Auctioneer Advanced

As if Auctioneer 4 wasn't good enough, the brilliant folks of Norganna have released a NEW addon: Auctioneer Advanced. Don't be deceived by the name - it isn't an update for Auctioneer, it's a completely separate addon. As the Auctioneer Advanced info page points out, there is one thing you need to understand about this new addon:

• Your Auctioneer data will NOT be converted. Auctioneer Advanced uses a different database, and does not share data with Auctioneer. However, you can run it alongside Auctioneer with no trouble until you build up Auctioneer Advanced's database.

So, when you load it and find you have no price data... sorry. No way around it! Enjoy the chance to build up a new set of data from the most current prices.

Speaking of price data. Scanning the Auction House is not the only way to gather data for Auctioneer Advanced. Every time you search an item, whatever the Auction House returns to you is added to your data. This is nice, especially if you want to keep current on certain things, but don't want to take 10 minutes to scan. Also, there will no longer be the moment of lag at the end of a scan, before the sound plays. Hurray!

Also, the entire setup can now be done through a GUI: no more confusing slash commands! More on this later, in depth.

Appraiser! A new feature in Auctioneer Advanced that carriers an Auctioneer feature to its logical conclusion. Remember the button you checked in Auctioneer to remember your pricing? Well, Auctioneer Advanced does that automatically, for EVERY item you post. So the next time you list it, you can see what you sold it for last time, search the Auction House (and record new data for that item), and adjust your sell price accordingly.

Let's break it down into sections: first thing, the main auctioneer window. Before, you had to do a scan, then search through it according to PCT less, bid %, etc. Now, some of this info is built into the main Auctioneer window!

A lot of this is familiar territory.

• On the far left of the results, we have the number of items in the stack.
  

• Next the item name, followed by the minimum level you need to use it (if any).
  

• To the right of that, we have "iLvl", a new feature. This is the "item level", which from what I understand is the estimated level requirement an item would have if those stats were found on a green.

• Next is "left", which is how much time is left on the Auction, followed by the name of who is selling it.

• Next is obviously the price. Bid price on top, buyout (if there is one), listed beneath it.

• Lastly, we have the "PCT" column, which means "percent". Basically, it is how much the item is listed for compared to how much it is sellable for, according to your data. As I only have a couple scans worth, Auctioneer Advanced is seeing these items for the first time, hence the "100%". They are being listed at exactly the same price as my data reflects, and my data contains only that price. The more data you have, the more reliable this value becomes.

• Note, there is no 'scan' button! You can scan by typing "/auc scan", or press the little "play" button on the top frame.
  

Now, let's look at our new "Appraiser" tab, which is where you will do all your selling. This where things start to get different, and rather cool.

• On the far left is your item selection window. It shows a list of all your sellable items! Simply click on it in this window, and the info for it will pop up on the right-hand window. Now you don't need to search through your bags, looking for the correct icon! You can search by name; very handy.

• Under where it displays the name of the item are some sliders. The first is the stack slider. Here is where you can choose how many items per stack you want to sell.
  

• The slider beneath is for how many stacks you want to sell at the size you chose above. Look at the image I have: the first slider says "stack size: 5", meaning I want to sell in stacks of 5. Below, the slider says "number: 2 stacks = 10". Meaning, I will list 2 stacks of 5, for a total of 10. When I click to post the auction, it post 2 stacks of 5 automatically! Neat, huh? You can also set it to automatically list as many full stacks as you have items for, but moving the slider one click from the far right. All the way to the right will list every full stack you can, and whatever is left after that as a smaller stack.

• On the bottom right, we have the bid price per item and buy price per item fields. This is just where you put in your bid price and buyout price. Auctioneer Advance will do this for you once you have data for it, just like Auctioneer. "Per item" simply means if you're selling a stack, how much each one in the stack goes for.

