Remote Auction House

The Remote Auction House
In the continuing quest for more money, Acti-Blizzard has unveiled their latest “service” the Remote Auction House. This was announced some time ago, I’ve since been curiously anxious to find out more details as I’m sure most fellow Goblins have. What does it do? Well, the Remote AH is simply a service allowing players to access the AH via web browser. There’s even an app for the iPod already to allow you to post away while on the bus, in a meeting, or on a date… (I’m kidding, but I’m not)

Of course, this type of service does come with nearly as many limitations as it does bonus features. And it’s notable that the service is subscription based ($2.99 USD per month). So what do you get for the extra money?

Free Features
» Browse the Auction House
» Get real-time notifications when your auctions sell or expire
» Get real-time notifications when you win auctions or when you are outbid
» View your characters’ current gold
» View the status of your auctions and search for similar auctions
» View the items you can sell in your bags, bank, and mailbox
» View the status of auctions you are bidding on
» View the items you’ve sold in the Auction House
» View your expired auctions
» View the status of auctions you created
» View your successful auctions

Subscription Features
» Bid on auctions
» Buy out auctions
» Create auctions from items in your bags, bank, and mailbox
» Collect gold from successful auctions
» Collect gold from unsuccessful bids
» Collect all outstanding gold with a single click
» Cancel your auctions
» Relist items for sale from your expired auctions

Advantages and Limitations
The most obvious advantage is that you’re able to play with the AH at times you wouldn’t normally be able to, unfortunately there’s probably a reason why you shouldn’t be checking the AH… you know, because you’re stopped at a green light. But the more subtle advantage is that you’re able to get some items posted and collect gold without alerting competition to your presence (assuming they don’t have the service themselves). The best thing I can see using this for is sniping items on the AH I’m after, like those damned Librams for the Insane title, being able to check for them on my lunch break… that kinda thing.

Unfortunately, the limitations of the service outweigh the possible benefits (to me). For starters, you can’t craft anything through this service, and AddOns don’t function through it either. So, do you really want to use your phone to manually list hundreds of glyphs? Of course, there are already people writing scripts and apps to mimic certain functionality from various popular AH AddOns. The concern here is, how long will it take before some new AH Ninja Bots arrive? It concerns me largely because AH Botting from a phone seems to be hard to police by it’s very nature. Of course, there is another set of limitations that make this less of an issue, while simultaneously making the service itself less attractive…

First, as stated earlier without logging in to WoW itself, you’re incredibly limited on what you can sell. Sure, you could stock up some alts and sell from them here and there, but then you run into the biggest speed bump for this service… Limited Daily Transactions:

Is there a limit to the number of transactions (purchases and sales) I can make?
Yes. In order to help prevent abuse of this service, there will be a system in place to limit the total number of Auction House transactions (including bids, buyouts, and creating auctions) that a single World of Warcraft account can perform through World of Warcraft Remote each day. For the purposes of the beta test, the limit is set to 25 transactions per day per World of Warcraft account. When the Remote Auction House beta test ends and the live World of Warcraft Remote service launches, we plan to increase the limit to 200 transactions per day (with a World of Warcraft Remote subscription), though this limit is subject to change. Our goal with this system is to ensure that most players who are using the service will not reach the limit, and we will be continuously monitoring how the service is used and making adjustments to the system as needed.

Conclusion
The sky isn’t falling, this isn’t going to destroy the in game economy. Largely because the service just isn’t that useful. What would it take for me to pay for this service? If the service kept a database of items prices similar to the sadly defunct WOW Online AH site it would be worth it to me. Blizz could make a great interactive stock market style site to track trends on the AH. The current functionality of the service however is simply a curiosity that I don’t fully understand. With the limitations I don’t see it being that useful on a day to day basis, but who knows. I mean people did pay $25 for a pony…