#1 - Sept. 6, 2012, 12:49 a.m.
Items are mispriced.
World of Warcraft allows for add-ons like Auctioneer that scan the AH and recommend prices, ensuring that arbitrage doesn’t exist for very long and that prices reflect the items’ true values. Diablo 3 has no support for add-ons, and estimating pricing by comparing similar items to my drops for hours on end sucks. It would be great to automate the whole process. If people can’t find average prices on the Auction House, they don’t really know what their item is worth. The market is inefficient. This is a real problem with real money at stake.
The AH search function is horrible.
The D3 AH doesn't provide us with fine-grained search tools to find items with comparable stats. I can only search by minimum values, not max. I can't search for every item modifier. Nor can I search for equivalent stats—for instance, given my gear and build, what is the exact relationship between +LOH and %Life Steal? I could build powerful search and item-comparison tools given an API.
There are several things—like security for the RMAH—that don’t even need to be addressed with a read-only API. You open up the data, I build a read-only platform that helps people know the real market-value of their items, and suddenly markets are priced efficiently. Given that it seems so simple from those of us outside Blizzard, can we get a further explanation as to why a read-only AH API won’t happen?