Cross-server Auction House?

[Deadlock]

The Auction House doesn't update real-time, and doesn't need to. It will refresh whenever you do a fresh search. You submit items to it and they disappear into the ether (items and money). You receive items from it in the mail (purchased, unsold, outbid money).

It's not exactly dynamic, and that's okay, it doesn't need to be.

Why not have a single auction house that is cross-server? Effectively it would be a stand-alone entity that everyone accesses from their home servers. I wouldn't expect it to be faster or more dynamic than what we currently have, but it would give you a better selection of items to choose from and a larger market to sell your goods to. Sellers are anonymous on the AH, so there's no roleplay reality to break. Supply increases, but so does demand so I can't see that it would have any detrimental effect on the game economy, it will just make it closer to a real marketplace - keenly priced, popular items will sell quicker.

Given the type of transactions that we have with the auction house, I'm struggling to come up with any major technical challenges that would prevent it. The total number of items for sale won't change, it'll just be aggregated in one place, along with details of the highest bidder. Restrict the number of searches a player can do to 1 per X number of seconds if you need to throttle queries on the auction house server.

Would also give an opportunity to greatly enhance the search options so that we can search for specific effects (also guild slots, augment slots etc) not just by substrings of the item name.

[Gkar]

The servers appear to be built so that they don't know the other servers even exist. Changing that could be a rather large and messy job.