You may have noticed an interesting note in the patch notes for yesterday’s hotfix. Trion has added a 200-auction limit for the amount of auctions a character can have active at once. This limit will not take stack size into consideration, only the amount of separate auctions. After some investigation, the team discovered that the auction house was lagging on some shards due to the huge amount of separate auctions some characters had. They even found a few characters who had close to 10,000 auctions up at the same time.
The team hopes to eventually increase this limit of 200 after they get a feeling for how the change affects auction house performance. The performance improvements will most likely not be noticed until all current active auctions expire, which will be in a few days.
Keep reading for a dev tracker post by Pithos, who explained the reasoning behind the change.
Oh, and one more addendum to yesterday’s hotfix: Yes, the Autumn Harvest scratcher mini-game is back on the RIFT mobile app. However, it doesn’t seem to be correctly sending players their rewards through the in-game mail system. Trion is aware of the issue and plans on addressing it within the next couple of days. They are planning to divvy out the rewards that players are missing out on after it’s fixed.
Originally posted by Pithos (Source)
There was one change in this hotfix that made it in at the very last minute and didn’t make it in to the initial patch notes (they have since been updated).We’ve added a limit of 200 auctions per character to the Auction House.
Many of you have noticed Auction House searches have been running slowly lately. We’ve tracked this down to the large number of active auctions. Auction House addons (such as BananAH) have made it very easy to create large numbers of auctions, more than the processing dedicated to Auction House requests can currently handle well.
A small number of players are responsible for a huge number of these auctions – on the two shards I checked, there were a couple characters with close to 10,000 active auctions.
As such, to restore performance for a majority of our players, we’re adding a cap to the number of auctions a single character can have active. Based on looking at the number of auctions players had active, we’ve decided to start this at 200.
Players with existing auctions will have those auctions active until they end normally. As such, it may take up to 3 days from the time of the patch for AH speed to return to “normal” again.
Our apologies to players affected by the new auction cap.
We hope to be able to increase the number of auctions players can post in the future – but we’re just in the idea stage regarding this at the moment. Of course, engineering optimizations could allow for greater capacity, but we’ve also been talking about various ideas to encourage more reasonable use of the AH, such as higher or different auction fees. If you have any suggestions, about fair and reasonable changes we could make, please feel free to respond to this post and we’ll read them over.
