WAR Auction House

I first started to get worried about auction houses when I noticed that late in the beta there still weren't any. There were auctioneer NPCs, but clicking on them didn't do anything, just weeks before release. Then last minute the auction house interface got patched in. Now, one week after release, it starts showing its inadequacies. This is not something which has been extensively tested in the beta, and accordingly the WAR auction house interface has serious flaws.

The biggest flaw is a fixed limit of 500 results. Not 500 results per page, then scroll forward. No, 500 results, won't show you the rest. The only way to get past that is to refine search criteria. Which would be nice if they were all implemented and working correctly, but they aren't.

Where the auction house completely fails is for crafting materials. Anyone who studied the WoW auction house a bit knows that crafting materials are traded much more than other items, like equipment. The WAR crafting system actively encourages trading crafting items, because you can have only one gathering skill, but need several different items for crafting. But all crafting items are rank 0, you can't set a filter by that. You can set a filter to only show crafting materials, but you can't search for only apothecary materials, or only fragments for talisman making. And as there are more than 500 crafting materials on the AH, with no way to refine the search by class, a good part of them remains permanently invisible, with the sellers wondering why nobody buys their stuff. Only if you know the name, or part of the name, can you search for something. But as you are unlikely to know the names of all herbs or curios or whatever, your chance of finding things are slim.

For weapons and armor the AH works somewhat better, but still has flaws. That is mostly because items in WAR have a very inconsistent system of restrictions. Half of the items are restricted to a particular class, lets say Black Orc. The other half are restricted by race and type, lets say orc/goblin and heavy armor. Now if you put "Black Orc" as search criteria on the auction house interface, it shows you all items limited for the class Black Orc, filtering out all the items restricted to other classes. But it doesn't filter out items with race and type restrictions, so you will still see items for Chaos or Dark Elf races, although obviously a Black Orc can't use those. So you do a search for your class and rank, and still come up with tons of results you can't use. There is no "useable" filter criterion, showing you only the stuff you could actually wear.

If you actually manage to sell something, you'll have the dubious pleasure of interacting with the mail interface, which isn't much better. Good idea: A separate tab for auction house mail. But I so wish that tab would have a "open all mail, take all items from it, and delete them" button. Instead not only do you have to open each mail one by one, take the attached items or money, and then manually delete the mail. You will also often encounter a strange bug telling you that you haven't read the mail you just took the attachments of, and are you really, really sure you want to delete it? If you put a bunch of stuff on the auction house and sold it, that gets tedious pretty fast. Hint: The bug seems to appear less often if you open your last mail first and work back from the bottom instead down from the top.

In summary the auction house user interface of Warhammer Online is rather bad, even failing to fulfill basic functions like showing everything for sale of a certain type. It clearly has been programmed in a rush, and not properly tested. There are some drop-down fields with only one option, suggesting that there are plans to improve the interface. But as it stands now, the auction house is more annoying than helpful.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:34 AM Permanent Link