i swear they need to merge all the low pop servers
Keep your *** mitts off Lakshmi. Anyone who's on a smaller server right now is there by choice.
Anyway, I think I'd side against a unified auction house in XI. It would make more sense in XIV, where there's already free traffic between worlds on a data center, but in XI, servers are bubbles, and if you aren't going to open them up completely, I don't think it makes sense to go through all the work of opening up just one aspect.
(A unified AH would involve some work on my part to adjust to, but it would make large parts of the site WAY simpler, so it'd be a wash in terms of how much hassle it would be for me.)
[Edit]
Leviathan.Celebrindal said:
»rewriting how the AH works
Actually, that wouldn't be much hassle at all, unless the AH internals are a complete disaster (which they probably are, but they'd have to be a catastrophe in very specific ways). In a lot of ways it would be more straightforward, the queries would be simpler for sure. There'd be more traffic to that box so it'd need beefier hardware, but no way it would require a box that's 16 times as beefy as the existing AH servers, so it'd probably be a net gain in terms of cost. I have to believe separate AHs is a choice at this point.