WoW's auction house broke for nearly a week, thanks to a code change that made a database table go from roughly 40,000 rows to 'tens of millions'

World of Warcraft: The War Within is off to a decent start—there's been a bit of a deserved fuss over the new expansion's early access pricing, but a surprisingly good story campaign, gorgeous world, and a continued lean towards alt-friendly flexibility seems to have put the ambitious Worldsoul Saga in good standing.

Most players, it seems, have been having a good time. Unless they want to use the auction house, that is. Late last week, the in-game auction house—which players use to buy and sell important goods for things like crafting items—was busted on certain regional servers for an appreciable amount of players.

Blizzard called attention to the issue on the forums August 29, though according to some players, the bug had been persisting far longer, as far back as Wednesday in the same week.

The "item not found" bug seemed to be inconsistently applied, making the theorycrafting as to the root cause all over the shop—with some players blaming powerful auction house addons and bots for the plague of technical issues. As one particularly peeved merchant writes on the game's subreddit: "it's really f*cking annoying that the AH is just under 300% capacity all the time by AH goblins trying to flip everything at once."

While I'm sure this state of affairs doesn't help, it turns out that the AH's current woes are due to a completely different problem, as stated by senior game producer Tom Ellis on Twitter:

"So what’s going on with the Auction House is an interesting tech problem, a well meaning and simple design change caused a DB table that used to hold 20-60k rows to now contain tens of millions." I know precious little about coding, but given that's (using 50,000 to 20 million as a number) a 400% increase in rows, uh—yeah. I think that'd do it.

It looks like the end is in sight, though, as Ellis writes: "Ok, got some holiday weekend engineering done by some heroes, AH performance should be significantly improved for now … CPU is still looking so much better (down from 150-200% CPU on each AH service to 40-50%), we should be good!"

It's a fun example of the kinds of stacking, mind-melting technical debt these old MMOs accrue over time. Earlier this year, Season of Discovery had some major issues thanks to layering tech, a feature that saved WoW 10 years ago but was causing massive problems for SoD's gameplay loops in the present. When it comes to maintaining games, every solution can cause another problem. While the situation's still a work-in-progress, players are at least reporting that the auction house is mostly working again, which means the price-flipping war is back on.