wow Auction House Changes to Stop 1 Item Listing Spam

[Starym 3,779]

 

Blizzard is finally taking on the long, long standing issue of 1 item stack postings on the Auction House, that make players go through dozens and dozens of pages of listings if they want to buy something in slightly larger quantities. The change was supposed to come to the PTR first, but it's going live with server restarts, and is probably only temporary, to help out short-term while Blizzard work on a more significant overhaul to the Auction House and we'll be getting a list of items that will be affected.

The actual way they are approaching the issue is through deposit fees for profession materials such as ore, herbs leather etc., as they didn't want to limit stack counts or the max number of listings a player can make. What they've settled on is significantly increasing the cost of deposits for smaller stack sizes for profession materials, affecting unsuccessful sales only. In short, if you're selling 200 of a profession mat for 200 gold total, you'll pay a 2 gold deposit if you put all 200 in one stack/listing, but if you put 200 listings of 1 up, you'll be paying 402 gold! Check out the full details below:

Auction House (source)

To address some issues related to the Auction House, we’re reconsidering how deposits—the refundable fees you pay to list your auctions—are calculated. This fee is based on the item’s vendor price, and for profession materials in particular, vendors offer very low prices, so these mats have a low deposit cost. Deposits are substantial on items such as BoE uncommon gear, gems, and so forth, but not trade skill materials (trade goods such as cloth, ore, leather, etc.).

One thing we’ve identified as particularly troublesome is a large volume of trade skill materials being auctioned off in stacks of 1. Some addons make posting quantities of this size trivial to do, resulting in dozens, if not hundreds, of pages of auctions for a single item. As we looked at ways to change this behavior and improve the overall Auction House experience, we found that we prefer to avoid inflexible solutions such as caps on the number of listings a player can make, or increased minimum stack counts, which might interfere with many players' common gameplay habits.

Our current plan is to increase the deposit cost of some profession materials on a per-stack basis, which should provide incentive for players to post items in larger stacks.

Here's an example:

• Let’s say that a player is trying to sell 200 Tidespray Linen for 10g (gold) each. Today, each item has the normal deposit cost of 1c (copper), with a 1s (silver) minimum deposit, so 1 auction of 200 linen requires a deposit of 1s, and 200 auctions of 1 linen each adds up to a total deposit of 2g.

• Now imagine an additional 20% deposit added to the listing fee per auction. With an asking price of 10g each, that raises the deposit by 2g per stack. In the case of 1 stack of 200 linen, the total buyout price is 2000g, and the new deposit is 2g1s. In the case of 200 individual stacks, the new deposit of an additional 2g per stack brings the total deposit up to 402g.

In either case, the deposit is returned to the seller if the item sells. Successful auctions aren’t affected by this change.

Our goal is to give players some forewarning on this change, and to gather feedback. We’re putting together a list of the items that would be affected by this deposit change, which we expect to be limited to high-quantity trade goods. Furthermore, we’re deploying the change to the PTR first, so that addon authors can work through the change while we test it thoroughly.

This change will likely be a temporary measure, as we’re also working to broadly improve the default Auction House in the future. It’s clear to us that many players use addons because they find the default Auction House interface inadequate. A temporary change to deposit fees will help with this in the short term, and we’ll continue to work on overall improvements to the Auction House for a future patch.

One of WoW's most annoying features may be gone soon!

[Brutalis 165]

This won't be enough.

[Tupi 30]

No, it won't. Just ban the add-ons that allow the single posting to be easy. It wouldn't happen if players had to post each auction manually.

[Skayan 52]

Why won't they just add an option "stack of more than X"

You just set it to "more than 1", problem solved.

Edited August 28, 2018 by Skayan
Clarification

[Babel 39]

It's not like you can post all those single item auctions manually using set max stack size as 1 without any addons, right?

Oh, wait, you can!

