In WoW, players are losing a lot of gold: “Economy will take weeks to recover”

In World of Warcraft, there have been major problems with the auction house for about a week. A player tells: He wanted to buy an item in the AH, bought hundreds and paid almost 200,000 gold. Now Blizzard has admitted these problems in WOW, but players say: The difficulties are huge. The game’s economy will take weeks to recover.

What is the auction house in WoW? Much of the trading in the MMORPG WoW takes place via the auction house.

It works like eBay:

• Sellers list items, set a minimum bid and auction duration, and set a “buy it now price”
• Buyers can bid on items or buy them immediately for a higher price
• For some, an auction house is a game in itself

This change caused difficulties: In WoW the patch has 9.2.7. changed how auction houses work a week ago: the hand of consumables was expanded to be region-wide, allowing you to sell herbs across Europe, for example.

Player wants to buy an item, buys hundreds, pays almost 200,000 gold

What was the impact? The change to the auction house has been causing major problems for Blizzard for a week.

A current bug is particularly serious: players report that they wanted to buy a single item from the auction house, but had acquired “hundreds of items”.

In the forum, the level 60 human paladin Atryk says (via blizzard): He wanted to buy an item, but inadvertently bought much more of it than necessary and lost 197,000 gold as a result:

How is that even possible? I wanted to buy an item and it automatically bought hundreds. Is there a way to undo this? I don’t even use an auction house addon and I don’t see how to report this in game.

Atryk, Paladin

Other players have the opposite problem: They say that even though there are thousands of herbs on the auction house, they can’t buy a single one.

Some lose a lot of gold, others make it

how bad is the problem? In the forum, a player named “Angrychair” deals with the difficulties of the auction house and the consequences for WoW (via blizzard). He says:

It’ll be interesting to see what Blizzard does to offset the damage, if they do anything at all. The economy will take weeks to recover, a lot of people have been scammed out of a LOT of gold and a lot of other people have made a LOT of unearned gold and are planning to make more. Also, players were prevented from actually playing the game due to the problems they couldn’t buy consumables, craft legendary items, and so on.

Angry chair

How did Blizzard react? On Sunday, after days of trouble, Blizzard acknowledged that there is a “major difficulty with the auction house” that is causing auctions to stall. It’s important for Blizzard to fix that.

A hotfix was released on Tuesday morning to address the problem. It will be interesting to see if WoW returns to normal.

The auction house in WoW is a case in itself:

WoW player wants to build auction house monopoly, buys 800,000 items, immediately regrets it