Hotfixes: August 27, 2018, Auction House Update

August 27, 2018

Achievements

• Players who have earned that Sweete booty by completing the Harlan Sweete encounter should now be awarded That Sweete Booty.

Auction House

• [Following server restarts] The deposit for certain tradeskill goods has increased by 20% of the asking price of a single unit. This cost is constant, regardless of stack size.  As with the standard deposit, this is returned to the seller when the auction successfully sells.

Character Services

• Players that faction change will have Battle For Azeroth flight paths after the change.
• Players that change back to their original faction will have all of their learned flight paths.

Classes

• Druid
  • Feral
    • Feral Frenzy should more consistently deal its full damage and generate its full combo points, even if you move slightly out of range after casting.
• Paladin
  • Hammer of Righteous splash damage correctly benefits from Last Defender and Avenging Wrath.

Creatures and NPCs

• Vathikur should now spawn once all pit snakes have been killed.

Items

• Faction items can now be sold back to their Quartermaster within 2 hours for a full refund.
• Fixed an issue where Merektha’s Fang could be cancelled by Remorseless Winter.
• Fixed an issue preventing Merektha’s Fang from critically hitting.
• Merektha’s Fang is now on the Global Cooldown, and its damage has been increased by 317%.
• Fixed an issue where Darkmoon Deck: Tides would sometimes activate less often than intended.

Pet Battles

• The following items can now correctly be used to grant you their associated battle pets: Baby Crawg, Wind-up Frog, Ball of Tentacles, Undulating Blue Sac.
• Inland Croaker battle pets now have the correct Sticky Goo level 20 ability.

Quests

• Players are now directed back to Ata the Winglord when removed from the vehicle during “City of Gold”.
• Fixed an issue where Brother Alen could become unresponsive during “Archived Knowledge”.
• Auras no longer persist on players after completing “Beachhead”.

World Quests

• The “Lost Goat” should now respawn as expected.
• Fixed an issue that was preventing “Stopping the Infestation” from starting properly.
• For “Cut Off Potential”, Zandalari Beastkeepers are now hostile to Alliance Allied Races, as intended.

World

• Horde players can now rest at the inns at the Blood Gate and the Diretusk Hollow.
• The Banshee’s Wail and Wind’s Redemption are now rested areas.

To address some issues related to the Auction House, we’re reconsidering how deposits—the refundable fees you pay to list your auctions—are calculated. This fee is based on the item’s vendor price, and for profession materials in particular, vendors offer very low prices, so these mats have a low deposit cost. Deposits are substantial on items such as BoE uncommon gear, gems, and so forth, but not trade skill materials (trade goods such as cloth, ore, leather, etc.).

One thing we’ve identified as particularly troublesome is a large volume of trade skill materials being auctioned off in stacks of 1. Some addons make posting quantities of this size trivial to do, resulting in dozens, if not hundreds, of pages of auctions for a single item. As we looked at ways to change this behavior and improve the overall Auction House experience, we found that we prefer to avoid inflexible solutions such as caps on the number of listings a player can make, or increased minimum stack counts, which might interfere with many players’ common gameplay habits.

Our current plan is to increase the deposit cost of some profession materials on a per-stack basis, which should provide incentive for players to post items in larger stacks.

Here’s an example:

• Let’s say that a player is trying to sell 200 Tidespray Linen for 10g (gold) each. Today, each item has the normal deposit cost of 1c (copper), with a 1s (silver) minimum deposit, so 1 auction of 200 linen requires a deposit of 1s, and 200 auctions of 1 linen each adds up to a total deposit of 2g.

• Now imagine an additional 20% deposit added to the listing fee per auction. With an asking price of 10g each, that raises the deposit by 2g per stack. In the case of 1 stack of 200 linen, the total buyout price is 2000g, and the new deposit is 2g1s. In the case of 200 individual stacks, the new deposit of an additional 2g per stack brings the total deposit up to 402g.

In either case, the deposit is returned to the seller if the item sells. Successful auctions aren’t affected by this change.

Our goal is to give players some forewarning on this change, and to gather feedback. We’re putting together a list of the items that would be affected by this deposit change, which we expect to be limited to high-quantity trade goods. Furthermore, we’re deploying the change to the PTR first, so that addon authors can work through the change while we test it thoroughly.

This change will likely be a temporary measure, as we’re also working to broadly improve the default Auction House in the future. It’s clear to us that many players use addons because they find the default Auction House interface inadequate. A temporary change to deposit fees will help with this in the short term, and we’ll continue to work on overall improvements to the Auction House for a future patch.