[Hedonismbot 9]

Get rid of the auction house add-ons period please

[jinsu2301 273]

17 minutes ago, Hedonismbot said:

Get rid of the auction house add-ons period please

Not until they make a proper overhaul of the entire system.

The auctionhouse in its current form has barely changed since vanilla (I think? I started in TBC). It's borderline usable even without the massive slowdowns right now. Sifting through pages and pages of 1-stacks would be an absolute nightmare without addons like AuctionMaster, and half of the items aren't even in their proper categories (why is Obliterum listed in Weapon enchants???).

[Dxn1350 4]

Maybe change the UI to show me how many auctions from each stack size/price are? Make them like an accordion of stacks of one and if you do click it you see all the postings in that size

[DeathsDesign 92]

8 hours ago, Starym said:

• Now imagine an additional 20% deposit added to the listing fee per auction. With an asking price of 10g each, that raises the deposit by 2g per stack. In the case of 1 stack of 200 linen, the total buyout price is 2000g, and the new deposit is 2g1s. In the case of 200 individual stacks, the new deposit of an additional 2g per stack brings the total deposit up to 402g.

When players get roughly 20g from a single quest and around 100ish gold per world quest, how is a 20% increase in cost going to even matter to anyone.  In Legion on average from questing alone I made 15k - 20k when going from 100-110, BFA was about the same for 110-120.  This isn't going to deter anyone.

1. Change minimum stack size for stackable items to say 5 or 10.

2. Put a search option in the AH to search for stack size and so all searches will be that number or higher,  i.e. Select search from stack size of 10, only stacks of 10 or more items will display.

3. make the deposit on tradeskill items that are stacks of 1 non-refundable. if you put in multiple stacks of 1 then you're just throwing away money.

 

Can't think of anything else atm.

Edited August 28, 2018 by DeathsDesign
added levels for clarification

[Prophet001 545]

If you're on a populated server, the stacks of 1 just break the whole process and take way too long to filter/search.

People posting stacks of 1 broke this. It wasn't Blizzard.

[Xaethron 36]

These changes aren't enough. If a player wants to post 200 items in stack of 1 they should lose more money than just half of what they would potentially get.  Increase the percentage from 20 to 50%. At least for white items.

Alternatively a stack limit could also be set. Say 20 minimum for White items and 3-5 for green.

[Allseye 96]

4 hours ago, Tupi said:

No, it won't. Just ban the add-ons that allow the single posting to be easy. It wouldn't happen if players had to post each auction manually.

THIS, exactly what i thoght. Just make it so annoying that noone will do it. Well and of course, delete the possibility to automatically create 1 auctions out of a stack. 

Edited August 28, 2018 by Allseye

[Highfather 8]

Right next to the item quality put a option in to select, singles or multiples? Fixed. That'll be 29.95 ty.

[Badadada 184]

5 hours ago, Tupi said:

No, it won't. Just ban the add-ons that allow the single posting to be easy. It wouldn't happen if players had to post each auction manually.

The problem is not the addons, but those who don't know how to use them. And the main goal of the change is likely not to make the listings more convenient and easy to read, but to reduce the CPU usage on Blizzard servers. I mean if you have 130 pages of mats, which could be reduced to ~30, with a restriction on single-postings, whenever a player or addon queries the listings it has to download 80% less data. That's huge.
 

4 hours ago, Hedonismbot said:

Get rid of the auction house add-ons period please

It would be like rolling back the stock market to the age when brokers got together with pen and paper and started yelling and shouting with the purpose of buying and selling. Market makers in WoW use powerful addons, because they help a lot in making pricing accurate. And from accurate pricing, everyone benefits.
The only scenario in this it could work (kind of) if they would also hugely reduce the number of mats and items the game throws at your character. Like you would loot a green BoE only every few hours, and profession materials should be a lot rarer as well. If the number of goods circulating in the game would be reduced, maybe we wouldn't need so complex tools to process their market either.

