Currently, only commodities like materials and consumable goods are region-wide in the AH. Other items, like recipes, bags, weapons and armor, are local and server-specific.
The Warband Bank now allows to transfer gold and BoEs to other servers. I have been depositing gold in the Warband Bank and creating alts on high-pop servers (where prices are generally lower) to buy recipes, bags and profession tools. I’d buy recipes and tools for 3000 gold that cost 30,000 on my server. I did this mostly for my own use, but I also re-sold some items on my server.
It’s a little inconvenient, though, but since it can save large amounts of gold, it makes sense to “import” stuff from high-pop servers.
Given that this can be done now, wouldn’t it make sense to make the AH fully region-wide for everything?
In theory, I would agree that it makes sense for everything to be region wide - especially as the concept of a ‘realm’ as it once was no longer exists.
It should be fully region-wide? Maybe. I don’t think there is any worth in keeping isolated realms economies anymore with all the ways that people could move items and gold between realms.
It could work being fully region-wide? I don’t think so. All the recent problems prove it. AH barely could handle a region-wide AH for materials only, wich should in theory be easier than the rest of the items.
So, no, they shouldn’t make it fully region-wide. At least until they can improve the AH backend to be able to handle it.