Blizzard just fixed World of Warcraft's Auction House, but a single "well-meaning" change in The War Within broke it all over again
Sep. 2, 2024Players are placing ‘dead end’ signs for a reason, you know
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
A World of Warcraft senior game producer says the long-sufferingAuction House’s recent wobbles result from an “interesting” tech problem caused by “a well-meaning and simple design change.”
WoW recently had issues with the player-fuelled marketplace in therun-up to the MMO’s The War Within expansion. As such, Blizzard took it offline and got it back on its feet. Alas, the influx of new and returning players coming to try the new expansion knocked it right off its feet once more.
After a few days of performance issues and players setting up signs telling others to turn away, things are on the mend again. Senior game producer Tom Ellis says performance should be rosier now thanks to some “holiday weekend engineering done by some heroes.” Unfortunately, addons are still struggling, so we’ll have to live with that temporarily while “actual fixes” are being worked on.
“So what’s going on with the Auction House is an interesting tech problem, a well-meaning and simple design change caused a DB table that used to hold 20-60k rows to now contain tens of millions,” Ellisshares. “Not a problem by itself but we’ve got some code changes to make to support this new world we live in. We’re going to throw more hardware at the problem with maintenance while people far more clever than me work on actual solutions.”
From what I can see, the Auction House issues depended on when and where you played. At best, you had some slow loads; at worst, the marketplace didn’t respond at all. It’s no wonder players have set up signs to tell others to just not bother. We can only hope things are recovered to the point that the signs can come down – and theylook likethey just might be.
It’s not just the Worldsoul Saga - World of Warcraft lead Chris Metzen saysBlizzard is “mapping out” the MMO upwards of patch 17.0.
Sign up to the GamesRadar+ Newsletter
Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more
Iain joins the GamesRadar team as Deputy News Editor following stints at PCGamesN and PocketGamer.Biz, with some freelance for Kotaku UK, RockPaperShotgun, and VG24/7 thrown in for good measure. When not helping Ali run the news team, he can be found digging into communities for stories – the sillier the better. When he isn’t pillaging the depths of Final Fantasy 14 for a swanky new hat, you’ll find him amassing an army of Pokemon plushies.
WoW veteran says the MMO’s devs had to make “ten times the amount of quests” as originally planned to sate playtesters, and now the game has 38,000 of them
World of Warcraft devs used to joke about the MMO making $1 million per month - just months before it smashed through $15 million in monthly revenue
Todd Howard “rolled his eyes” at the idea of Troy Baker playing Indiana Jones in the Great Circle, but the Bethesda boss later told him “you’re doing a hell of a job”
