X Y or Z. Through him I got to raid some of Cata and early Pandaria. We tried making a guild but that only furthered the issues. I learned that people are lazy and inept. We couldn't even get past the first boss in...That one titan place. Can't remember name of it, it's 4 dogs. Had people thinking they were raid ready in fresh-at-90-greens. And not just one or two pieces that are real sticklers, I'm talking "I just hit 90, I'm ready to raid now for the first time in my life ever." It was insanely demoralizing to log in every day, organize groups of people to hit up heroics to get some gear going only to find half the guild dissapear overnight because of the christmas holidays and no raiding happen for 2 months(on top of the 2 prior since launch) people who were like me and wanted to raid got the shaft and I said screw it, took a break. Came back, got recruited by my friend as a replacement for his guild main raid team(Dude decked out in full SoO gear, poorly itemized mind you, but fully decked out.) decided to quit at the last second. My friend vouched for me and said "he won't die in shit, he'll do the best he can and he'll do everything in his power to get his gear together." This was on a monday. That day I did EVERY WING OF LFR to try and get ANYTHING(490 ilevel after that.) only to do it all again the next day after reset and do the first half of SoO that night(We stopped after Nazgrim).

SoO I like, but some of the mechanics are just annoying, like the twin tower drake..thing. Galakras I think his/her name is. It's cool the first time but when you start wiping because the god damned npc's like to stand in shit it's not fun. They definitely stepped up their game somewhat though I'll grant them that. But at the end of the day, my fondest raiding memories will always be the challenging times that were Ulduar. I don't know if they can ever achieve Ulduar-levels of near perfection in the future. But we can hope.

Captcha: Ticked Off

Yeah I have my moments remembering the wasted time and potential for raiding and it does tick me off.

 

[elvor0]

But at the end of the day, my fondest raiding memories will always be the challenging times that were Ulduar. I don't know if they can ever achieve Ulduar-levels of near perfection in the future. But we can hope.

WoTLK was lightning in a bottle, they'll never achieve it again. Every raid was golden. Not that I dont still enjoy WoW, but Wrath was the pinnacle, the stars aligned into creative juicyness.
Revamped Naxx: one of the best in it's original, still kicks ass in new mode.
Ulduar: Well, it was Ulduar, nuff said.
Trial of the Crusader, still pretty cool in my opinion, regardless of it just being an Arena.
Icecrown was fucking shit hot. And 25 man LK heroic? A fucking epic spectacle. Deathwing is the only one that comes close to just how cool that fight was to be a part of.


Siege of Orgrimmar's pretty cool though, interestingly and rather dissapointingly, the Garrosh fight is a bit of a let down. I haven't done it on heroic, but on normal, its just so...quaint. Kill the adds that do almost nothing, dont stand in the void zones, slap the Mind Controlled players. Not to belittle the guilds that have done him, but in terms of /spectacle/ it just doesn't have the same epic feel that original Naxx, Kil'Jaeden/Illidan, Lich King or Deathwing did. I wanted there to be /more/ in the fight.

 

[VanQ]

Snip.

Stoneguard was a real guild killer, apparently. I remember hearing about guild after guild falling apart because their tanks couldn't handle the tank switch.

SoO is fantastic. Galakras is the name of the fight you're talking about and it sounds like your group wasn't stunning the bonecrushers. The NPCs won't die from things like poison cloud and fire, but if the bonecrushers charge and start slicing them up, they'll die fast. A simple stun or knockback prevents this though.

The last four bosses in SoO Heroic are magical. They demand an incredible amount of coordination and skill from any group that attempts them. Heroic Blackfuse is especially great because of the amazing flexibility in strategies that you can come up for him. The fight is literally "things going wrong making more things go wrong: the encounter" and having belt teams and floor teams work flawlessly and backing each other up if anything goes wrong to prevent a chain reaction of unfortunate events is wonderful. The last 15% of that fight had my blood really pumping similar to how it used to back in the old days. Don't mind if I drop my guild's kill video here for e-peen's sake.

Spoiler

But at the end of the day, my fondest raiding memories will always be the challenging times that were Ulduar. I don't know if they can ever achieve Ulduar-levels of near perfection in the future. But we can hope.

WoTLK was lightning in a bottle, they'll never achieve it again. Every raid was golden.
Revamped Naxx: one of the best in it's original, still kicks ass in new mode.
Ulduar: Well, it was Ulduar, nuff said.
Trial of the Crusader, still pretty cool in my opinion, regardless of it just being an Arena.
Icecrown was fucking shit hot. And 25 man LK heroic? A fucking epic spectacle. Deathwing is the only one that comes close to just how cool that fight was to be a part of.

Revamped Naxx was great but people still couldn't do the safety dance. No matter how things change, they always stay the same.
Ulduar is still my all time favourite raid. Everything from the lore to the aesthetic to the difficulty and hard modes was perfect.
Trial was pretty bad, in my opinion. It was nice having no trash but it was tiring tackling 5 bosses one after the other.
Icecrown, well, you said it already. It was fucking shit hot.

