You may have noticed the Auction House being disabled for a while on US servers tonight, as well as Blizzard’s blue post about it returning. If you were wondering what that was all about, we’ll be explaining that here, and taking a look at how some players were making a lot of gold using this unintended addition from this week’s Season 1 launch.
This one isn’t that complicated, as it a simple case of Blizzard not making a certain item Bind on Pickup. The World Quest Sparks of Life in the Azure Span rewards 8 Trophies of Strife, which can be used to upgrade PvP gear to high item levels (385 for PvE and 421 for PvP). So far, so intended.
However, it seems someone forgot to add the un-tradable feature to the trophy, as players were simply selling them on the Auction House, for as much as 100,000 gold a pop. Prices eventually dropped down, but were still at least 30,000 gold each, and in the end Blizzard had to disable the AH. Considering this was a simple World Quest and each completion rewarded 8 of the trophies, players with many alts were flooding the AH with them, and there were plenty buyers.
The actual vendor that sells the trophy gear and upgrades, Malicia, was disabled and returned a few hours after the AH, as there were presumably more issues to deal with for her.
