The launch of Battle for Azeroth has been remarkably smooth, for the most part.

The state of the WoW Auction House is not included in “the most part.”

I mentioned before that the introduction of War Mode changed the entire trajectory of my WoW history. My patience for dealing with non-consensual PvP had ran out years ago, and a WoW in which alts were actively discouraged is not one I play for very long. By introducing that PvP toggle switch into the game, my alts were suddenly free from the tyranny of corpse camping, and I had a renewed interest in seeing how every class played out.

Well, it’s now going on the third post-launch day in which the AH in WoW is borderline nonfunctional, and my interest in doing anything is about to run out.

There will never be a better time to make gold than right now, at an expansion launch. The gems that give +5% XP were selling for 5000g apiece on Monday, and were selling below vendor price by Wednesday. Seriously, I was buying as many as I could so I could walk 50 feet away and sell them to an Innkeeper. The problem is that the AH is sluggish, unresponsive, and practically crashing in the midst of doing any kind of transaction.

Now, yes, a part of that is surely the fact that there are 27 pages of 1-herb auctions clogging up the tubes. But in the 10 years of my playing WoW, I have never experienced anything this bad in terms of the AH. Those pages of 1-item auctions could have been cleared out by one person with a functioning TSM/Auctionator addon, but either one is struggling to do anything productive. I have resorted to using the default interface, and even that is barely functional.

Up to this point, it really appears that Blizzard doesn’t care. And why would they, right? It’s much more important that there aren’t any bugged quests that will impede progression, or that the dungeons work, or that there aren’t any crazy exploits out there. The AH is probably towards the bottom of their list of concerns.

…which is dumb. The existence of the WoW Token should absolutely make fixing the AH one of their top priorities, considering there is no other reason why people need gold in the first place.

People are resorting to spamming Trade chat with their prices and instructions on how to mail materials via C.O.D. Even worse, the prices people are offering are actually better than the items in the AH currently – someone offering to buy any BfA herb for 65g apiece, when there were a bunch for 50g in the AH – but the AH is so fucked and slow that you’d be faster gathering them in the game world than trying to spin your wheels in the interface.

In any case, the AH being broke is sapping my will to play the expansion. I am interested in the questing experience and how this story will play out in the future, but I have zero particular drive to hit the endgame scene and run a bunch of dungeons. The fact that I am missing out on the most lucrative time in an expansion is acting as a giant wet blanket over my drive to play at all. I had a precious few days to perform AH alchemy before leaving on vacation next week, and I fully expect the irons to have cooled down by the time I get back.

I would guess that I have maybe gained ~100k since BfA came out. Had the AH actually functioned in any particularly good way, that could have been 500k. And that’s a deficit in potential that will mar my playtime forever.

Ugh.