I think we all agree that there are and should be many ways to enjoy playing wow. Questing, Grinding Achievements, Raiding, Dungeons, Professions, Auction House farming, Pet collecting etc.
I feel that with the latest changes to rate limit the Auction House API for non-native applications somewhat killed one of the above listed ways to play the game. I doubt that alot of the people who dive deep into the Auction House game play use the native auction house. It is just too rudimentary.
Please review the changes you made to the Auction House and come up with a way for us Auctioneers to actually enjoy the game again.
I don’t think rate limiting is a bad thing. I just think what they seem to be rate limiting is a very bad choice.
At least from my experience, auction cancellations seem to be rate limited. But, can you guess what will happen when my cancels just hang on cancelling? Yeah, I’m going to close the window and run the scan again. It’s purely the wrong thing to limit.
I still maintain their best move is to provide a bulk action API for addons that can more efficiently scan the AH with the kind of criteria required and perform listings and cancellations with single transactions. Then limit those functions with clear feedback to the addon about the time remaining for these actions.
If it’s possible to perform the mass actions cleanly and everyone experiences the same limits, it can be done fairly. As it is now, there’s no feedback until it happens.
I’m not seeing any real slowdown on scanning right now. Just cancellations suddenly stopping working after a number are performed, and they will keep failing and then one will work, then fail again etc.
Scanning is extremely slow on my end. I’m selling Glyphs at the moment and I sometime have to wait 30 min for my to post scan to complete wiht an inventory of 3 stack glyphs.
The amount of things on the AH is significantly less than it was. Many people have stopped selling stuff on the AH it seems. I know I have.
I suggest making it impossible to cancel an auction that has a bid, to avoid the low bid auctions that exploit the Blizzard AH sorting mechanism.
I don’t think it’s the bid exploits that is the big issue when it comes to load. I think the biggest issue is the AH API. As Andrai mentioned:
I still maintain their best move is to provide a bulk action API for addons that can more efficiently scan the AH with the kind of criteria required and perform listings and cancellations with single transactions.
Changing the API to make a single query to the database for either search, post or cancel would drastically reduce the load. And it would make for a way better user experience.
Best solution just put retail AH, literally no downsides and minor to none changes; most will stop using addons and lag will reduce considerably. Furthermore, the AH will be more friendly and you won’t need third party addons that, right now, are almost mandatory if you want to post more than 20 items without it taking 1 hour.
I like to play with professions, make and sell things. I came back to wow after few months and this is a total disaster. It takes about 30 minutes to put 20 things on AH, it’s incredibly slow plus I get a lot of error messages. Complete disaster…