Quests to earn auction slots

We all know that the auction house system is coming in some form or another in the future. When the auction house does open there will obviously need to be some sort regulation on how many items can be auctioned at once or people will just throw every item in their inventory into the auction house in hopes of getting a few more gold than what the merchant would pay. Nobody wants to sort through lists of garbage items like a '6-11 purple smiting staff with +4 armor vs plants'.

What I suggest is a set of 'Auction Slots' that you have available that would each let you auction an item in the auction house. Perhaps 8-10 as a total amount of slots (items) that can be sold at a given time. This way people will attempt to sell their best items and prevent auction spamming.

Also, a new character shouldn't immediately have access to the maximum number of slots, perhaps only start with 2. More slots can be earned through special side quests as progression is made. The quests can be given by npcs, either in towns or out of the way explorable areas, and should gradually get harder to complete. By completeing the quest, your reward is an extra slot at the auction house and would be well worth the effort and a sense of status once you have attained the maximum slots. I suggest the last quests to gain auction slots be very difficult; such as the npc being located in the Chaos Plains of Underworld. Soon Temple of Ages would be filled with people saying "LFG for auction quest in UW".

Any thoughts on this?

Why not just have a better way of sorting it, such as by specific upgrades, type, max req, damage range, etc., not very hard if they did an auction house to simply remove 95% of the garbage you do not want to see and only look for say a 15%+ Haft of Axe Mastery, or a weapon with that and a max of 10 Req, though I'm wondering if damage range will be a factor, should just be Highest and Not Highest, since I had a few max damage axes with good req the second I hit LA.

Just add sorting or filtering to the GUI.
Experienced players may not be interested in low level items, but newbies might. Throw it all in, and let people filter the items the don't want to see eg: "Only show green axes with damage greater than X"

I have around 175 max gold items with great stats, including some unusually good purples and 30 greens.
I need to sell them all in bulk because i had to relegate one of my main characters to mule duties. My second account has around 20 slots left

Looking forward to the auction indeed.

We can just have some sort of search feature, and the whole debate goes away. Quests to earn more auction spots is pointless, as the point of an auction house is to sell your items while you are away; and not to make you press more physical time towards the game just so you have a better chance to sell.

If they implement this, it should not be that hard of a quest. Perhaps talk to 5 different NPCs scattered around the map like in Hot Springs Murders?