Warlords of Draenor Will Merge Auction Houses

Separate Horde and Alliance auction houses will be no more in the next World of Warcraft expansion.

World of Warcraft has maintained a strong separation between the Horde and Alliance factions. Even Pandaren characters, who must choose which faction to join, lose the ability to speak to other Pandaren in the opposite faction. The separation between the factions is getting a little smaller in Warlords of Draenor. Game designer Ion “Watcher” Hazzikostas confirmed on the Warlords of Draenor Beta Forums that the next expansion will merge the faction-specific auction houses. “Yes, in 6.0 auction houses are unified between factions on a given server,” says Hazzikostas. The major reason cited for the merger is to reduce the imbalance for servers where one faction is in the minority. A server with a low population for one faction can have significantly fewer items available on the auction house, leading to scarcity of resources and high prices.

Currently, players can sell or buy items from the opposite faction only through neutral auction houses, located in some neutral cities. These auction houses are typically used to sell faction-specific recipes or other faction-specific items, but are most often used to transfer items or money between characters on the same account but belonging to different factions. Transferring items this way requires an intermediary (you cannot bid on auctions from your own account) and can be very risky. Joystiq has confirmed that the neutral auction houses will be connected to the cross-faction auction houses in Warlords of Draenor. The merger won’t make getting items to your Alliance toon from your main Horde character easier, but you won’t have to go out to Gadgetzan just to use the auction house any more.

What do you think about making the World of Warcraft auction houses cross-faction? Will it improve your experience with the auction house, or is this merger just a push by the goblins to make some more cash?

Source: Battle.net Forums