Veteran MMO player here (over 10 years), in all games I’m most interested in trading - that’s how I play and how I enjoy playing MMO.
For the problems ToS has from my perspective (not economist, just huge experience in this field).
AH can’t handle supply & demand variety
Example: average item price is 6-8k, AH only lets you set a piece for 4-9k. One day, all pieces for 6-8k got sold, and the lowest piece becomes 12k. But you can’t set your piece for anything higher than 10k still.
When demand rises and supply can’t catch up, the market price goes up. It can go up and down overnight (happens in WoW frequently), or it can go up gradually. Those price changes is nearly the only way to make money for a person who doesn’t have a huge budget to maintain long term trading (see next point).
AH restrictions prevent you from maintaining a big business
If you have a budget of 10kk and you want to invest into some resource or gear and expect the income of ~30% over, say, a month; for that you have to be able to set at least 10 pieces at a time, but the more the better.
There were times in WoW when I had some big business going on and I always had over 500 pieces set up on the AH at any time, for about 2 months in a row. That’s big, but not the biggest - some people reach the 1000 pieces marks or even more.
Being able to set so many pieces opens other aspects of economics as well - monopoly, competitiveness, currency conversion (one piece type into another, not only money <-> pieces), and some other. This is a very interesting and fun part of the gameplay, and ToS doesn’t have it at all.
AH restrictions prevent rapid trading
You have to wait 24 hours to get your money back, therefore, if you don’t have a big budget, you can’t benefit from rapid trades. But if you have a big budget, you wouldn’t do that anyway.
Rapid trades is something that you’re rewarded for if you monitor AH very actively when the economy is not stable enough yet.
For example, somebody who is lazy about trading puts his weapon 40% cheaper than the other pieces, and if you can spot that, you can buy it and resell it quite quickly (usually the same day).
But then you’re delayed for 2 days - you can’t get your money back and you have to wait. Considering that usually you can maintain ~10 deals/day with rapid trading, you lose incredible amount of money, and, possibly, time, since your character will have so few money to play with.
Question
Why do we, who enjoy trading so much, have to suffer those restrictions just because you decided that it’s easier to control economy (it isn’t) than it is to fix the security issues that your game has, to prevent botting?
Even if we allow botting and release all the restrictions to the AH and trading for all accounts, the damage that will be done by gold sellers will not be as significant as the damage done by the restrictions that you set up. This is self-destructive for economy and for a good portion of players, who likes to trade.