The World of Warcraft Armory, which has been slowly and steadily updated with more and more useful features since its inception, has been updated once again. While this is still in the beta process, you now have near full auction house functionality from either the web or the mobile armory iPhone app. This is a huge addition to the functionality of the armory site and will likely help those pining for a WoW fix during their work day find something to do, as long as their boss isn't around. Read on to get the low-down on this new service.

So, here is the functionality that is promised through the mobile auction house service. You can:

  • Browse the auction house.
  • Check on your bids and auctions.
  • Create auctions from items in your characters' personal inventory.
  • Collect gold from successful and unsuccessful bids.

Naturally, just like in-game, you may only browse the auction houses that your character has access to, which would be your faction auction house, as well as the neutral one. Also, there is a limit to the number of total transactions you can perform per day with this service, but that shouldn't be a big deal. Here's what the remote auction house FAQ had to say on the limit:

In order to help prevent abuse of this service, there will be a system in place to limit the total number of Auction House transactions (including bids, buyouts, and creating auctions) that a single World of Warcraft account can perform through World of Warcraft Remote each day. For the purposes of the beta test, the limit is set to 25 transactions per day per World of Warcraft account. When the Remote Auction House beta test ends and the live World of Warcraft Remote service launches, we plan to increase the limit to 200 transactions per day (with a World of Warcraft Remote subscription), though this limit is subject to change. Our goal with this system is to ensure that most players who are using the service will not reach the limit, and we will be continuously monitoring how the service is used and making adjustments to the system as needed.

There is a larger catch, however. When is there not, right? To be able to make use of the more advanced functions of the mobile auction house, you will need to subscribe to Blizzard's Remote Auction House service, which, after the beta is over, will run you an extra $2.99 per month. Without subscribing, all you are able to do is browse the AH. While this may be alright for some, the meat and potatoes of this ability to remotely access the AH comes by giving Blizzard an extra $2.99 per month on top of your standard subscription fee.

With that said, during the beta, you're free to use whatever functionality you want, and it is all available from the WoW Armory site. There is only a small handful of realms available for testing right now, so unless your character resides on one of those, you're out of luck at the moment. However, Blizzard has stated that, throughout the beta, they will open up more and more realms so that eventually they will all be supported.

Naturally, none of the realms my characters are on are supported, so I can't go much beyond giving you a rundown of the proposed functionality. However, I do think this is a very awesome idea that Blizzard has implemented here. It may have taken a while, because other MMOs have similar functionality on their sites, but when Blizzard does something they usually do it right. Although, given the amount of profit the company is raking in from WoW subscriptions and sales alone, I really don't think they need to charge for all this functionality, do you? Conversely, they have tens of thousands of players paying $25 a pop for a sparkly horse, so I really can't blame them.