World of Warcraft Auction House heads to iPhone; Blizzcon tickets on sale next month

You can now monitor your World of Warcraft auctions using your iPhone (or iPod touch). A new version of Blizzard’s Armory App now gives users the ability to tap into the game’s Auction House, wherein gamers can keep tabs on their sales of copper stacks and see how much Spellweave is going for.

There’s also a Web version of the mobile Auction House, but that’s a little less exciting.

The Auction House functionality is being beta tested right now. As such, it’s totally free to use. Fair warning: Blizzard does intend to charge $2.99 per 30 days for mobile access to the Auction House when the App leaves beta. I’d like to accuse Activision for coming up with that unnecessary fee, as it seems their wont. Do I have any proof of that? Absolutely not.

Nerd rage aside, it’s actually a fairly neat idea—longtime readers should recognize that “fairly neat” is mighty high praise coming from me. It basically gives you access to the whole of the Auction House while on-the-go (assuming you have AT&T reception, something that isn’t always guaranteed). You can create and bid on auctions; it’s not some two-bit “monitor” where you can see what’s going on but cannot interact at all.

That said, “serious” auctioneers tend to use the Auctioneer add-on. Essentially, it gives you a whole heck of a lot more control over your auctions. Sorta the difference between driving a manual transmission car vs. an automatic.

Of course, my realm, Aggramar, isn’t included in the beta. Wonderful.

In other Blizzard news (which I forgot to mention yesterday), Blizzcon tickets go on sale on June 2 and June 5. (The convention occurs on October 22 and 23 in Anaheim.) They’re releasing tickets in two groups this year, trying to make things more fair. Apparently having a Battle.net accounts makes things easier when trying to buy tickets. Also, just like last year, the convention will be live-streamed online and made available as a DirecTV pay-per-view.