The AH patch

After wallowing in indifference towards Diablo 3 for a while I can finally see a tiny light at the end of the tunnel. Blizzard has announced that they are working on some nice changes for the Auction House. Instead of pasting that stuff here, I'm going to direct you to Incgamer's post.

Lately I haven't even bothered to sell stuff on the AH. I suspect that the market is shrinking and sales aren't as forthcoming. But then again, I don't have so many items to sell because I haven't been playing seriously over the past weeks. The changes that they are proposing, though, are very exciting and exactly what I would have done to improve the AH. Here's my take on this.

Increase the attribute filters from 3 to 6
This change can't come soon enough. Everybody has been asking for more filter slots from the beginning. It will make searches so much more precise.

Cancel auctions without bids
Something that I was dearly hoping for. If I could just cancel my bid-less auctions I would be so much happier. I could lower my buyout successively and re-post if the item doesn't sell, perhaps once a day.

Detailed stats in the auction log
I can't believe how nearly useless the auction log is currently. There's no way to tell what stats the items you sold or bought in the past had. You can't tell what price your unsold items were posted at. It's really frustrating because it makes it hard to price your items correctly in the future, unless you keep detailed spreadsheets of every item sold.

One other thing that I'd like to see
While these changes are leagues ahead of what we already have, and should have been in the game from the beginning, I'm still hoping for one extra thing. I would like the ability to use the AH in game. I know that Blizzard said that the AH interface has no place in the world of Sanctuary but that's bullshit. No one cares about the thin story of D3 anyway. So why not make it convenient for us to use the AH without having to leave a game if we don't want to? It would be nice to keep those NV stacks, right? The way I propose they do it is to be able to access the AH only in town. This way there won't be any possibility of being killed by monsters due to inattention.

D3 was released in an unfinished state but these AH improvements go a long way towards making the game better, even if it won't be perfect. This patch can't come soon enough.