It was not sorted, people went to work on Monday, so there was less load. They did nothing
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Okay, so after reading 800+ replies. The state of play can best be summarised as “It’s the fault of add-ons! They should ALL be banned!” vs “No it’s Blizzard’s crappy code! Leave the add-ons alone!”
Alrighty then. (Sigh)
As best I can tell, all add-ons are limited to emulating what we dweeb humans can do, (just without breaking tendons button-mashing for hours on end,) but a ‘little’ faster. In setting the API limits, Blizzard have determined that the fastest humans could perform certain actions is x milliseconds but that is probably only possible for the youngest 0.5% of the player-base. Notwithstanding the lunacy of that decision by Blizz, it’s clear that unscrupulous folk will always find a way to use these ‘allowed actions’ to such an extent that it changes the add-on from being a useful tool into being a gun. (Remember folks, ‘guns’ don’t kill Auction Houses… ‘People’ kill Auction Houses.)
So, yanks don’t/won’t/can’t ban guns (or cars for that matter, they’re used in robberies and drive-bys all the time) and Blizzard can’t/won’t (or maybe shouldn’t) ban these add-ons. - Okey Dokey.
Okay then. How about Blizz makes a radical (but simple) change or two then…
- Add a hidden field to EVERY single item in the database that is not BoP/W@P, (sorry, Warbound on Pickup’s abbreviation is apparently a prohibited word.) This is totally do-able with a script run on the back-end at weekly reset. You could call it, say, “AHP” for ‘Auction House Purchase’. This field is marked ‘0’ on item creation.
- Whenever seller buys a listing, AH server/code amends the field from ‘0’ to ‘1’ before depositing into buyer’s mailbox.
- When any player adds any item to the sell box in the AH; straight after the “Is it Soulbound/Warbound” check, add another check to see if the AHP field is 0 or 1. If 0, continue. If 1, post a message stating “Items purchased from the Auction House cannot be re-sold through the Auction House.” The item will still not be bound, so can be given away/traded to another player using the in-game trade window.
2 Major problems are solved right there. If listing-cancel ‘bots’ cannot re-sell the stuff other people posted, at ‘their’ low ‘bait-and-switch’ price, that they immediately sniped; then there is absolutely no reason for them to list-cancel anymore. There’s simply no profit to be made. At all. Ever.
This should remove 90% of low-price bait-and-switch listings, making what is visible (no matter how low) more trustworthy and easing the burden on back-end servers.
Additionally, without this scummy ‘buy low, sell obnoxiously high’ behaviour, the AH should start to behave like a ‘normal’ economy, and sky-high prices will be genuinely undercut - per classic market-forces laws - and buyers are more likely to get fair deals on common good;, while sellers will still have many opportunities to make ludicrous sums of money from rarer, in-demand items.
If all that seems too much like using a nuke to crack a walnut, then you could always modify the ‘AHP’ field, and make it a ‘Time Purchased’ timestamp instead. The AH message would have to be amended to read "Items purchased from the Auction House cannot be re-sold through the Auction House for 72 hours. You have X hours remaining.’ What use would 5k widgets, bought at 10 gold each, be to a (filthy, low-life, scummy, sell-their-mother-for-a-dollar) ‘player’ when they have no idea what the economy-driven price is going to be in three. whole. days!
As a closer, if that all seems too much like hard work for the 4 programmers and single QA tester that Blizzard still employs, then at least put a hard-limit on cancelling and posting listings. I think anybody that makes more than two ‘mistakes’ an hour while posting is either a moron or a… [refer to above paragraph].
Two cancellations per hour. Hard. Limit.
Listings limits are, of course, a bit harder. There are those who do nothing but play the AH and want to make money. That is their prerogative and I won’t argue. Without them, the listings would look a lot… smaller. But dear God in heaven just how much money do they really need?
My two cents: the needs of the much greater majority of the AH user-base trump the ‘wants’ of an admittedly sizeable subset. Limit sales listings to 100 per hour, with a 500 listing per 24 hour cap. They’ll find a way to live with it, as they’ll still make 100s of thousands or tens of millions per week, just less of them. 
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I like this idea tbh.
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Do you actually know what I do for a living? So cut the crappy attitude.
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Hate to say this but ah is still lagging even after yesterdays fix. Please do something about this , if you aren’t able to fix it please heavily limit ah / database scanning addons it should help
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Don’t even engage with him - he is a professional disruptor and neagtive fluid producer. He will disagree with you even if the take needed to do so would be absolutely insane and ridiculous. It’s the matter of principles.
Hello Nelfsomethingsomething! Game master Shammychanga here! I’ll be your Biizard assistant today.
First of all, of these are pretty solid and good suggestions. We, at Biizard, really value such constructive criticisms, hence, we are going to ignore your suggestion and do something totally worse as we please.
I am sorry this have to happen this way, but do not hesitate contacting us if you have other suggestions, we’ll be gladly ignore those too…
Kind Regards,
GM Shammychanga
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Besides my low-budget Blizzard cosplay above, I do think they are willingly not acting on it as it will kill all bot accounts, meaning, huge drop on monthly sub income.
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Problem is: With this you would just add ANOTHER calculation (check) on top of the already overburdened CPUs, which would just slow everything down even more.
And limiting sales listing is the exact contrary to what they did in the first place: Expand the databanks.
they allowed bots to elevate their sub numbers to that extend that they are now dependent on those bots. Banning them now would cause too big loss of profit. 
Their suggestion would solve the entire problem. With people not able to scam others, there will be far less load on servers as these little twerps cant sit and refresh spam anymore. That will free up more than enough server space to handle that idea, which I think is an awesome solution.
Problem is, Blizzard dont care about it, so you may as well fart in the wind and hope someone smells it
AH is dead again. Trying to access it from Ragnaros realm, it says no items found on everything.
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AH still not fixed, item not found on everything apart from mats, and even then when trying to buy them you can’t because they’re no longer available it’s that slow.
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gief dem time, smol indie kompany after all.
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Great, perfect, they just closed AH right in my face. I was about to sell A LOT of ore
I guess just some kind of restart, it opened again in few sec
AND all the current auctions disapeared for me, hope its just visual bug BLIZZ 
At least it kicked out all the scamer bots, no scammy undercuts i see.
Took like 25min and scambots are back in business. At least my gold from “lost” auctions came through the mail. Thats a relief
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Im pretty sure that they fixed the coding, hardware and stuff, but some part of us knows that part of this problem is AH botting.
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wat a joke pls do somting about bots pls
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It’s still not fixed. AH still shows outdated auctions.
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Blizzard, we get it, you like the income from botters, but they’re making this launch intolerable. Do something.
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They just keep restarting AH every hour or so, it helps to clear some DB crap building up there, but its not a permanent fix.
I think they are just buying time until the initial release hype subsides, so they dont have to invest resources into infrastructure 
Just the usual corporate way of dealing with problems
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