Hi,

I wanted to start a conversation that is an off-shoot of this one about a neutral auction house thief on Dalaran named Pricecheques. You can find the old discussion here: http://forums.norganna.org/discussion/6458/pricecheques-of-dalaran/#Item_27

Well, after plenty of quiet time on Kilrogg, we too have experienced an in-resident thief. This one doesn't bot (or at least no one has gathered any evidence to suggest he does), but he does park down at Booty Bay and look for deals to be had. Our thief is named Chubawuba.

As you have probably guessed, he got me this evening. I lost an enchanting recipe that I had purchased for 1000g and was transferring. I immediately hopped on the Alliance side to whisper the thief, offering him 50g to return the enchant as a "gotcha fee". He immediately logged, and I predict the recipe will shortly be on the Alliance auction house.

All of this has me wondering -- just why does Auctioneer provide utility for the neutral auction house, anyway? Or at least, why does Auctioneer provide the ability to repeat scan it and notify the user when a deal has been found? It's not like the neutral auction house has much to offer even under the best of circumstances. Gone are the days when the Lightforge BOE pieces were sold there. Now it's mostly just junk that people are posting, with the very rare big-ticket item that someone is trying to sell.

Now the developers will probably shoot me down immediately. But what I'd like to propose for discussion is whether Auctioneer should be phase down in regards to using the neutral auction house to foil thieves. Perhaps there can be some sort of stopgap measure placed in, such as a limit on how frequent the auction house can be scanned. Or to prevent scanning of the neutral auction house at all.

If someone legitimately feels a need to scan the neutral AH, please speak up about the context of your usage. By all means you should be able to use the mod legitimately. But I'm sure the designers of Auctioneer hate the idea of thieves striking it rich on their mod, and would consider modifications to make it more difficult for them to do so.

Thoughts?

Dinesh has covered the reasons fairly well.

He hasn't mentioned one thing, though. In BtmScan (as well as the new RealTime search), the lowest the refresh setting can go is 6 seconds. Since 2.3, this is not required by the client, as the client will allow searches every second. This is partly because we don't want to continually hammer the server (if we're nice to Blizz, we're hoping they'll be nice to us), and we feel that refreshing every second only adds benefit if you're trying to get in before someone else who's specifically watching for that item (eg at the NAH)

Bear in mind that the botters, and probably this Chubawuba, change our code to get around that. (or run a macro setting it lower than the slider allows)

My recommendation when transferring items using an AH is to price it at or over market price. That would guarantee that it doesn't get snatched up, though you'd take a slight loss from the AH fees (which are probably higher at the NAH to discourage this use)

I think it also comes down to this: Things you may think are jerk-y aren't necessarily wrong. I *really* hate it when people try to corner markets on specific items or artificially inflate the prices at the AH. If it were up to me, that'd be against the rules. But it isn't up to me, and it isn't against the rules. *shrug* This seems to fall in the same category: You may not like that people scan the NAH for deals and grab them when they find them but it isn't against the rules, and many people would consider that shrewd use of the tools, and taking advantage of a good knowledge of the market (knowing where to find the deals).