Auction House improvement suggestionsFollow

First post - Hi all.

Anyway, I've been playing the game since launch, and I am enjoying almost every aspect of the game. But as you can tell by my subject, I'm not fond of the Auction House, so I wanted to post a few suggestions for improving it, and ask for others to do the same.

1) Better searching and sorting. You can only search by name, level, and type/slot of item (I don't think I'm forgetting one here). I want to be able to search and sort by Attribute improvements and current bid. And possibly by just showing Buyout auctions.

2) Show EXACTLY how long the auction has left. This will encourage higher prices (by more bidding in the last few minutes) and thus, more items being sold by AH, which is better for all players.

3) Proxy bidding. Especially since this game is new, prices are still being set, and I don't want to pay through the nose if I way overbid on something.

4) Have an optional Auction Only Bank Account for each character so I when I get outbid I don't have to keep running back and forth between the AH and the Mailbox. Funds just get added and subtracted from this account.

Am I missing anything?

I can understand it's current architecture. The fact that you have to run back and forth is simply because you are bidding near your economic capacity. I haven't found myself in that situation since I broke the 2gp barrier. Of course, as the economy and the item base expands I expect even multi-goldenaires to run into financial thresholds. Getting into a bidding war is something that you must undersand might take you to your limits, whatever those limits may be.

I have two issues, that I haven't confirmed, but am concerned about:

1) I was bidding on an item that I watched go from Medium to Short and about 10 minutes into the "Short" period I started getting competition; a bidding war ensued. As we ramped up the prices of, in this case, a decent 16.1dps 2h Axe, watching the time tick away, the auction suddenly reverted to a Medium time limit. I've not read anywhere that would suggest that bidding volume affects the timer, or that you can even change the timer, so I found this very odd.

2) I haven't tried, 'cause I just haven't, to bid on my own items, but it "appears" that you can. Can anyone confirm? This is a fairly easy way to run up prices inappropriately and I'd hate to see, in the event that they may crop up, bots that once "you have been outbid..." pops on their screen, they up the ante again on their OWN item, simply to raise the price...if they win, they even get their deposit back...no loss, with a lot to gain.

Now for suggestions:

1) I don't know if this is even possible, but it'd be nice to get more feedback on the status of a search in the AH. You can wait until the Search button lights back up, but that only means you can search again and that your previous search may very well still be in progress. This way a certain amount of burden can be removed from the servers due to people continually overrunning their own searches with another.

2) A seperate database, not attached to the actual auction themselves, that lists bid history. With bidding history target selling prices can more accurately be set to current market norms, allowing for people to place appropriate and more successful auctions. There is a level of abuse that could arise from this by crafty (pun intended) players depending on how many transactions the database displayed. An example from FFXI's functional AH: a crafter would corner the price history and rewrite the current market prices in his favor via bot or by mule. Another reason a price history would be beneficial is that it would allow less common items to be sold in shorter auctions; allowing sellers to find the relative sweet spot for the sale and place it on a shorter auction which would benefit the seller and buyer alike.

3) ...