The launch of Burning Crusade Classic went pretty smoothly. However, a few days after the launch of the first expansion of WoW Classic, an unsightly problem arose. The auction house lost a large part of its functionality, requests were answered slower and slower. Blizzard had to pull the emergency brake and brought a hotfix – but it annoys some players a lot.

What happened?

The auction house became difficult to use for many players in Burning Crusade Classic. Search queries sometimes took several seconds and sometimes were not executed at all. Those who wanted to buy and sell in the auction house had to spend a lot of time or could best postpone the endeavor to another time when fewer players were present.

What did Blizzard do?

Blizzard has implemented a hotfix that will affect many players. The mini update is supposed to bring about two changes in particular.

• Setting changes have been implemented to reduce search times in the Auction House.
• Players who post, cancel, bid on, or buy up many items at a rapid frequency may now experience a delay between multiple actions.

So if you want to manage especially many auctions – for example via an addon – you now have to live with a waiting time.

Why are players dissatisfied?

Especially the “power users” who spend many hours every day in the auction house are dissatisfied. Because the changes make their daily game content take much longer. What previously took only a few minutes can now drag on over an entire evening. Processes automated by addons like “Trade Skill Master” now take much more time, such as the extensive scan of the auction house.

What solutions are there?

For most players it seems clear that the current state is only a temporary solution. There are several suggestions from the community, but all of them are called discussed. These are about:

• Implementing the “retail” auction house: this runs much smoother and removes the need for posting numerous individual auctions, such as for cloth or ores. However, for many, this auction house is part of the Classic experience, which should be preserved.
• Change of the addon settings: The creator of TSM demands that Blizzard changes the rules for addons so that addons can request more than 50 auctions at the same time. Then addons would have to send only one request and not hundreds or thousands.

How Blizzard plans to proceed with the situation is not yet clear. However, there seems to be no clear, perfect solution for most.

Do you suffer from the new restriction? Or have you seen an improvement in the auction house since then? Tell us about it in the comments.