Blizzard just fixed World of Warcraft's Auction House, but a single "well-meaning" change in The War Within broke it all over again

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Players are placing 'dead end' signs for a reason, you know

World of Warcraft: The War Within launch trailer characters
(Image credit: Blizzard)

A World of Warcraft senior game producer says the long-suffering Auction House's recent wobbles result from an "interesting" tech problem caused by "a well-meaning and simple design change."

WoW recently had issues with the player-fuelled marketplace in the run-up to the MMO's The War Within expansion. As such, Blizzard took it offline and got it back on its feet. Alas, the influx of new and returning players coming to try the new expansion knocked it right off its feet once more.

After a few days of performance issues and players setting up signs telling others to turn away, things are on the mend again. Senior game producer Tom Ellis says performance should be rosier now thanks to some "holiday weekend engineering done by some heroes." Unfortunately, addons are still struggling, so we'll have to live with that temporarily while "actual fixes" are being worked on.

Players are now posting "Dead End" signs outside of the Auction House from r/wow

"So what's going on with the Auction House is an interesting tech problem, a well-meaning and simple design change caused a DB table that used to hold 20-60k rows to now contain tens of millions," Ellis shares. "Not a problem by itself but we've got some code changes to make to support this new world we live in. We're going to throw more hardware at the problem with maintenance while people far more clever than me work on actual solutions."

From what I can see, the Auction House issues depended on when and where you played. At best, you had some slow loads; at worst, the marketplace didn't respond at all. It's no wonder players have set up signs to tell others to just not bother. We can only hope things are recovered to the point that the signs can come down – and they look like they just might be.

It's not just the Worldsoul Saga - World of Warcraft lead Chris Metzen says Blizzard is "mapping out" the MMO upwards of patch 17.0.

Iain Harris
Iain Harris
News Editor, Games

I joined GamesRadar+ in May 2022 following stints at PCGamesN and PocketGamer.Biz, with some freelance for Kotaku UK, RockPaperShotgun, and VG24/7 thrown in for good measure. When I'm not running the news team on the games side, you'll find me putting News Editor duties to one side to play the hottest JRPG of 20 years ago or pillaging the depths of Final Fantasy 14 for a swanky new cloak – the more colourful, the better.