Auction House gone gold

A short while after the feature went live on the US servers, now EU has their out-of-game auction house at the armoury as well. I won’t go into the discussion if this supports goldsellers – Blizzard thinks this feature is ‘safe’, so we all have to deal with it.

However, I think this benefits the casual gamer. Not the hardcore raider.

Hardcore raiders or WoW’ers in general spend so much time in game, equipped with addons like Auctioneer that they hardly have any need for this new way of accessing their auctions. Sure, it is very convenient to claim all gold from sold auctions at once, but Postal also does a good job of that. The casual, however, doesn’t spend as much time playing. They don’t want to configure and learn Auctioneer to utilise its full potential. They don’t want to have to log in every couple of hour to check if they’ve been outbidden on that sword they want so much.

The Armoury auction house is indeed the perfect solution for them. Coffee break at work? In a beer garden, public viewing the World Cup? Having a barbecue? Log in, place a handful of auctions (undercutting is made easy by displaying per item buyouts), maybe compare with WoWEcon if there’s something worth buying, done. Let’s face it. 200 transactions per day isn’t enough for true hardcore brokering. In beta, I hit the 25 transaction limit within the first hour of trying the service. It is enough, though, for the casual gamer (who can essentially treat the auction house as it’s own browser game) to enjoy it and make some gold.

Point in case: Even if I haven’t got any time for playing like the last two or three days, I still make some decent gold (I consider 75 gold per day on level 30 decent enough), just buying and selling various bars and gems. It’s even less work than ingame, because I can access bag, bank AND mail from the same interface. Is it worth three Euro a month? I don’t know yet – but since that is approximately the amount I save by buying gametime cards from a small reseller instead of a regular subscription, I’m not particularly bothered.

However, I still don’t see why I can pay THAT with normal methods, but I’d absolutely need a credit card for the Blizzard store. But that is a rant for another day.