I don’t have a problem with people that play more having more resources (gold, the rarer affixes, etc), or people that are more skillfull (& I include a good awareness of the community’s valuation of items to be able to buy things that are under-valued & sell them for a more appropriate price) having more resources.
That said, if they are still intending to have limited auction slots & it being a proper auction with bidding, I think that will ameliorate a lot of the bulls*** we see with pricing in PoE. People won’t be able to snipe rare-affix-with-a-value-of-10,000-gold-that-unaware-player-put-up-for-1-gold in a fraction of a second after it was listed because it’s not instant, there’s time for everyone else to notice it & the ensuing bidding would drive the price up to closer to the “reasonable value” (that being what someone is willing to pay for it).
If the auction house is in-game with decent search functionality then you probably wouldn’t get the third party sites that PoE has that automatically list anything that’s been put up for sale because they aren’t needed.
An in-game auction house with proper bidding gets rid of a lot of the problems that other games with trading have, though they do also come with their own problems (such as making it a lot easier to get the gear you need from playing the AH, not the game).
What does “offbalance” mean? Why should the devs set a range of prices for how valuable the community thinks any given item is? If there’s a maximum price for an item (regardless of however it’s calculated), why bother having bidding for an item that the community values at greater than that value?
GGG have effectively set a broad range of pricing for the currency by having that currency also available from vendors. I’m not sure that kind of thing would work too well in LE without the affix shards available from a vendor, or through some other method that effectively allows the player to get a particular shard another way such as being able to craft affix shard X from affix shard Y or something else that drops, that then links the price of shard X to shard Y & sets a cap. If the recipe for shard X requires 10 of shard Y then if the price of shard X goes much higher than 10x the price of shard Y then people will start buying more of Y to craft X & the prices begin to settle down again.
Actually, maybe that would be a good idea to make sure the price of affix shards does go totally nuts, allow the transmutation of the more common shards into the rarer shards, presumably with gold (which would remove gold from the economy) plus something else perhaps. It would also give us a use for those thousands of common shards that we have/will have.
And this post was a lot longer than I was expecting.