Call to Auction interview with Ghostcrawler continued.
Inflation in WoW is an issue that, surprisingly, the Blizzard team takes into consideration when designing content. This is difficult because it’s hard to manage how much gold is being generated as well as homuch gold is being taken out by NPCs.
The aim of the team when designing content that has an effect on the economy is that they “want economic interactions between players to be a positive experience” in WoW. A player should be rewarded if they farm for something that someone else is unable to.
As it is quite a pain to level your professions alongside leveling your character nowadays, Blizzard is experimenting with catch up profession leveling. This was seen with cooking in WoW 5.0 and now with blacksmithing in 5.2. In the future, it might be seen with herbalism and mining.
While Blizzard does not like the idea of region-wide Auction Houses due to the economic ramifications, they are considering exploring merging together the AHs of smaller population servers.
Ghostcrawler says that there might not be anymore new content for Sunsong Ranch in the future of WoW, but expansion after MoP will “likely explore similar features…”
Completely redoing the AH interface would be quite jarring for some players. This makes Blizzard unlikely to do so. They do, however, support the creation and use of addons that improve the UI.
The ability to split off stacks in an auction and buy an arbitrary number will most likely never be implemented as it would make it more difficult to search through the AH.
The option for buy orders might come about in the future for rare items that cost a lot to make. This will most likely not be done for common items like flasks.
The question was brought up about whether or not Blizzard would ever extend the bidding time limit, especially for things that get listed in bulk like cut gems and glyphs which are a pain in the butt to restock after a failed sale. Ghostcrawler says that it’s not something that’s really been brought up with the team before.
In the future, the auction house and the mailbox system might finally be separated. You would be able to gather what you bought from the AH itself. Ghostcrawler considers it a pet feature of his and it’s something that the WoW programming team would like to see, as well.
A mill-all and a prospect all sort of feature might come in the future for WoW, but unlike smelt all, it would require some UI changes in order to prevent the mill all from taking any millable material instead of only the mats you intended.
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Stay tuned for more WoW interview summaries as the staff finishes making its rounds talking about 5.2 and the future of MoP.
