It works as a wide attractor of players, but other games, such as WAR, will take the strengths of WoW and add the complexity that veterans seek.

Plus, as WoW remains the fallback king, new games are not nearly as frightening to go off and venture into. But to maintain that, Blizzard can not do much other than keep on their straight and narrow path.

My favorite implementation I have played was Dofus. I loved the fact that there was an easy way to undercut prices and force the market to find the “fair” price.

In response to the option of Buy Orders, that would be fantastic! I am a Scholar in LOTRO, and I never ever make bow chants or loremaster books… it just seems like a waste of time, but if I saw a few buy orders to change my mind…

On the whole, PP’s auction house implementation should really fail. You can only see information about commodities for sale at the exact island you happen to be docked at/standing on, and while going to another island is free it’s also very annoying due to sluggish UI response when changing scenes. Items that aren’t commodities (which includes everything from clothes and swords to whole ships) aren’t visible en masse at all - you have to go to the shop specific to that item type to price-check, and you’re still limited to that island.

All of this *doesn’t* fail because the game’s community has long since adapted. You can, with a little effort, get on a first-name basis with shopkeepers in a few types of goods, or make friends with a few well-connected captains and guild leaders, and through them do most of your price-checking and shopping. Depending on the server, it’s often considered part of guild officer duty to keep an eye out for good deals. The result is a lot of fun for the people who like market economics but find Eve’s excel-in-space implementation too dehumanizing, and it fits well with the game’s theme.

City of Heroes is probably the worst about the matter : you’re actively encouraged to build things you can not sell to vendors and few players need in order to get badges, while a few devices become artificially rare just because few people are in the right level range to yank them. That’s not good for an economy.

If you don’t have a major city or two that everything revolves around, make lots of different Auction Houses. Seriously, even in your game there are better things to do than stare at a mount’s backside for ten minutes because my inventory is full.

This is only one example of the very basic things that people whose only MMO is WoW don’t know they’re missing. Blizzard knows that more of its player base cares about and understands new emotes and achievements than they do a solid market model; so the former make it onto the expansion feature list even though the latter would make for a better game. That newbies can’t enter the vastly inflated economy without first accruing a great sum of money from adventuring is glossed over because “no one likes crafting anyway,” and yet few people stop and consider why tradeskills are so unpopular.