im not gonna go into spewing endless argumentative thises and thatses but i will say this

market wards are much more limiting and require much more attention from the developers than an auction house does.
the market wards are very similar to an auction house, but consumes more time, is more limited in space for items, and requires extra server space and hardware usage due to the crowding of large amounts of physical NPCs crammed into one area.

adding an auction house would take time to implement and would come with its own bugs and problems, however, an auction house is easier to implement because because of the lack of having to physically build and then render anything but a UI client side.

please give us an AH soon SE, but for now the population is easily small enough for this to not be at the top of the list. im glad were getting battle changes first.