Legion was a Bad Idea

Okay, hear me out.

Throughout WoW, there was no big bad badder than the Legion. We were told, this was the ultimate goal.  We were even teased that the war against the Legion would continue into Anduin’s old age.

And then came the Legion expansion, and we chumped Sargeras and, somehow (?) the Legion was rendered moot.

Now, we’re in a strange place where instead of hopping world too world after Dem Legions, we’re fussing around with Fancy Trolls and Thicc Bois and blowing each other up. And something something Teldrassil, and “anticipating” an adventure in the land of the dead.

It’s weird. Pursuit of the Legion had enough built in content to keep this game going for decades, with a wide diversity of possible worlds, multiple opportunities to switch things up, and ample opportunities for engaging new races and characters and maybe even classes.

Compared to this, Shadowlands feels – to me – like flailing about wildly for “what’s next”, a Dr. Strangesque excursion into a place that we didn’t really feel compelled to go in the first place.

I’m not sure who’s idea Legion was at the point that occurred, but I really feel “don’t schedule the endgame until you’re ready for the endgame” seems to be fairly rational advice, and I can’t believe nobody gave this advice to that person.

I’m surely giving Shadowlands a fair shake. But I feel somewhat less than excited to do so. BfA at least stirred my blood with the burning of Teldrassil, but this time I feel like, “can we just close the gateway and leave her in there?”

Hey, there are a few things I am truly looking forward to, starting with (and primarily) the new appearance options we’ll get for our characters. But everything else I’ve seen so far leaves me feeling flat.

I wonder how others are feeling about it.  I imagine the hardcore raiders / pvpers are indifferent, as long as they get new raids and stuff. 

#AuctionGate

Yesterday, June 16 2020, Blizzard surreptitiously pushed a change to the Auction House, forcing a “throttle” on auction activities such as posting or cancelling.

This throttle seems to be around a batch size of 30 to 40, and has met with great levels of unhappiness amongst the masses.

A few items of concern:

• Batch size too small to qualify as “power auctioneers”, the stated target.
• For example, I average between 50 and 100 auctions per session, which is mostly glyphs
• You can easily exceed the limit just dumping mats you salvaged while being totally casual
• No testing on PTR
• No feedback gathered from testers
• Pushed to production with no discernable testing

Basically it works out that if you do more than ‘x’¹ actions in a minute, all the actions beyond that value in that minute will be throttled. Massively.

This is less of a patch than a hit.

The outcry was immediate and loud.  We had bloggers, streamers, twits, twitchers all calling this out, and who can blame them. I mean, sure, you wanna tackle certain bad actors, then fine. But honest pizznesmens? Optics are bad on this.

The interesting part of this is, while I was writing this, things changed. Quietly, without a lot of fanfare, Blizz backed things off a bit.  I don’t know how far, but I do know that it’s at least as far as sixty actions in a single minute since that’s what I had to test with.

The other guy blinked.

They’re leaving the throttle on cancellations, but I can live with that (even though it really sucks)

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¹ Where ‘x’ is somewhere between 25 and  40 based on what we’ve heard so far.

Change and Chaos

Now hug.

8.3 rolled out this weekend, and we are all having Visions of N’Zoth now, I guess. We have it on good authority that this is the last content patch for BfA, so we’re in for at minimum 9 months of no new content, so stretch it out as much as you can.

Which is less of a problem in light of one change that Blizz pushed out with this update.  TLDR – you might not be getting paid for your auctions.

Background

So Blizz started messing around with this several months ago, trying to  resolve the whole “stack size trolling” issue (yes, it was an issue. No, nobody really cared). Basically, people could “troll” honest crafters like you and me by posting thousands of one-item stacks of commodities, forcing the poor, unsuspecting buyer to wade through page after page of auctions in order to make a hat.

(That is, unless they never heard of an addon called Auctionator, which would automate the purchase of the cheapest xxxx items for you, but I guess nobody asked me).

Anyway, some “Goblin”-friendly individual at Blizz decided that Something Must Be Done so they decided that they would make the cost of commodity items (thing that sell in stacks) have a flat deposit rate, which means that if you pay 20c to sell a stack of cloth, and 20c per item to sell a stack of 200, then that should be quite a punishment for the trolls. Honest dealers would not be penalized, and trolls would.

You’re probably realizing the fact that if you utter the words “new tax” you’re guaranteed to get a dozen live-free-or-die trolls fall out of the trees immediately, and that’s more or less what happened to Blizz. They were completely unable to spin it so that it didn’t sound like they were punishing the wrong people.  So, back to the drawing board.

Which brings us to today

Part of the new stuff in 8.3 was a revamp of the auction house.  As of now, if you post a commodity of some sort, it automatically gets posted as individual items, no matter what.  On the other end, commodity buyers just have to tell the AH how many of an item that they want, and they will automatically get the best deal for that quantity, and the monies thereof will be distributed to the individuals that posted it.  No penalties, no addons required, just commerce, pure and simple.

Except …

Turns out, the selling part is working fine, but the paying part is not – individuals are reporting – and confirming – that items that are actually sold do not return money to the individual that sold it.

Yeah, probably six months of testing and nobody bothered to check if the loop closed out all the way.  As a worker in the credit card payment industry, may I just say that this is pretty familiar. ⁽¹⁾

Now, it may not be the auction house itself, because there was another change made – to the mailbox.  Specifically, they made changes to the way that mailboxes display and refresh their contents.  Where before you could see at most 50 items and it refreshed every 60 seconds, now you can see 100 items and it refreshes every 15 seconds.  Great change, I love it, but Blizz states that they believe that the problem with the missing auction money is related to the mail system, which means probably somewhere in the code changes for this.

For the time being, I’ve elected to sit out.  I emptied the mailbox without thinking too much about it, but now I have no room in my bags for questing, so what’s a fella to do?  Fortunately, Endless Space 2 was on sale this weekend, so I’m getting my periodic dose of 4x until this snafu is corrected.

They say there should be a fix in a few days – which is marvelously vague without being too overly pessimistic.

Follow Blizz on Twitter. Watch WoWHead. Just don’t rely on me for news, I may be heavily in battle with angry aliens.

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⁽¹⁾ Cash only, y’all.