Blizzard announced a new service yesterday that will allow World of Warcraft users to access and manage their Auction House items while outside the game. The interaction builds upon the success of Blizz’s Armory and associated iPhone and iPod Touch apps. Blizzard official forum moderator Bornakk posted the initial details to the North American forum:

…This is a fairly complex service to develop, due in large part to its unprecedented integration with the game, so we don’t have an exact release date yet. It’s important to note here that certain elements of the service will be premium-based, which we’ll go into more detail on once the service functionality is finalized. As with all of the services we offer, we plan to integrate the Auction House and Armory in a way that won’t disrupt the gameplay experience, and we won’t release it until it meets the quality standards that we’ve set for our other features and services. You may be seeing bits and pieces of the Auction House service pop up in the test builds we use for the public test realms as we go through the process of internal testing. …

Outside of virtual currency earned in-game through quest or dungeon run rewards, Blizzard’s in-game Auction House is widely regarded as one of the best ways to make money within the game. By opening up this service to external use, Blizzard is giving users tools not unlike what daily traders on Wall Street have access to. With this external management tool, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a number of enterprising players buying and selling around the clock.

There are two things to highlight about this feature.

1. How will this external access to virtual currency trading, buying, and selling effect the overall in-game economy?
2. What’s this about the service being ‘premium-based’

Granted, allowing external access to the virtual market is nothing new, and browser based management of sales can be found in a number of online game, but none that compare in size, scale, and overall numbers as World of Warcraft. And again, external access is nothing more than a whole lot of players all hitting the auction house all at the same time. However, giving players around the world a method to constantly monitor their auctions around the clock could result in some very interesting results. Will this buy/sell/trade effect price rates? There are already a number of players that apply real-world financial practices in place in the in-game auction house, and now they’ll have access to even more real-life tools, with which they may further apply out-of-game financial principles.

And now for that interesting pig in a blanket. If this is Blizzard’s attempt to subtly introduce the community to the idea of a Premium Service; it hasn’t gone unnoticed. To my knowledge, this is the first appearance of the idea. Blizzard has long been one of the last remaining stalwarts of the ‘subscription’ based model. However the company hasn’t ruled out microtransactions completely, and have already implemented a few via in-game special pets. And while it’s too early to clearly know what Blizzard has up their sleeve(s), the ‘Premium Based’ service might be an early foray into expanding the ‘subscription’ model. I.e. those with ‘premium’ features may have the option to simply buy an item that they’re after with RMT’s. Alternatively, Blizzard could play the option that Premium players would have access to all game features, areas, etc., while others might have to make microtransaction payments to access the same services. Again, at this point this is only conjecture.

Blizzard released it’s newest expansion pack, “Wrath of the Lich King” back in November of 2008, and have started to tease their upcoming expansion pack, “Cataclysm”, which currently has no release date. It should be quite interesting to see if, how, where, and with what Blizzard may or may not option in some form of microtransactions.