Access the Auction House on Armory

Posted by Markco at 8:00 AM

Many of you have heard that the auction house is going to eventually be integrated into the warcarft armory. This is awesome news! Will it be a premium option that costs money? Perhaps, but the more pressing question for me is will you be able to run addons like auctioneer while accessing the armory version of the auction house? I personally don't expect an addon that makes use of xml (it wouldn't be a wow addon in the first place) to read and write to the wow armory's version of the auction house to appear anytime soon.

Regardless of how the auction house is integrated with armory there will be some serious changes to how markets flow in world of warcraft. I'm talking about the cycles of wow, you know raid items selling better on raid nights, pvp upgrades selling quickly on tuesday afternoons, etc. Normally you see less auctions during the middle of the day since people are working and there are also less buyers for the same reason. This is a great time to pick up deals on the auction house in order to prepare for posting later in the afternoon when prime time happens and most people get online. With the 24/7 nature of wow armory (except for patch days), there will never be a 'down time' on the auction house. This will greatly change trends and cycles in wow as more players will have access to both post and buy items all throughout the day. I expect to see huge influxes of players during lunch hours at work, as well as early morning when people arrive and read the news or check their mail. Now they'll be checking their real life mail as well as their auction house mail.

Will the auction house be worth it without the dozens of addons the vast majority of successful auctions have come to love? See 22 steps to auctioneer to help you get started with that great addon if you haven't already.

Leave some comments on what you think will happen, whether you would pay for the armory auction house, etc. Maybe blizzard will charge us per transaction lol. E-Trade in wow!

24 comments: on "Access the Auction House on Armory"

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Anonymous said... February 4, 2010 at 8:10 AM

"I personally don't expect an addon that makes use of xml (it wouldn't be a wow addon in the first place) to read and write to the wow armory's version of the auction house to appear anytime soon."

Maybe it won't be shared straight away but I'm sure I'd have a working 24/7 snatchlist script running on a server within the first week. And I'm also sure I won't be the only one :) It all depends on how they limit the functionality because I'm sure they know as well, and probably want to limit it in some way both for gameplay reasons and to prevent people hammering their servers.
Anonymous said... February 4, 2010 at 8:42 AM

Let the game stay a game. I am strongly against this :(
Anonymous said... February 4, 2010 at 9:33 AM

It will definitely rock the normal posting and buying trends. I think the premium service will turn a lot of "one foot in" auctioneers off and build a mentality of "premium service" only to be on the AH. The AH is already being taken over by the gold sellers with infinite gold backing and large amounts of "play" time. This might give a hint of competition against the gold sellers, if you have the "premium service" but you are still hard pressed to compete against the deep pockets and the time that gold sellers have. Auctioneers will still find ways to make gold on the AH it will just be harder to compete and harder to be a newcomer.
Unknown said... February 4, 2010 at 9:37 AM

My work currently blocks Armory. This would be awful for my ability to compete.
Indy said... February 4, 2010 at 9:42 AM

I'm pretty sure I wouldn't pay for this... but then most times I could access the armory, I can also log into WoW itself if I want.

First impression -- if many people do use this, the profit from snatch lists is going to drop, perhaps substantially.
Winter Seale said... February 4, 2010 at 9:49 AM

Yeah, I'm with the first anon-- I can't imagine that I won't have something pulling down the AH (or a few select searches, if that's restricted) and pushing it into a db. I'd expect things like http://wowstreet.ajs.com/wowstreet to become quite common, at the very least.
Anonymous said... February 4, 2010 at 10:05 AM

I don't think that there will be any "write" access to the auction house.

