Have you guys seen this yet? Bornakk just gave an update on Auction House integration with the Armory website.
Today, we wanted to give you a heads-up about a new service now in development that will let players access the Auction House directly through the Armory website or Armory App for iPhone or iPod touch.
Now if I’m reading that right, it means I don’t have to log into the game to purchase stuff off the auction house. And thank goodness for that. I don’t think I’m the only one for this, but there are some days where I’ll forget to purchase stuff like herbs or flask related stuff. I may not be in position to do so either if I’m not at home. Now I can buy the stuff I need as I’m heading home and it’ll be in my mail box when I log in to raid.
Of course, you have to realize that there is a catch.
It’s important to note here that certain elements of the service will be premium-based, which we’ll go into more detail on once the service functionality is finalized.
If I were to hazard a guess, I would say that browsing stuff on the auction house would be free of charge. The actual purchasing would require a bit of extra cash on your part. Not sure if its going to be subscription based or not. It could be a one time fee (which would be cool too). Anyway, I doubt we’ll be seeing this in the game anytime soon. I’m going to say somewhere in the neighborhood of a Cataclysm release or in the time frame leading up to it.
I love it! I knew this was the endgame strat for WoW Microtransactions. Would you pay $9.99 down, $1 a month to access the auction house on players in Capital cities and fish on your characters near water? I’m pretty sure i would…
The only concern that i would have is that an out of game access to ingame transactions would make it much easier to create scripts and software that would work the AH for you. I Hate gold farmers. I think they ruin the game and it’s economy. I hope Blizz puts several checks (type the word in the box things) to avoid gold farmers causing unrealistic inflation of ingame prices.
Agree with Brygmann here. I can imagine it would be rather easy to hook up some wall street like software to the online AH and just buy low sell high till the cows come home
Please, not only for iphone
Give some love to Android platform
No thanks! I have a job to do during the day and this is one more distraction I don’t need. Currently I believe Blizzard’s policy is that micro-transactions do not offer a gaming advantage and this would definitely contravene that if it were made into a micro-transaction enabled feature. If this isn’t considered a gaming advantage then Blizzard might as well just set up their own micro-transaction gold seller service and be done with it.
In short I don’t want to pay for it, I don’t want anyone else to be able to pay for it and I’m not sure I even want it for free.
Not really surprised Blizzard are looking to monetize these facilities although it’s a bit of a shame considering that other games offer similar things for free. I imagine that this wil be one function out of many though and I’d hazard a guess that we might see other things like guild chat through your iPhone. Again, would be nice but not sure how many people would actually pay for it though.
Looking forward to seeing how it all pans out anyway!
.-= We Fly Spitfires´s last blog ..Samsung Monitor Lust =-.
Had some good discussion on my guild’s website about this topic. I think charging a per transaction fee is the way to go in this case. If you make it expensive enough, people will only use it when necessary and you can drive the cost up high enough to make it prohibitive to take over the AH.
Another thought is to only allow browsing, bidding and buying. Do not allow posting. Or, allow the 3 Bs for free and charge for posting as an alternative.
Either way, they are going to have to put some pretty tight security controls around this function.
Hm, people seem to think gold farmers are destroying their economy? People seem to think there is no possible way anyone could get gold without exploiting the system? It’s not allowed? “There’s money in this game but I can’t get it!”? Have you even tried? But really. It’s not “Gold Farmers” that control your AH. It’s probably about 20 people that are following the simple rules of “Buy Wholesale, Sell Retail”. It works. Start looking at your AH and spreadsheet out the material cost of your profession’s items and start finding profit margins and just scale up if you think gold farming is a major issue with the game population. It isn’t. I swear. It isn’t.
I can refer to only one person who told me they ever bought gold at any point in their time in World of Warcraft. He said it quietly. He said it in total shame. I ended up sharing with him a few WoW economy blogs that I would glance over pretty often, and he instantly “got it”. He instantly went from being broke and just doing crafting CDs to playing the AH. He earned about 15k his first week. I was stunned. I created a monster. He was well on his way to the gold cap.
If this is exactly like what’s predicted in the article, this will be the first time that Blizzard has ever given a paid service that will actually set up a “have” and “have nots”. This is pretty bad. Do you realize that people who play the AH heavily will abuse this to the point where a monopoly is completely possible? No more so than someone sitting at their computer all day, but this would allow these creatures to command the AH from the Denny’s across from the mall or even down by the river drinking with their buddies! It looks awfully grim! This has more of a chance of giving people (who already have a hold on the AH) a monopolizing deathgrip. It separates out the haves and the have nots. If you don’t have the pay-for-use armory AH, then you’re going to be behind deals like finding a herb farmer dumping his inventory on the AH for stupidly low. Before, you’d have the chance at catching this before competition had scanned the AH. If it works how this article hopes it does, then someone not even playing the game can buy it out on their way to work on the bus. If I don’t buy this service, I feel my Inscription business will suffer if competition is taking advantage of instant herb purchases from anywhere. :[
There’s a good chance that about 50% of the AH’s goods are sold by the same 5% of your server’s population. I don’t want to see an unfair advantage starting with the haves and the have nots with this paid service.