auction-houses
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The Undermine Journal to close
There is sad news in the WoW community today. The longtime, invaluable auction house resource The Undermine Journal will be closing its doors at the end of July. The Journal cites ballooning server hosting costs as the culprit, and they just can't keep up. Since 2010, The Undermine Journal has been the place to go if you wanted to stay on top of auction house pricing--particularly for comparisons across different servers. The loss of this site is huge blow WoW players as a whole, but particularly for those who make a dedicated hobby out of playing the auction house. There does remain some hope for The Journal's future, however. If they can find a new server host, it's possible that a revamped Undermine Journal will make an appearance in time for Warlords of Draenor. However, in their news announcement, they caution that if the expansion's launch comes and goes without The Undermine Journal's reappearance, it will likely be gone for good. They will do their best to keep a webpage in place in order to deliver updates on the situation. From those of us at WoW Insider, we'd like to thank Erorus, the creator behind The Undermine Journal, for all his hard work and dedication to maintaining such a wonderful resource. We hope The Undermine Journal's absence is just a hiatus, but either way, we'll see you at Realm Pop.
Auction houses will be cross-faction in Warlords of Draenor
Developer Ion "Watcher" Hazzikostas dropped something of a bomb on the forums late last night: the Horde and Alliance auction houses will be merged in patch 6.0. Watcher confirms that a major reason behind this change is faction imbalance. The faction with the smaller population on any given server often struggles to maintain a lively economy. With the auction houses merged, we have to wonder what will happen to the neutral auction houses scattered across Azeroth. Will they continue on as an alternate black market or be eliminated entirely? Facilitating trade between the Horde and the Alliance was the entire purpose of the neutral auctioneers -- a purpose rarely utilized by players for anything other than transferring their own items between characters across faction lines. Update 11:00 a.m. EDT: We now know that neutral auction houses will become integrated into the cross-faction auction houses. In other words, there will no longer be neutral auction houses -- just one massive interconnected auction house system per-server.
Neutral Auction houses (and putting them in Northrend)
You've probably heard, by now, the reason why there are no auction houses (or class trainers) in Dalaran or Shattrath. Blizzard doesn't want the old world towns (like Ironforge and Orgrimmar) to become ghost towns. Ghost towns like, for example, Shattrath -- have you been there lately? But as Gnomeaggedon pointed out last week, there's another option: neutral Auction houses.We haven't talked about the Neutral Auction houses in the game for a long time -- they exist only in Winterspring, Booty Bay, and Tanaris, and pretty much have only served the purpose of trading items back and forth between the two factions (or scamming between them). But Gnomeaggedon has a new idea: why not reintroduce them to the newer cities, and create another option for people rather than having to go all the way back to the old world (and waste a hearthstone cooldown)? Not only would you bring people back to the Neutral Auction houses (they really are empty right now), but you'd bring the auction house back to the people, at a slightly higher cost.I like it, and so does Mend Pet, though she sees a few issues: even with the higher cost, you might still get people forgetting about the normal Auction houses and then you've just switched where the problem is (not to mention that people leveling wouldn't see anyone in the big cities when they went). And Dalaran is laggy and crowded as it is -- creating another mess of characters won't help. And finally, this is a solution without a real problem: we're getting the Hearthstone cooldown lowered anyway, so it's not that big deal to go back home occasionally (or just use a bank alt). Still, the Neutral houses are just sort of sitting there. Giving us more access to them might be worth it.
