WoW's Auction House was down for almost a week due to a code-change that changed a database table from 'tens and millions' of rows to roughly 40,000.

World of Warcraft: The War Within has a good start. There's been some deserved fuss about the new expansion's pricing, but the Worldsoul Saga's ambitious story campaign and gorgeous world have helped it to stand out.

It seems that most players are having a great time. The auction house is not available to them. The in-game auction house, which players use to purchase and sell goods such as crafting items, was down on certain regional servers late last week for a significant number of players.

Blizzard brought the issue to light on the forums on August 29. However, according to some players the bug has been present since Wednesday of the same week.

The "items not found" bug was inconsistently applied. This led to a lot of speculation as to what the root cause is. Some players blamed powerful auction house bots and addons for the technical issues. One merchant on the subreddit of the game wrote: "It's really f*cking irritating that the AH is always just under 300% capacity by AH goblins flipping everything at once."

According to senior game producer Tom Ellis, the AH's current problems are caused by a completely separate problem.

"What's happening with the Auction House is a tech problem. A well-meaning and simple design change has caused a DB Table that used to contain 20-60k rows to now hold tens of thousands." I'm not a coding expert, but if you use 50,000 to 20,000,000 as a number, that's a 400% increase. I think that would do it.

Ellis writes that the end is near, however: "Ok, some holiday weekend engineering was done by some heroes. AH performance should now be significantly improved... CPU is looking so much more better (down from 150%-200% CPU for each AH service to 40%-50%), we should all be good!"

It's a great example of the kind of technical debt that these old MMOs accumulate over time. Season of Discovery was plagued by major issues earlier this year due to layering technology, a feature which saved WoW ten years ago, but caused massive problems with SoD's current gameplay loops. Every solution to a problem can create another one when it comes to maintaining a game. The situation is still in progress, but players report that the auction house is mostlyworking, which means that the price-flipping battle is back on.