WoW almost didn't have the Auction House

Interesting interview on the official WoW site with Tom Chilton, looking back on the fifth anniversary. I already gave away what I thought was the most interesting tidbit, so here's the rest of that passage.

There were a lot of sacred cows that had to die. One in early World of Warcraft development was the idea that there should not be an auction house. We were hoping to see the social interaction in any kind of trading -- players meeting up face to face, deciding what the price on something would be, and determining what they were going to do to exchange their goods. After the game had been in beta for a while, and we saw that trading was incredibly cumbersome, and people weren't able to efficiently buy and sell stuff, we made the decision to include a game system to support it.

A short while ago I proposed ditching the AH, replacing it with something I felt was better. The idea of not having an auction house or something similar seems, well, completely insane to me. Of course the other MMO I played the most beside WoW, FFXI, had a useless auction house, but at least it didn't hurt you, like every other bad feature in the game.