Quote Originally Posted by Denmo View Post
I could be seriously wrong, but I don't think XI was the first to implement an AH.

As for AH, you could still have it and market wards with my idea. You could even overlay AH onto it, and have a "Buy it Now" feature for an added fee, thus making bidding cheaper and more viable. I'm not arguing for/against AH here. I just think that the wards could be an awesome thing if they did it right.

It's not "adding more coats of paint". It's doing away with whats wrong (crowded NPCs standing in a ward) and reshaping it into something that makes sense.
Yes, they came up with the auction house, first.

And yes, your idea is just more coats of paint (no offense). The problems with the Market Wards are that they aren't an auction house with no need to set up and use NPC vendors whatsoever. So rather than slowly morphing it into an AH (which is a silly idea), why not simply create an auction house properly from the ground up?

Besides, the market wards can stay. It has some use as an offline bazaar for those who really want such a thing. It just can't ever be anything that approaches the functionality of an auction house without fundamentally being turned into one.