Dream Features: Sorted trade goods in the auction house

In the second installment of my column on single features I'd like to see in World of Warcraft, I'm going for something hopefully a lot less controversial: A better sorting of items, especially trade goods, in the WoW auction house.

The World of Warcraft auction house works reasonably well if you are looking for weapons or armor. Want a plate glove for your level 65 warrior? Just select the armor category, plate sub-category, hands sub-sub-category, and optionally select a level range, and all the plate gloves available will be shown. But if you look for other things than weapon or armor, things become more complicated.

For example imagine you found your first item with sockets, and you want to buy a gem to put into a red socket in the auction house. Good luck! Right now there is no way to find them, unless you know the name of what you are looking for. Gems, cut or uncut, are listed under trade goods, together with ores, metal bars, cloth, enchanting supplies, leather, and a wide range of other materials. As the name "trade goods" suggests, there is heavy trade in them, and you can usually find more than 1,000 items in this category. And there are no sub-categories, all you get is an unsorted list, over 20 pages at 50 items each. Sorting by rarity or price only works on the one page you're on, not over the whole 20 pages. Going through that list to find red gems is a nightmare. The best you can do is find the names of all possible gems that fit in red slots (blood garnet, living ruby, flame spessarite, noble topaz, shadow draenite, nightseye) and search for them by name, although that will still give you a mixed list of cut and uncut gems.

What is missing is sub-categories for trade goods. Even just having sub-categories like alchemy, blacksmithing, jewelcrafting etc. would be a big help. But ideally there would be sub-sub-categories like red gems, blue gems, yellow gems under jewelcrafting, or ore, bars, and miscellaneous under blacksmithing. The probable reason why nobody has implemented this is that apparently currently any one item can only be in one category. So ùost trade goods like metal ore, which would be used for blacksmithing, engineering, and jewelcrafting can't be sorted into one category. The solution would be to allow one item to have several labels, and thus be present in several sub-categories.

Sorting trade goods into categories would make life a lot easier, without changing anything in the rules of the game. It is just an improvement of the user interface.