Blizzard are working on improving the Auction House and this time they are rebuilding it from the ground up, finally getting rid of single stacks that bloated the tabs while trying to find the best price.
Auction House is getting both a visual upgrade and functionality changes in the upcoming Visions of N'zoth update for World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth. It will take on the form seen in Guild Wars 2, where players can search for the item they want, click on it and see all the listings and all the prices submitted by other players in one cohesive list.
This means you will no longer have to swipe 30 pages of single stacks in order to find a stack of 20 of whatever item you are looking for. You will simply see all the listed prices of the item, regardless of how many are in a stack and then you can type in the quantity you want. The system then automatically highlights the lowest-priced group of the chosen item that corresponds to the chosen quantity.
Therefore, players can purchase parts of a stack from others but the process is automated and will mostly be unseen. In case the terminology sounded confusing, let's say you wanted to buy 121 copper ore. Other people listed 20 at 30 copper per unit, 34 at 50 copper per unit , 70 at 65 copper per unit and 3414 at 1 gold per unit.
The system will automatically grab the 20 cheapest units, 34 of those sold at 50 copper per unit and 67 of those sold at 65 copper per unit while completely ignoring the expensive listings.
One interesting mechanic is the reverse selling priority. Namely, auctions created later will be sold first, as opposed to working on a first come first serve basis. This may look unfair to those who posted their auctions first but the notification on the Auction House noted this is a means to prevent undercutting and therefore erosion of prices in the long run.
This mechanic is sure to be controversial and it remains to be seen how well it will perform its task.
