Isn't it about time for purchase orders on the AH!?

#1 - Dec. 20, 2012, 12:12 p.m.

With certain players trying to heavily manipulate (or in some cases take almost complete control of) the Auction Houses on some servers and Blizzard leaving realm economies pretty much a free market, isn't it about time for purchase orders on the AH?

How it Works:

Player A: Wants 10 stacks of

Ghost Iron Ore at 60g a stack

Player A: Submits a purchase order on the AH for 10 stacks of

Ghost Iron Ore and pays 600g up-front.

Player B: Wants so sell some

Ghost Iron Ore and sees Player A's purchase order on the AH.

Player B: Is happy with the amount offered and clicks to fulfill Player A's order.

Player A: Instantly receives the

Ghost Iron Ore in their mail box.

Player B: Instantly receives the 600g that Player A paid up-front for the order.

This would definitely help the situation on many servers because most players trying to control/manipulate the Auction House simply don't have the stocks. They rely on undercutting other players 24/7 or forcing the prices down to buy out all the stock and flip it!

After all who is more important to Blizzard? The 1000s of players who just want to make gold to enjoy the game or the handful of players that want to manipulate the economies because thats the only part of the game they enjoy?

Edit was for item code error and typo

Taepsilum

Community

#9 - Dec. 20, 2012, 1:41 p.m.

Personally I must say I kind of like this idea, not sure if it would be that easy to implement tough.
Could be something like a simple WTB AH tab, and I supposed a timer would need to be associated with the purchase order as well.

But to be honest I think we would see some sort of reversed undercutting between buyers.
Let’s imagine for example:

Player A: Wants to buy 10

Fight Club at 1337 gold each.
Player B: Sees Player A’s offer and decides he wants to buy 10

Fight Club at 1338 each.
Player C: See’s all the available options and sells to the “highest bidder” = Player B.

I would still have a few concerns though, this would probably bring excessive complexity to the AH, because for example, if you are a seller, you are probably going to end up doing some extra work, not only you will have to check the current AH prices from other sellers (competitors), but you would also check the buyers offers against one another and against the current sellers prices in order to find the option that would benefit you the most.

Buyers would see a similar competition to sellers when they face constant undercutting. This would probably create a certain frustration because when you are a buyer, chances are you need those items more urgently than when you are a seller, since sellers only get gold.
So the sense of urgency from buyers would probably work against the success of this implementation.

Still I think this is a good idea and I’m probably exaggerating a bit when I speculate about the possible consequences. We just need to make sure that ideas are sound before we spend resources on them, we need to be sure that not only they would work, but that enough players would actually benefit and experience better gameplay because of it.
I’ll share the suggestion with the devs, but I suspect this isn’t something new to them, we’ll see.