I thought that was the way it was supposed to be.

I still remember my disappointment upon entering Outland. Good gear fell like rain, BOEs were common, and suddenly nothing sold any more. My bank overflowed with greens before I could bring myself to vender them.

That was a big mistake IMO.

But it is genuinely hard to find details on how things worked in old WoW patches. I guess memory is all we have.

Diablo 3 AH is problematic. I haven’t found a single item that I keep. Instead, it’s way easier to just buy everything on the AH. The goods are very cheap thanks to the huge supply (no bind on pick-up, it makes even epic items affordable) and they’re a lot better than what you find while killing mobs. A big part of these games is finding better items and from time to time, an epic item. In Diablo 3 however, finding loot does nothing to me. Sure, I found one epic. That made me 10% richer. If I found an epic in WoW I was thrilled as it would sell for a nice sum.

But yeah, one AH per faction/neutrality before then, never an unlinked SW and IF AH.

The main factor holding people back from trying out Minecraft-based SMORPGS is the difficulty in installing the needed mods. If Mojang ever ships its mod API which will make mod installation easy, look for Minecraft-based SMORPGS to take off.

WoWWiki is a bit vague on when the Stormwind AH opened vs. when they were linked. Also, the AH in Stormwind apparently moved at one point but that’s omitted entirely from WoWWiki’s article.

If you wanted you could just make low quality goods for quick cash, albeit low amounts of said cash. If you got really involved you could make some of the most epic quality items in game. It was, in my eyes, the perfect mini-game and was very indepth.

I would love for something like that to be implemented in WoW some day. For me, it would eliminate the mind numbing crafting we have now. I also miss personal vendors to sell your goods with…but I’ll save that topic for my own blog post some day. )

I understand why this way is less painful for people levelling enchanters, no need to rely on crafters making the market happen or call out in trade chat for a Blacksmith and hand them the mats, and no one will ever have to trek out to Moonglade again to buy the recipe for the arcanite rod either. One of the reasons the old way was so inaccessible is that there was no information in the game to tell enchanters where to get the rods from, nothing even said ‘you will need a blacksmith to make this’. The only way you would know is if the thing you wanted happened to be on the AH, or you asked.

I think it’s interesting that inscription dodges the issue by allowing crafters to use the current tier of materials to craft all the lower level glyphs. If blacksmithing (say) did that, you probably would have seen a lot more lower level rods on the market.