Let me dispel some of your illusions about auction houses.

I spent many years being an entrepreneur in WoW's AH. I was gold capped several times over, bought all the expensive doodads and mounts, sold/traded gold for time cards (RMT omg!), paid for PvE raid carries, etc... There was really nothing I couldn't acquire once I had near unlimited funds. Ironically, I was relatively amateurish compared to the true 1% of WoW gold making elite.

So how did I make all this gold on the AH? By killing content, farming for high demand/rare items, and crafting. JUST KIDDING!!! I sat in town camping the AH while running a horde(pun) of 3rd party programs, websites, and even phone notification apps.

TSM (TradeSkillMaster Modules, Database, & App)


The Undermine Journal (AH statistics & tracking)


All of this and more was necessary to compete in a cutthroat game of chicken over who would logout or leave the AH first because the name of the game was undercutting. If you weren't at the AH monitoring your auctions they'd be nullified by others undercutting them within minutes or less. Hence tracking both when you've been undercut as well as the online status of other notable AH players became increasingly important for actually selling a decent portion of one's stock.

So what is the point of all this? To put it simply it is to say that an AH is trade on steroids. Whatever the trends and meta are for trading in a game an AH will have the tendency of making them more dramatic. So it is unlikely to reduce the need for 3rd party programs and while it might make listing items for sale easier this in turn will increase competition making it harder to make a sale thus driving the market towards more and more active undercutting. Prices for everything but the most scarce items will plummet devaluing the average wealth generation from drops.

A lot of people campaigning for an auction house seem to believe in some fairy tail system where it's easy to reliably post, sell, and buy items in game without the annoyance of other things getting in the way. That's just not how markets work.

.

In the dumpster economy that is called standard league , Literally hoards of League items , legacy items, Bots, RMT, Flippers, scammers and the totally fuckedup inflated prices
AH would actually increase the trade scene

AH would not devalue items , They are already devalued by the above... Economy is always on a downwards spiral where people just give up trading and hit the leagues

Items in the standard always getting devalued at high speed , coupled by advent of new leagues, metas , FOTM...

There is nothing Bad that AH will do that the game is not doing to itself already.

"

Entropic_Fire wrote:

An auction house favors the buyer though, both in terms of convenience, and lowered prices with all of the sellers undercutting each other.

For the record I'm against having an auction house in this game, but you can't just ignore the benefits the system would have for buyers.

Everybody rotates from a seller -> buyer -> seller though.

It's not like the position is static when you play. So yeah, advantage in one field, penalty in the other.

But top-end will see a lot more abuses, which seems irrelevant given how the current system is being utterly exploited since it's not a "part of the game client".

Peace,

-Boem-

edit :

@hacku, what makes you think this is not already the case? All the data to participate in trade like described in the OP is already revealed by 3rd party crawlers.

It seems a bit optimistic to assume current trade has not already reached the point you describe.

GGG will never add one so give it up already

Thats all there is to it

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Zinja wrote:

There is nothing Bad that AH will do that the game is not doing to itself already.

Except an auction house would do it at warp speed.

.

What people actually want/request is a no-interaction buy-out platform.

Which already exist's.

And it's already warping the game as is, for the worse in my opinion but that's subjective.

Peace,

-Boem-

edit : @entropic i am talking about people playing the game GGG designed. Which actively participate in both fields.

Not talking about people who play under their own rule-sets and sub-sequentially are not having an optimized PoE experience.

The only thing true about "every player" is that every player assumes that everyone else plays just like they do.

"

Shagsbeard wrote:

The only thing true about "every player" is that every player assumes that everyone else plays just like they do.

You know you play like me lol