World of Warcraft: Classic’s auction houses will be going offline for roughly five days in preparation for the arrival of the Burning Crusade expansion pre-patch on May 18.
As revealed by Blizzard on the game’s official forums, auction houses across all WoW Classic servers will be shutting down at 10 AM PT/ 1 PM ET on May 14, and won’t be brought back online until the arrival of the game’s Burning Crusade pre-patch following server maintenance on May 18. The move is being done to help get the game’s existing servers ready for their Burning Crusade upgrade, as well as to prepare new, Classic Era servers which won’t receive the pre-patch.
Blizzard is advising players not to post items on the auction house shortly before May 14, as nobody will be able to use the auction house during the maintenance period and deposit fees for posting items will be unable to be refunded.
The auction house is the game’s primary means of selling various items in-game and is an essential part of WoW Classic’s economy. With no auction house for five days, players will simply have to advertise their goods in the game’s trade and general chat and manually trade items and gold with one another. This already happens to some extent, but forcing the entire server to interact with one another to obtain raid consumables or enchanting materials, instead of simply clicking on the lowest priced listing on the auction house, should make for an interesting, if brief, economic experiment.
While anticipation is high for the Burning Crusade’s arrival on June 1, many in the game’s community have been less than thrilled with some of the announcements surrounding the game’s official release, including the shorter-than-usual two-week-long pre-patch, expensive character cloning fees, and pricey microtransactions that weren’t present in the original game.
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