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WOW's iPhone Auction House in beta

Will require extra subscription when live.

Blizzard is beta testing the Remote Auction House for World of Warcraft, which will allow players to bid on and sell items via an iPhone or iPod Touch or a web browser.

The service is free to use while in beta, but once live, will require a subscription to the new World of Warcraft Remote service, which will cost $2.99 for 30 days.

The beta is currently only available to players on a selection of North American servers - WoW.com has the full list.

The remote auction house works through the existing World of Warcraft Armory website and iPhone app. "Additional mobile devices will be supported in the future," according to Blizzard.

Anyone can browse the Auction House for free, as well as view character inventories and get real-time notifications from the Auction House. But, once the service is out of beta, you'll need to pay the subscription in order to bid on and buy out auctions, create auctions from items in your bags, bank or mailbox, and collect the gold you earn.

According to the WOW Remote FAQ, a subscription to World of Warcraft Remote is tied to an existing WOW account, so players with multiple accounts will need to buy a subscription for each. There will be a limit to the number of Remote Auction House transactions per day in order to prevent abuse of the service (currently set to 25 but likely to increase to 200).

World of Warcraft Remote may add extra services in "that could help keep players connected to different aspects of World of Warcraft through the web or their mobile device" in the future, Blizzard said.

There are further details at the Remote Auction House FAQ.

(By the way, if you have trouble reading the links to pages at www.wowarmory.com in this article, it may be because you're logged in to a European Battle.net account. Try logging out first.)