I'm currently playing on Valkyrie, which has a relatively anemic 300-600 population. They used to have the Horde and Alliance auction houses linked and this seemed to please everyone. For some reason, they split the AHs without a correlating rise in population growth and now both sides of the AH are atrophied. For example, I started playing a couple of months after the split and from reading a thread about it, learned the Alliance AH had shrunken to roughly half of what it had been right after the split: 20 pages versus 45. Even after playing there a couple of months, with decent growth thanks to a Twitch streamer, the AH has stagnated again at 27 pages.
Unless the server launches with more than 1,000 players online, I think you should consider having the AHs linked.
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A related issue is how auction deposits are calculated. On Valkyrie, for any given gear slot, for example Cloth Waist items, there might be 5-8 items at any one time, total. This seems to be related to the high cost of deposits for gear items. I myself chose to disenchant everything that wasn't a blue because I simply couldn't find a buyer at any price within the maximum 24 hours and ran an inordinate risk that I would lose the deposit. If the deposits scaled with the asking price instead of a fixed, seemingly arbitrary, cost, I feel that would encourage more use of the auction house.
Unless the server launches with more than 1,000 players online, I think you should consider having the AHs linked.
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A related issue is how auction deposits are calculated. On Valkyrie, for any given gear slot, for example Cloth Waist items, there might be 5-8 items at any one time, total. This seems to be related to the high cost of deposits for gear items. I myself chose to disenchant everything that wasn't a blue because I simply couldn't find a buyer at any price within the maximum 24 hours and ran an inordinate risk that I would lose the deposit. If the deposits scaled with the asking price instead of a fixed, seemingly arbitrary, cost, I feel that would encourage more use of the auction house.