The Auction House Killed the Bazaar
I used to sit in East Commonlands for hours in EverQuest. Not grinding. Not raiding. Sitting. Watching the scroll of /shout messages roll by like some deranged stock ticker run by people who couldn’t spell. WTS Fungi Tunic 90k OBO. WTB FBSS PST. Lowball me and I block you. Someone would inevitably start a fight about pricing. Someone else would try to scam a newbie. You’d learn who the reliable sellers were, who the flippers were, who was desperate. You’d remember names. You’d build a mental map of your server’s economy based on vibes and personal grudges.
Gone. All of it.
Every modern MMO ships with a searchable, sortable, anonymous auction house. You click a tab, type the item name, sort by lowest price, buy. Done. Thirty seconds. You never see a name. You never negotiate. You never learn anything about anybody. The entire transaction is indistinguishable from shopping on Amazon, except the delivery is instant.
And yeah, sure, it’s faster. It’s more convenient. It’s better, if your only metric for “better” is raw transactional efficiency. But transactional efficiency was never what made MMO economies interesting. The interesting part was the friction. The texture. The fact that buying a sword meant standing in a virtual bazaar next to forty other players, some of them idiots, some of them genuinely helpful, and all of them real.
I remember logging into the Bazaar zone in EverQuest after they added the trader system. You’d see dozens of player characters standing around with their inventories open, each one a tiny shopfront. You could browse. You could compare. You could send someone a tell and say “hey, would you take 8k instead of 10k?” and sometimes they’d say yes and sometimes they’d say something rude and either way you had a story. You had a moment. The economy was a social space.
Now the economy is a spreadsheet behind a UI panel.
The auction house in World of Warcraft basically trained an entire generation of MMO players to never speak to another human being about commerce. Why would you? The system handles it. Post your stuff, collect your gold from the mailbox, move on. No conversation required. No reputation. No trust.
What kills me is that this extends outward. Once you remove the reason to talk during trades, you remove one of the biggest casual social touchpoints in the game. Guild recruitment used to happen in trade channels. Friendships started because someone undercut you and you whispered them to complain. Entire rivalries formed over bidding wars in /shout chat. Those are gone now. Replaced by silent, optimal, dead-eyed clicking.
Designers will tell you player-run markets are messy. They create scams, confusion, barriers to entry. And they’re right. They are messy. Messy like a real place with real people in it. The auction house is clean the way a hospital waiting room is clean. Technically functional. Spiritually empty.
The worst part is nobody’s going back. You can’t ship a 2025 MMO without a global auction house and expect anyone to tolerate it. The convenience expectation is baked in now. Players would riot. They’d review-bomb it on Steam within a week. We optimized the social out of the system and now we can’t put it back.
Go play a classic Ultima Online or EverQuest server for a weekend. Or really any MMO before World of Warcraft. Sit in the tunnel. Shout your wares into the void. Get lowballed by a level 12 monk. Feel something. Because that weird, annoying, slow, human marketplace had more life in it than every auction house tab ever coded.