Plus or Minus: Cross Faction Auction House

As it seems from a recent post by a blue in response to a question asked concerning the auction house, it was suggested that next expansion the auction house will be a singular one.   This would mean all auction houses would be tied together for your server sort of like the goblin ones have always been so you can trade between factions.

The question is if this will end up being a good move or a bad move and I would guess your opinion on that might come from where you stand.  I can certainly see why some people would not be too thrilled with the change but in the same breath I can see why others would be ecstatic.

As the blue mentioned, one of the reasons they are doing this is for servers that have a major faction imbalance and as having a few characters on servers like that where I am on the wrong end of the imbalance I can surely see how that would be a huge plus.

On one of my servers I was recently looking for some trillium bars so I could move along with the legendary quest line.  They were 300 gold each on my auction house which just so happened to be the 20% faction on an 80/20 server.  There was no way in hell I was about to sped 12,000 gold to move along with my legendary quest line on this alt.  So instead I did the smart thing, something anyone would a brain would have done.  I bought the ore for spirits that I was not using for anything else and asked in trade for someone to smelt them for me and threw them a tip of 400 gold for doing so.

So, with that said, once the auction houses are merged I can say with absolute certainty that the price of 300 gold for a trillium bar is going to go down, a lot.  And that is part of the reason they are doing this change.  I hope I do not need to replace my meta gem on that character until this change comes about because when raw gems are 2K each on that server buying five to replace your meta is a huge undertaking.  Being on the short end of an imbalanced server can really hurt, even more when you only have a solo character on it and can not find an active guild to help you.

As you can see, from a buyers standpoint I think this change is fantastic.  It gives the people on the short end more reasonable prices and what is there not to like about that.

But what about the goblins that were selling those trillium bars for 300, meta gems for 2000, and glyphs for over 500?  Guess they will not be the fat cats any longer, they will actually have to play the game once again and not just run the market.  Competition is coming and I can see a lot of these goblins being very upset with that.

So it is not going to be good news for all.  The profiteers taking advantage of having little or no competition are in for a rude awakening.  I am not really sure, outside of that, what other reasons people might consider this a bad move for.  Well, except for one, one really small and odd reason that you know someone out there will complain about, any maybe it is with good reason.

Immersion.  A single word we hear a lot of lately mostly when talking about the flying topic and the lack of it in warlords but it fits here to some extent too.  Horde and alliance are enemies, they are at odds, they are fighting each other as well as a common enemy.  Even with that common enemy they are not exactly working together as a team so why would they help each other by allowing trade between factions?

In war would you offer ore to build weapons to your mortal enemy even if you had a common enemy at the moment.  You might be willing to put the bloodshed aside and both attack the same enemy instead of each other but as soon as that enemy is defeated or if you meet somewhere on the field of battle were it is just you versus them you would be drawing on each other and you do not really want the blade your enemy is holding to have been made with the ore you supplied him so he could make it.

From an immersion factor a shared auction house does not fit.  It does not even come close to fitting.  It is immersion breaking to sell your enemy materials so they can make weapons of war to use again you.  The goblin auction houses made sense.  They were few and far between, never had much on them, and were run by a neutral race with a motive of profit and profit only.  But for all auction houses to work like that really is immersion breaking.  It just does not fit the game.

For this elf however I will gladly accept this immersion breaking factor for purely selfish reasons that I do not wish to spend outrageous amounts of gold for simple things I need because I am on the short end of the balance stick.

So having just talked about an against, immersion, that many people might not think about lets talk about a for that many people might not think about.  Third party web sites that sell items and gold.

A shared auction house could greatly limit the desire of people to use such sites.  I know when I was looking at those 300 gold trillium bars it popped into my mind that maybe I would just be better buying them from some web site than waste 12K gold on the 40 I needed.  A quick look online and I could get everything I need for 20 dollars and when you are talking 20 dollars in real life vs 12,000 gold in game there is no contest, 20 dollars in real life wins.

I could, while at work, surf the net, find a place to buy it and place the order in an amount of time that would have earned me 20 dollars, as I am at work getting paid while doing this, and get what I needed or I could spend countless hours in game earning the gold on an alt I rarely play to begin with.

Sure, I went the in game route using a smarter way to do it, but that is because I am an experienced and knowledgeable player to some extent, but for many people they would have spent the 20 dollar in real life instead of the 12,000 gold in game without even blinking an eye.  It is pricing like this that fuels the out of game web sites and there are many people that use them because of this exact reason.

With the joined auction houses there would no longer, or less likely at least, be outrageous prices like that and as such there would be less reason for someone to look outside of the game for cheaper and more reasonable options to get what they need.

The reason there is a market for gold sellers and item sellers is because of sky high prices in game.  Having a shared auction house will help combat those sky high prices and as such will help combat people who go outside of the game to buy things.  For that, I think this is a good move.

From where I stand, this is not huge news.  I am not a goblin, I do not work the auction house trying to make money, so it does not effect me there.  On my main server I have more gold than I can ever spend, so it will not effect me there.  But on some alt servers, like the one with 2K meta gems, this will be a nice little change and I appreciate it for that reason, but even if it never happened it would mean nothing to me.  If I need something I will find a way to get it because that is what I refer to as playing the game and it is why I am here right?

Do you think the cross faction auction house will be a plus or a minus?

Over all I would have to say it is a plus for the game.  Decreasing gold and item buying outside of the game while making prices more reasonable across the board.  To me that greatly out weights the loss of immersion that comes from selling your enemy materials and the fact that it would give the goblins more competition.   If anything, shouldn't the goblins having more competition make their game better because the auction house mini game is their game and this will just step up the competition meaning it becomes more challenging?  Hey, what do I know, I am not a goblin, I'm an elf.

What do you think about it?