Anyone else Impressed by Blizzard's work on the AH?

[dextrose]

I think its fine, and I expect to see a few iterations of it over the life of D3.

Not having a text box to query with is a major letdown IMO. If I know I want a Stone of Jordan, I want to be able to search for those. Not click a bunch of filters to look at rings.

There's a bunch of minor technical things that I kinda understand why they implemented the AH the way they did, but I don't really like it. For instance, there's no way to look at every single piece of gear on the AH once there's any considerable volume on the AH for the item type. Not a problem most people will have (how many Cracked Sashes can one look at?), but comparing to MMO AHs, it's a bit lacking because of things like this.

For 99% of people out there, I think it'll be fine. The recommended items screen is revolutionary IMO, and will be the most salivated over screen in all of video game history. The 1% who really want to dig down though, they're a bit left in the cold.

Still, I can't be negative about it. It's mighty nice, and adds so much to the game I can't be anything less than thrilled.

[jwfcp]

Theres a box, that doesnt work yet, but having a spot for it on the ui is a huge boon to that end

[AKUder]

I think its fine, and I expect to see a few iterations of it over the life of D3.

Not having a text box to query with is a major letdown IMO. If I know I want a Stone of Jordan, I want to be able to search for those. Not click a bunch of filters to look at rings.

There's a bunch of minor technical things that I kinda understand why they implemented the AH the way they did, but I don't really like it. For instance, there's no way to look at every single piece of gear on the AH once there's any considerable volume on the AH for the item type. Not a problem most people will have (how many Cracked Sashes can one look at?), but comparing to MMO AHs, it's a bit lacking because of things like this.

For 99% of people out there, I think it'll be fine. The recommended items screen is revolutionary IMO, and will be the most salivated over screen in all of video game history. The 1% who really want to dig down though, they're a bit left in the cold.

Still, I can't be negative about it. It's mighty nice, and adds so much to the game I can't be anything less than thrilled.

I think one of the big things with showing every single item, is the vastness of how many items will be there. There will probably be millions of items posted at any given time because the auction house will be accessible to millions of people, unlike the AHs of WoW, which are limited by the number of people on a server.

[Eagle]

Having tried the open beta now I can say I am unimpressed by the commodity system.

If I want to buy 15 subtle essence I don't want some random quote of what it might cost, followed by me getting items and maybe some money back. I want to say "I want to buy 15 subtle essence and I don't want to pay more than xx per unit, buy as many as possible".

The way it is now I'll want to buy commodity items individually (or the minimum number i can try and buy with the 100g minimum) for a more accurate price.


I also didn't like the way the price to sell at defaulted to some number (I guess the base cost to vendor that commodity?). I realise that the previous days average wasn't working, but that's the number I hope they default it to, otherwise careless people are going to sell things far under value and get screwed for no good reason.

[galzohar]

Beta AH was bugged as hell. Interface and searching features (when they actually do work) are definitely better than the WoW AH and help you find stuff, but I was expecting something much more advanced. They really need to allow you to give stat weighting for items to be able to sort items by "score". That's really the only way to find the "best" item according to your standards, and then buy the highest-scoring item that is up for a price you can afford (or better - filter by max price, which definitely is a nice feature that does currently exist).

Haven't tried commodities, since with the little time I had the only stuff I wanted to buy are stuff I'm going to get a chance to use before the open beta ends.

Overall - The AH is nice but could really be much better without *too* much effort. Ignoring the terrible bugs of course - Assuming they'll be fixed by release.

[Risingred]

Compare it to WoW. It still lacks even basic search functionality. It's awful.

There's a ton of bugs in it yet, bugs constantly being discovered. I was looking forward to it until they revealed the RMAH. And then this. And ick the interface.

But has it been improved? Yes. That's not saying much.

[doggyfish]

I dont think string search will be implemented anytime soon, because it will be VERY VERY VERY slow.

Ppl r comparing d3 AH with wow, but wow has a cap on players per server, which also limited the items in AH.

[Catastrophe]

String search exists, but only for legendary items. I'm fine with that since that's the only place where string search is useful. If you want an SoJ, you can browse only SoJs. And because of random ranges, random modifiers, and sockets, each SoJ can be unique.


For magic and rare items you don't use string search, you use modifier search. Pick the modifiers that you want from a pulldown menu as if you were designing the item. And then uh, I hope someone is selling what you want?


Commodities could use a change. I'd like to see what the 10 cheapest listings are, how long it has been since the last sale (probably a fraction of a second), and what the last successful sale prices and volumes were. Otherwise buying them as-few-as-possible at a time is best, and that's lame.

[galzohar]

One more thing, I couldn't find which stat corresponds to "of wounding" modifiers. I was also really missing the "filter by DPS", "filter by average weapon damage" and "sort by average weapon damage".

In the end, in order to really use the AH efficiently, they'll have to let us assign a scoring system where we can use to give each item a "score" value. Similar to what you would get from a spreadsheet in games where you can actually calculate the value of stats, except of course in D3 you can't really calculate them - Only estimate their value, but the value would still be meaningful and useful for filtering items. I don't really care if an item boosts all my damage by 5% or boosts my attack speed by 5% (as a Barbarian), but currently I can't tell the AH to show me items that have at least 1 of those stats. In beta this isn't a big deal since the number of affixes is small, but it would make browsing a nightmare (or hell, or even inferno) at higher levels when a lot more affixes are available. And I didn't even touch the pricing issue, since setting a max price obviously isn't enough (though it can go a long way to help you browse once you can set a proper scoring system)...

[jwfcp]

Yes it does: "attack speed %" and "weapon damage %". It would be nice if there were some collapseable grouping withing that drop down- stats over in this pile, flavors of +dmg in that pile, crits/procs in a heap over here, class specific things in those piles etc but we're way to close to release to quibble now. believe me, once people are inferno, blizzard will be feeling the full wrath of mildly inconvenienced neckbeards everywhere.