[Mageamegwyna 0]

Wouldn't it be simpler to allow say no more than 5 single items (limiting the entire Battlenet account to this every 48 hours), the go to 5, 10 etc . There are some items that people only want one of, not 5 or 10, so we do need a few single items listed, just not pages and pages. Last night I spent hours going thru pages of single items, just to get to the lists of stacks of 5 to 20 on several mats I wanted. 

[UnlistedOdin 0]

An easy fix is just make the max stack items at the front when you search and the lower stack/no stack items at the end of the search. It's not that hard to fix.

[geofferson 33]

Auction Addons like TradeSkillMaster are also part of the solution.

I'm an Engineer and an Enchanter which means I buy my Ore.  Without an Addon it is not feasable to but 400 Ore 1 at a time.  With TSM or Auctionator I can buy up hundreds of 1 Item Auctions which helps clear up the problem in a way you cannot without such an addon.

You CAN easily post 200 items in single stacks on the Auction House without an addon but you cannot easily buy those 200 items without one.

[multiboxing 71]

this is kind of bullcrap! I understand stopping the chowder heads that list 400 single stacks of 1 but raising the listing fee is gonna cost a lot of us serious sellers a ton of gold! if it does not sell right away before all the underlisters jump in and we get underlisted, auction ends with no buyer, and have to eat the new higher listing fee!

what you really need to do is just program in a restriction on single stack listings a player can have in auction house per 24 hour period. actually 1-4 stack cause if you limit singles then then idiots will just list 200 stacks of 2,3,4.

 

there's always gonna be some players that need 1 to 3 of something and have no need to buy a stack of 200 because they are not a hardcore mega crafter that wants to craft 50 of something! They are just a casual player looking to craft 1 item cause that's all they can afford! I don't every get to crazy with my single stack auctions, but they sell just as much as my larger stacks, so anyone that says singles don't sell, they do sell!

 

Edited August 29, 2018 by multiboxing
more info

[Ragingwolf 286]

After viewing prices for select cooking mats yesterday (on Thrall Server) looks like I'll be back to farming/fishing the mats again.  The one rare fish that is needed to make food for raiding has gone up in price by 300%+.  I like to buy in bulk to have adequate stock of materials in our Guild Bank.  The buying 1 item listing at a time is a bit of a nuisance and after flipping through 25 pages of 1 listers I feel as if I wasted time looking when I could of had that time to farm it to begin with.  But in all honesty the Auction House system is by far the most outdated feature that I've used in this MMO.

[Xaethron 36]

18 hours ago, multiboxing said:

this is kind of bullcrap! I understand stopping the chowder heads that list 400 single stacks of 1 but raising the listing fee is gonna cost a lot of us serious sellers a ton of gold! if it does not sell right away before all the underlisters jump in and we get underlisted, auction ends with no buyer, and have to eat the new higher listing fee!

what you really need to do is just program in a restriction on single stack listings a player can have in auction house per 24 hour period. actually 1-4 stack cause if you limit singles then then idiots will just list 200 stacks of 2,3,4.

 

there's always gonna be some players that need 1 to 3 of something and have no need to buy a stack of 200 because they are not a hardcore mega crafter that wants to craft 50 of something! They are just a casual player looking to craft 1 item cause that's all they can afford! I don't every get to crazy with my single stack auctions, but they sell just as much as my larger stacks, so anyone that says singles don't sell, they do sell!

 

Nope. This system works though im all for raising the percentage from 20 to 50. People should be losing money by sending a lot of stuff 1 at a time. think of it as shipping price

If a player needs 200 of something then that something is not worth much and should be posted in stacks of 10 or 20 or 50. If you post it in stacks of 1 you should lose more money in total than you wouldve gotten if it sold because of the post fee.

If a player needs 1 or 3 of something then that something is worth a lot and should be sent in stacks of 1. You would gain more gold selling that item in a stack of one than you would lose from the post fee.