Friday, September 14, 2012

Dev AMA Thoughts/Highlights

After the Developer AMA on reddit, I'd just like to highlight and briefly comment on some of the things they said that relate to the AH and gold making.  (Dev posts in blue, my responses black).

Q: Cross Realm Auction Houses?
A: "With regard to the auction house, I can imagine a future where we might decide to make auction houses cross-server. It's not something to jump into lightly, but there may be ways to design a cross-realm auction house that ensures a viable economy without getting "too big"."

To me this just says "No this just isn't going to happen".  It's something that if it did happen we'd be given a wide window of notification, but is something they're not worried about at all right now, and haven't put any thought into yet.  They seem to like how Cross Realm Zones (CRZs) are working so far(see below), and have no plans to change how the AH works to be cross realm in the near future.

Q: CRZs Killed Hunting Rare Spawns and Gathering.  Also my servers economy!:
A1: "We understand some players have gotten used to the idea of farming nodes or rares without any competition, but we designed all of those features with a certain population in mind."
A2: "CRZ wasn't intended to fill up the auction houses of realms with low auction activity. That wasn't the goal of the feature, so blaming it for not achieving that goal isn't terribly fair."

Going through the AMA recap, there are a lot of questions regarding CRZ and the AH.  I agree here, it did really kill the ability to hunt rares on smaller servers, and may in fact hurt your gathering chances greatly (especially on lower level nodes), decreasing mats that are on the AH, because they are brought to other servers.  Don't think though that they won't adjust the spawn rates of nodes or rares, if they see it as needed.
So basically as a small pop server, there are now an equal amount of people camping a spawn, or competing for nodes as a high pop server. Working as 'Intended'.  Not so sure it's equal now, but I don't doubt that they'll make it equal "Soon.™"

Finally on a second article, "World of Warcraft Devs: Q&A for Fansites" which I first read on wowjuju, Blizzard answered a few more questions, only one of which I think has interest to gold making:


Q: What's the reasoning behind removing the Auction House from Pandaria?
A: Firstly, we want to ensure our servers are stable. The Pandaria hub will be a very crowded area. Ultimately, we think the model for TBC and WotLK worked okay, so we don't foresee any major issues with requiring players to return to capital cities to use the AH. This also helps keep the capitals from being ghost towns.


Not being on the Beta, I was actually unaware that they did this.  I can understand the reasoning, but I post non Transmog or Glyph auctions from my main, and could definitely see this as an inconvenience.  Can easily be resolved by switching my posting toon though, with minimal effort.  Not the worst thing in the world, but definitely annoying.  Guess they did it because they don't want Lagaran 2.0, and that's completely understandable.  That's all from me for now, what are your thoughts on these developments?

Cheers,

Phat Lewts

If you like my blog follow me on twitter, @PhatLewtsGold!!

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