Garrosh on Heroic is a lot more fun. It's still a low damage fight in the first 3 phases but it demands so much from your DPS that it has you burning to get the most out of your class as you can. Plus, Heroic has Phase 4, a phase that you don't get in Normal or below. Battling a Sha Corrupted Garrosh in the smoldering ruins of Stormwind while he rains down madness and destruction on you, kiting Empowered Iron Stars around the field trying to line up a hit on Garrosh with just perfect timing to land huge damage and interrupt his Manifest Rage so he can't summon a metric fuckload of adds.

It's pretty fucking ballers, actually.

 

[elvor0]

Trial was pretty bad, in my opinion. It was nice having no trash but it was tiring tackling 5 bosses one after the other.

Yeah Trial is a bit divisive, I personally still enjoyed it, but compared to the other Wrath raids, it wasn't as good. I can totally understand why the folks who didn't like it, didn't like it though.

 

[Tradjus]

I haven't played WoW in a while, but one of the things that always bothered me was scalping of faction specific items over the neutral auction house, so this is a decent change. It won't bring me back, but lots of little changes like this too things people have been complaining about forever might add up too more users returning.

 

[Shadow-Phoenix]

GOod maybe this means the servers all as one will finally stave off those that seek to take control of the individual marketplace's, got really fed up with finding my server being full of nothing buy guys who spend their entire time gathering all day only to charge you out the ass to a point where you'd actually need to pay for a server change/move your guild and friends just to find another suitable auction house, shit should never come to that.

 

[Crazy Zaul]

I don't even play any more but holy shit, about fucking time! They should have done this years ago. Still not having cross faction mail was stupid but at least now you can kinda do it.

 

[LordMonty]

Goblins run the AH now, they don't give a damn who is buying or selling, they just want the profits!

 

[Ninmecu]

Snip'd because walloftextcritsfor10billion

As amazing as some of those things sound, the problem I have with raiding is, pardon my elitism a moment, very few people are as good as I am. Don't get me wrong, I'm miles behind the best, I've got a lot of room for improvement. But I constantly IMPROVE, regardless of whether or not I get an upgrade in any given week, every week I was taking less damage, dishing out more, learning how to deal with particular packs of adds or positioning and squeezing out the most I could with my set up. Most people I've raided with aren't like that. I've heard it said for every Legendary player, there are 10 epic, for every epic player, there are 10 rares, for every rare player, there are 100 uncommon, for every uncommon, there are 200 common, for every common there are thousands of junk.

I don't mind playing with any level of player as long as they try and learn and don't make the same mistake twice. But more often than not, we'd be wiping because one jackass is gone full tunnel vision and isn't moving to avoid certain things and in turn gets OTHERS killed.(That mecha dude in SoO being a perfect example. I used to call it "bad rng" because I was the new guy and was on "trial", calling people out for stupid movement choices(especially the GM/Raid leader(bad combo) would've gotten me the axe. In hindsight, might've been an improvement.)


One of the major issues I had with the raid team was the strategies used were inconsistent from week to week. We'd have a 220k dps mage decide "fuck it I want to heal lol" and bring in an ilevel 495 shaman that he has no idea how to play, so we're down a semi-reliable dps and up a shitty healer, meaning the strategy changes to compensate for the lowered damage and in a 10 man group, that's a big impact. The whole thing just smacked of poor organization held together by a man who had no business being a leader.



As for WOTLK being lightning in a bottle, yeah, that's fair. I don't think anyone could've anticipated that level of raid design. I once lead a raid in Naxx where the entire team save for one entry level healer and a warrior died to the Safety Dance(I'm saddened to admit I was amongst the deceased.) they safety danced for 15 minutes before killing him without a team. It was pretty awesome. Ulduar was, my god. It was(is) beautiful, the mechanics were engaging, the atmosphere absolutely dripping, the feeling we were actually raiding, tackling things greater than our collective wholes. It was great. I'll admit, I might be bleary eyed and nostalgia goggled because it was my first real forray into raiding. But I doubt it, I've gone back and soloed it. It was intense and challenging, even at level 90. And I'm a Green-Fire Warlock with an ilevel of 490 when I pulled it off.

But at the end of the day, my fondest raiding memories will always be the challenging times that were Ulduar. I don't know if they can ever achieve Ulduar-levels of near perfection in the future. But we can hope.

Siege of Orgrimmar's pretty cool though, interestingly and rather dissapointingly, the Garrosh fight is a bit of a let down. I haven't done it on heroic, but on normal, its just so...quaint. Kill the adds that do almost nothing, dont stand in the void zones, slap the Mind Controlled players. Not to belittle the guilds that have done him, but in terms of /spectacle/ it just doesn't have the same epic feel that original Naxx, Kil'Jaeden/Illidan, Lich King or Deathwing did. I wanted there to be /more/ in the fight.

Yeah, Garrosh lacks a distinct "RAWR" feeling. I don't know if it's a lack of spectacle or the fact that the mechanics themselves are so simple to master that annoyed me most about him. People still managed to wipe like mad despite him not being that hard on normal. Never mind LFR or...crap I forget the middle one. The point is, I found the whole raid to be a bit lacking. Sure it was challenging enough(compared to the previous raids.) but it was missing an element of something to draw me in. Not sure what it was.