Malchome’s Mind on Gaming

By now the news has spread the Blizzard will eventually implement in game Auction House(AH) Access into the Armory, the signed in portion of course. I saw it mentioned first on mmo-champion which points to a WoW Forums post.

I think this is a really cool idea, I won’t be using this feature most of the time, but definitely something I will be using at other times. Especially since theoretically you could be on 1 character of the account and check the AH on other servers and or the Bank Alt of the same account. But they may put something in place such that is that account is logged into the game no character on that account could be checked. We will have to see.

Over all I like this idea but lets be serious the current AH in game feels like a quick fix that was added at the last moment to at least have some sort of an in-game economy going. The default interface is a pain in the ass and even with Auctioneer and other Add-ons it is still extremely tedious and a bitch to find stuff if you are just browsing. If you know exactly what you want it works otherwise it fails.

Out of the 4 in game AH like interfaces I have dealt with directly and several, more than 3, others I have heard about only 1 stands out as actually being something different, robust and useful.  EVE-Online is the only MMO I have seen that actually has a robust and useful economic interface.  I believe it is this way because, crafting and the economic game are actually acceptable play styles in EVE.  Whereas in all of the other MMOs I have dealt with and heard about those systems, crafting and trading, seem to be a quick fix to add features.

So what am I suggesting or IMO is needed. A complete overhaul of the AH. Yes our bag space may be limited by stack size but why the hell should the AH. The AH like everything in the game is ultimately a series of entries in a Database. Currently it seems like 1 entry in said DB has a stack size limitation. This is insane.

The following are IMO the way to make the AH sing.

• 1 entry in the AH per Item of unlimited quantity (ultimately an unsigned Int of either 8/16/32bit in size. 16 would be the best since dust and some rep items could get into the hundreds easily.)
• The biggest and most important one,  list Buy Orders
• Fully customizable search for gear.
• Wild Card Search-able for Name Text
• iLvL
• eLvL
• Quality(Pick-able, not Lowest filter.) If I want to find a green item I want to see green, not green, blue, and purple.
• Stat Search X [<|>|=] of Y Stat [Str|Agil|Stam|Int|Spr|SP|AP|Armor|Crit|Hit|Haste|ect....] Repeatable so add additional filters.
• Price History (at least past week) so we can in game see the price trends over the past week. (Min, Max, Avg) of both Price listed and Price Sold. Maybe a separate graph showing # sold at what price through Bid and Buyout.

Essentially look at what EVE-Online has for an in game economic interface and make something similar with the Blizzard polish, because I really can’t think of any way to really improve the EVE interface, I just know that I like it and it would be great to have something similar in WoW. Unfortunately for EVE it is about the only thing I really like in the game but I will save my dislikes of EVE for another post sometime.

Well patch 3.3 has come out and there was much rejoicing.  I will avoid discussing the Raid content.  I may be raiding it but it is not my main focus of this blog or even my usual goals so I will save comments on it for another day, most likely after the second wing opens in January.

Titanium Market

Essentially we need to add a generic level appropriate material that is gathered, so Mining nodes would become like Taconite or some similar material.  Then different fantasy rock compositions can have a chance to produce current ore in different quantities per stack of 5, like how other professions, prospect, mill etc.  For Alchemy I think we need to add a layer from herb -> (potion, elixir, flask).  Rather than use raw herbs it should be processed into powders and extracts, same with enchanting.  Actually Alchemy and Enchanting should become more closely related and cross feed into one another.  Actually come to think of it we already have rough, dense, solid stone coming form mining nodes.  If we convert everything to a stone type as the node rather than the mineral or elemental name that would be a good starting point.

I also think that enchanters should have an alternative process to create the special cloths.  Now I know most enchanters are tailors as well or at least use to be, so that may be overkill but we really need new alternative ways to balance out high end materials.  There should always be more than one way to obtain any crafting material.  Even if it is through an exchange vendor it will help to keep AH prices from getting to extreme.

For 4-6 weeks now I have been contemplating greatly on these subjects even came up with a few catchy titles to call posts about several of them at a time. In this time we have heard a bit more information about the future of some of these topics. Additionally I have seen some other information about similar issues in other games that I follow. So rather than trying to tease apart these topics I am just going for a single summarized post. The previous titles were: “Groups, Guilds and Raid IDs”, “The New Battle.net – A New Hope or Phantom Menace”.

All of these topics orbited a concern of mine with regard to Cataclysm. We need more things in WoW to bring players together rather than to stratify them into discrete types. This massive categorization may have resulted prior to TBC, however my highest level character was 54 at launch time for TBC. So if it existed in classic WoW where it was a “Raid or Die” mentality for any form of progression, I do not really know.