The only thing i could imagine is track your own auctions, or look at current auctions in general. But buying and selling would totally destroy the gameplay and market!
Anonymous said... February 4, 2010 at 10:20 AM

This is absolutely preposterous. This is an in-game service. This puts everyone who cannot access this at an EXTREME disadvantage. How could the devs even consider allowing people to control the AH while NOT IN THE GAME?
Zeran said... February 4, 2010 at 10:46 AM

I think I like the idea of this, but I have a feeling we're either not going to be able to modify the ui (no addons) or the ah will be so abused by a handful of scripts that the functionality will be disabled in a week.
Anonymous said... February 4, 2010 at 11:14 AM

While the idea sounds good on paper (letting the average player access the AH from everywhere) This WILL be used by bad hands in a way blizzard won't be able to prevent.

External access means no warden, which in turns means less security.

This could lead to catastrophic results on the economy.
Wiggin said... February 4, 2010 at 12:51 PM

Unlike Markco, I don't see this as a good thing.

"I expect to see huge influxes of players during lunch hours at work." I do too, but only sellers/AH hawks. The people who are going to be most interested in this feature are going to be people who already play the AH, and those are mass sellers and underpriced AH snipers, not the types those same people make their money off of.

Casual (I wont use the term M&S, but I am implying them in these examples) players arn't going to pay a premium free so they can get the best deal on raiding mats, or to get mats to PL their profession. These, much like the real world, are impulse buyers who buy when they need, rather than planning what they need.

Assuming the above may be correct, I can also see markets being driven down even further by undercutters. People will play the AH as hardcore as they play Ebay. Not because they are simply putting too much value into virtual currency, but because it is ultimately a game to them.

Maybe I'm too pessimistic, but that is my first reaction about hearing the news.
Markco said... February 4, 2010 at 1:17 PM

@Wiggin
1. I never said it was a good thing.
2. Unless there is so me way to automate the process of buying/selling auctions myself and many other big posters will likely avoid using the armory auction house for anything other than infrequent browsing.
3. Automation is required for those people like myself that use QA3 to regulate glyphs, gems, enchanting scrolls, and a host of other items. Without the automation it is impossible to play the ah on armory the way we do now. Therefore your nightmare undercutting scenario is impossible without automation.
4. Casual != M&S. I am by definition a casual player (1-2 hours a night, not every night, no raiding) and yet I have a gladiator title and more gold than probably my whole server put together.

Don't mean to pick on you in particular but rather to make my points clear.
Sannin said... February 4, 2010 at 1:43 PM

I think you all miss something.

1. Not everyone who plays WoW has iPhones/iPods. Of those how many can and will pay for the AH on the armory.

2. I doubt that auctioneer or any addon for that matter will work. So this is an opportunity for those who know the market prices to make money. You know people using this without knowing the market are going to post and buy things at the wrong prices.
Anonymous said... February 4, 2010 at 2:17 PM

on your point #2 Marco, this is exactly what buggles me the most : being outside of the warden makes it nearly impossible for blizzard to prevent crawling (look at all these armory-crawlers : wow-heroes, armory-light, wow-jutsu, etc.), automation : heck, we develop automated tests for our web applications, I'm positive it'll be possible to have one for the AH-armory, granted this isn't something average joe have access to, this is something that gold selling company will invest in if they have any common sense.

this is pandora's box, will blizzard dare to open it?
April said... February 4, 2010 at 2:27 PM

@Brian - I can't access Armory at work either. But for a while I was able to use Windows Remote Desktop connection to connect to my home computer to access any websites that the work filter blocked. But then they got smart and blocked port 3389. But you can change the listening port to 443, which most workplaces do not block since SSH uses 443 as well.

Instructions here: http://www.nullamatix.com/howto-remote-desktop-at-work-evading-a-firewall/
Wiggin said... February 4, 2010 at 2:42 PM

Thats totally fine Markco, I wasn't starting anything :) But thank you for clearing up your points.

For sure automation is important, and perhaps too big of ahurdle to overcome...but the hurdle is there.

