Tuesday, November 13, 2007

World Of Warcraft Patch Improves Auction House Experience

Haven't logged in yet, but according to today's patch release notes for WOW there were three changes to the AH interface (this is taken right from their release notes)...

  1. The Auction House UI has been much improved. The useless categories have been removed (Plate-Cloak for instance) and a number of additional sub categories have been added. In addition, many items have had their category changed so that they make more sense.
  2. The Auction house time periods have been changed. Now items can be put up for sale for 12, 24, or 48 hours. The option to put up items for 8 hours has been removed.
  3. Sorting of auction house searches has been simplified so you can only sort by one column, and automatic sub-sorts have been created for those columns to be as useful as possible. In addition, sorting is now done on the server so as you page thru results, items will appear to be sorted across the entire results instead of just the page you’re looking at.

Item #1 was desperately needed. I can't wait to see the interface.

Item #2 is going to be interesting. Being able to post for 48 hours will change the dynamics of some markets. For example, the market for an item can get saturated driving down prices and making it difficult to get back to the historical market price. Happens all the time with disenchanted drops (like Lesser/Greater Magic Essence). When this happens and I have a stack to sell I just wait for the current supply to dry up either through purchase or (more often) auctions expire. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. I can see this effect drive down prices for some items.

Item #3...I didn't realize I could sort by more than one column. Hopefully this fix will sort things correctly because I often experience sorting that doesn't quite work for searches that span several pages. For example, low-to-high prices.

Time to log in and check it out!

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