World of Warcraft Updates Auction House, Adds New Chat Feature

Blizzard announced this week plans to change the Auction House in World of Warcraft as well as plans to add a new chat feature to help filter out some of the noise players sometimes experience in-game. The Auction House update makes it so that some items won’t be realm-specific when they’re listed within the player-to-player marketplace while the chat feature gives players a way to hopefully excuse themselves from people advertising different services. Both of these changes will enter testing first on the PTR before they go live for all players.

Over in the WoW forums, Blizzard detailed the plans for the next Auction House update as well as the new chat feature. You can find those details below:

Auction House Update: Region-Wide Commodities

• Auction Houses across all realms on a given region will now share commodity listings (gems, herbs, flasks, consumables, etc.). Items that aren’t commodities –- like armor and weapons –- will continue to be realm-specific.
• Developers’ note: The Auction House you know and use today should look and feel exactly the same; it’ll just have way more buyers and sellers available to you for commodities. We’d love for players to hop on the PTR, copy over their characters, and help us test the Auction House across the entire PTR region. We might schedule a specific time in a few weeks for everyone to hop on at the same time to help stress it, details tbd.

User Interface and Accessibility

• A new chat channel for searching or advertisement of services like raiding, dungeons, or PvP activities has been added: Trade (Services).
• Developers’ note: The trade channel that’s been in the game for 18 years will continue to exist, but we wanted to add a new channel to direct messages about the request and advertisement of services like raiding, dungeons, or PvP activities. If you’re looking to buy or sell these kind of services, this is the channel for you! If you’re not interested in those, you can leave the channel and avoid the noise, or move it into its own chat tab. We believe that with this new distinction, you’ll be able to keep Trade chat for the traditional buying and selling of items and professions, and not other chatter.

Blizzard did not give an idea of when these features would be released in the full game, but they’ve come to the PTR in the 9.27 update for testing.