I remember playing a web based/text game a long time ago, called Battlefaeries (spelling is correct) in which people had "faeries" that they equiped with armor/weapons, and battled others to become the top "fearier leader." The more kills you got, the more experience and gold you got, leading to better armor/weapons and higher levels

The quest of becoming a top 10 player ultimately let to third-party programs used for automation. Players exploited the game by using programs to click "farmers" every 7 seconds, or even less (think 2002, high speed internet wasn't widespread, especially in homes).

Admins tried to stop the practice but it continued. That brings me back to the topic at hand, if the access is there, the hurdle will be overcome. Automation will be the first GOAL of the auctioneer.

I apologize for the casual/MS reference. I meant M/S, but I dont like calling people morons, so I mistakenly used casual. I'm casual, I play an hour a day or less!
Anonymous said... February 4, 2010 at 2:51 PM

The AH will NEVER come to the Armory. Here's why: the AH is LOCATION SPECIFIC. If you logged off your toon in the Eastern Plaguelands, how could you expect to have access to the auction house through the Armory? Without some tight restrictions, (ie: your toon must be within a certain distance of an auctioneer) this could totally tilt your realm economy.
Anonymous said... February 4, 2010 at 3:14 PM

I don't believe it will effect the AH in any way. I think the the AH armory Addon will only show what you have posted and what has sold. I'd be very surprised to see if they added an option to actually post items through the armory.

I haven't seen a post where it says that you can post items through the armory. If there is one then can someone please post the reference.
Unknown said... February 4, 2010 at 5:52 PM

@April: I'm a bit paranoid of this sort of thing. Though I do have a Droid, so if there's an app for that, I'll be spending a lot more time on the john.
Thundaa said... February 4, 2010 at 7:07 PM

I like the new look of this site(much better than the other temp one)

rating: *****
Darth Solo said... February 4, 2010 at 8:06 PM

I don't agree with these proposed changes. Even bitched on my blog about it. It would give some people an unfair advantage and this time it's about gold, not some lousy vanity pets.
Winter Seale said... February 5, 2010 at 6:21 AM

@darkmeanplate:
"being outside of the warden makes it nearly impossible for blizzard to prevent crawling (look at all these armory-crawlers : wow-heroes, armory-light, wow-jutsu, etc.)"

I don't think they have any intention of preventing crawling. They certainly encourage it in game-- else why add a fetch-all API call when they don't use it in the stock UI?

The armory as a whole is designed to INVITE crawling. It's easily one of the best examples the semantic web in existence today. Everything is served up as XML with just the raw data and converted to HTML via XSLT in the browser. So software can fetch down the XML and easily get the info it needs, no custom parsing required. And layout/ui changes have no impact on existing apps.

Just making the AH visible will allow for a plethora of new tools, far beyond what's currently feasible.

Buying and selling are an entirely different matter. I suspect the answer to this is to limit the number of transactions per period of time. That's something that can be done entirely server side without having to trust anything on the client. (An open question then would be: Will they allow people to purchase additional transactions?)

There are other options of course, another way of discouraging auction house players would be to include additional transaction fees on transactions made from the website.
Anonymous said... February 8, 2010 at 8:49 AM

Good points Winter.

If data is read-only I don't mind that much. There's Wowoah anyway that already provides a list of "currently available auctions".

What I do have a problem with is the eventuality of : unlimited transactions from the browser. That just calls for bots running the AH.

If that happens, I'll have 2 choices either stop playing the AH entirely (which, in the end would mean stop playing wow altogether) or start making my own crawler / bot : something I think I could achieve depending on how that "Browser AH" is done. However, I don't see much point to it : where's the fun in having the game playing by itself?

I'll most likely end up with solution 1 :-(
Rob Dejournett said... February 15, 2010 at 1:32 AM

I was in school for about 6 months and played the AH every work day. What I found is pretty obvious, there aren't many people on during the day, so very little gets sold. There was some advantage to being able to post around 5pm when people get home from work/school, but by and large nothign really happened economically during the workday.

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