In Wrath you can progress relatively well if you are willing to go at a slightly slower pace content wise through PuG-ing. So guilds only really benefit as an organizational tool, even then the tools for guild organization are more outside the game than in it. Don’t get me wrong I like and appreciate where the in game calendar is going.

From the other MMOs that I have played and read up on I will list a few general concepts that hope we see in Cataclysm.

1. Break from the 1 character/1 guild paradigm. (I think this is one area where Battle.net could really play a major role.)
   1. Move to a more direct 1 Player/Many Guild system such that the permissions of any player is the sum of their characters. So you don’t have to play Alt-Tango to get stuff between guilds and alts. When you go to access a bank or any system where you have different characters and or roles, add an intermediate interface that allows us to select the “role”/Character that we draw permissions from.
   2. Another great improvement would also be to extend all non-purchased(IRL Money transaction) BoA items to be Battle.net Account Bound rather than WoW Account Bound, it would rock for collector’s editions to also work but I would rather have Heirloom Items and instant Gold/Item transfers between WoW accounts under the same Battle.net account work first.
   3. Oh and on the subject of guilds, put in a feature to allow GMs to rename a guild, prior to guild Banks not a big deal. Now after 1000s of gold have been sunk into a guild bank that is an unacceptable loss for no good reason. Especially since all it really amounts to is an update to 1 field in a DB, if the DB is even remotely normalized.
2. Improved AH, if nothing else move each AH to a Cross/Realm per Battle-group based system. This will help stabilize economies on old versus new, and low versus high population servers.
   1. Move away from the stack based unit of quantity for materials in the AH. 1 Character can place one auction per good per price. So whether you sell 10 stacks of 20 infinite dust or 200 stacks of 1 infinite dust it takes 1 entry in the DB and only gets translated into stacks when being mailed to the person buying the materials.
   2. Add a will buy X number of Y good at Price Z into the AH, the other have of a buy/sell market. This will also help keep prices from dropping below vendor, or at least add a little extra stability into the AH.

I could go on here but I first I want to make an observation/comment about Battle.net. If the vision of what Battle.net is/will/could be is even a part of what I am hoping it to be then it will be one of the best trans-gaming community support structures ever built. I really have high hopes for it, in some ways maybe not with WoW but with a future Blizzard MMO, Battle.net becomes the place where people meet/chat and greet, the game is where they just go to play. Even further the characters could be tied to some meta Battle.net structure such that Character/Server becomes meaningless. The server is just that a server to run a shard of the game world. Thereby when a Battle-group or server goes down characters and everything else are still available to any other server to run on. You would then just have servers you prefer to run on because they are in the closest data center to you but you could still play anywhere. Now if “your” server goes down you are screwed so to speak. Not really for me as an alt-o-holic but for the average player. It is this dream/vision of what Battle.net could be that led me to the title I mentioned in my first paragraph.

That grand dream being said, realistically it is not going to happen, or at least not anytime soon. If at any time I would expect something like that coming for the “next-gen” MMO that blizzard has in the works. I also would hope after Starcraft 2 is released and Battle.net is more tested that friends within the same Battle group would be able to cross-realm invite for at least 5 man dungeons if not raids.

What all of this has in common is the need for Blizzard to create new and more ways to bring players together rather than splitting them up into different sub-groups. This is the main reason I really think that guild alliances need to be made. Maybe a charter with 100g fee and requires GMs from 2 guilds to “sign” the charter. Then the alliance could be formed and it would act as a super guild structure. Then you could have the “leveling guild”, “casual guild”, “RP guild”, “pvp guild” and the “raiding guild” all under the same banner. They would each keep their own channel but members of the alliance could “guest” into the guild channel as well as share an Alliance channel. Furthermore there should be no reason or restrictions made such that 1 guild could not belong to multiple Alliances, a 1 guild to many relationship. So 1 guild could be in a PVP alliance, Raiding Alliance, RP Alliance ect… Allowing a many to many relationship may be hell on the DB or conceptually for some but allowing the player base to truly group/ally/stratify as they see fit is in the end the best way to go. Then real analysis about the player base could be made by looking at how the players on a given server organize themselves. If at some point cross-realm guilds/alliances were ever possible to be formed it would be interesting to see how the player bases on different battle-groups organize themselves.

I apologize if this post is a bit all over the place. There were several large and complex concepts that I was attempting to express. It was also written over the period of a few days when I had time to tackle the issues. I will most likely come back to some of these concepts at a later time.