Gold Guide: The Remote Auction House

Are the days of old gone with the new remote AH?

Yesterday the free preview for the remote features of guild chat and the auction house ended. Long ago, when the remote auction house was first showcased it left me with a sour taste in the mouth. A user was only allowed to list 50 auctions per day. The performance of the remote AH itself was slow, clumsy, and extremely prone to time-outs. Overall, it was a good idea but the app was not stable enough to make me want to subscribe to it.

When the free preview was offered on the main website I decided to give it a whirl for a second time. I'm happy to say that the remote AH has been updated with a more streamlined interface, no time-outs(at least while I was using the app) and an increased amount of auction listings. However, I'm still pondering whether or not to add this additional service to my subscription fees.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
The success of the remote AH is the ability to stealth post and visit the nuetral AH without any effort. Add in the very simple and fast 'claim all' money button and a player has saved quite a bit of time without stepping their pixel foot ingame. Being able to check in on your auctions at any time while playing another MMO or being at the office is quite addicting.

There are a few pitfalls to the remote auction house. Some would say the feature's failure is the price of $3 dollars per month but the value of this app is relative to each person.  So then, what I found is that if a user happens to not have access to a mobile then they can access the remote AH via Blizzard's handy website. This may seem to be an extra boon but in fact it adds several problems.

Appearances are deceiving with the web browser option.

On a whim I used the website and was forced to wait for long loading times because of the various java scripts(Google-Analytics, that's you, I loathe you with a mighty rage!) running in the background. Also the saving of bid/buyout prices are dependant on always keeping your cache and not emptying it out upon exiting the browser. I lost quite a bit of time and information(insert more nerd-rage here) on neutral auctions because I forgot that my browser empties its history on log-out. This could be fixed by simply adjusting a few of my browser security settings but I honestly should not be forced to do so. Another bad quirk is that a person must pay seperate subscription fees for unique accounts despite that they are all linked together to a single Battlenet account. I can see a hardcore AHer being put off by this as well.

At the end of it all
The remote auction house is handy, impressive, and addicting. I honestly wish Blizzard would up the amount of listings a tad more. I'm still on the fence on whether or not to take up the added subscription although the stealth posting is rather nice.