• Now, on the bottom left we have the "pricing model to use" dropdown menu. Here's where it can get confusing. I haven't figured out the details of them all, but here's what they mean as I understand it, in order from top of the menu to the bottom:
• Market Value: This is the one we are used to. Lists the price Auctioneer Advanced thinks it can be sold for, based on previous auctions it has seen.
• Stats: Vendor Markup: If Auctioneer Advanced hasn't seen an item before, it will list it at 3x what a vendor would buy it for (as vendors are rip-off artists).
• Fixed Price allows you to specify what exactly you want to sell for.
• The other options are a bit more cryptic. As Auctioneer Advanced is new, there is not full documentation. I'll finish the list when I'm comfortable that I can explain them accurately. In general, use "stddev" or Market when selling.

• The very bottom window shows other listings of the item you have just put up (according to your last scan, that is.)

I think that's enough for one post, don't you? That should get you comfortable with how to use it. Next post will cover the configure menu in depth, which I didn't touch here, for those of you who must tweak and tweak and tweak until everything is perfect!

Primal Water and Primal Air for Alchemists

In response to a request, here's some info about primal waters and primal air.

Now, alchemists can transmute water to air, which is nice to have, as air can be somewhat difficult to farm sometimes. On my server, primal air is the most expensive primal of all, and the least available, likely owing to that it has no particularly awesome farming spot (use my search bar if you're interested, I think I covered good farming spots in another post). Also, the recipe to transmute primal water to primal air is indeed a revered reward from the Cenarion Expedition, so a huge amount of people aren't going to be doing it.

What it comes down to is patience. The cooldown on transmuting Primals is a long one, so it isn't as though you'll be making a ton of gold a day by doing it. But, you WILL make gold. Primals are one of the most easily sold items, in my opinion. I always sell mine through the trade channel, and they always sell well, if you undercut the AH by a gold or two. Again, the problem is simply time taken to transmute. If anyone wants to try this, my advice is to grab up multiple Primal Waters at the lowest price you can, and keep them in your bag to transmute whenever you can. When you market them in /trade, be sure to give the option of buying them individually, in case someone doesn't want "10x primal air!".

On a related note, you can also transmute Primal Earth to Primal Water, via a Sporeggar revered recipe. Primal Earth is just dirt cheap, because it's so easy to get. You can make a much bigger profit with this recipe, transmuting Primal Earth to Primal Water (in the neighborhood of 20g profit, on my server).

My Ore Experiment, Part 2

Okay, so, I made 30 gold profit by selling the Mithril Bars I bought. However, there is simply too much Mithril on the market to control it all. I can't afford to buy 190 bars a day. So, the market is too big, but the concept is sound.

I'm moving on to Felsteel bars. There is 1 stack of 5 on my Auction House right now, and I'm going to buy it, break it apart, and sell the pieces for more. I'll let you know how it goes!

Auctioneer Settings to Tweak

You can tweak the settings of Auctioneer with text-based commands. A complete list can be found at The Auctioneer Wiki, which is a guide to all the features of Auctioneer. I'm only going over the ones here that I feel are the best to tweak. Always remove the brackets <> when putting in the command in WoW.

/auctioneer pct-markup If you have an item you've never seen at auction before, this is how it is priced. It will take how much you could sell it to a vendor for, and mark it up by whatever is. The logic being that vendors in World of Warcraft generally buy items for 1/5 the gold that they'd sell it for. I'd set this to 300 or so. In time, with enough scans, you'll see less and less of this, and start seeing real data.

/auctioneer pct-bidmarkdown This controls the difference between the bid and buyout prices when Auctioneer prices an item for sale. Keep it between 15 and 20. That way, even if someone wins by bidding, you're not going to get ripped off, like if you set the bid very low. A key mistake many novices to World of Warcraft make in the Auction House is setting the bid low to encourage a bidding war. Unfortunately, each bid placed only barely outdoes the previous, so the result is often selling the item far under value.

/auctioneer pct-nocomp This controls how much ABOVE market value Auctioneer will set an item if there is no competition. It makes market sense - if there's no competition, supply is probably low, and prices can go up. Don't be shy here. Ratchet up the price, if the item is in demand. See, then you set the market. Even if someone underbids you, chances are they'll only do it a by a bit, because they want to secure a profit for themselves. Rarely will you get an honest player who will know your 100 gold blue is only worth 20 gold, and underbid you by 80g. It's in everyone's best interest to sell their item for as much as they can! Take advantage of human greed.

/auctioneer pct-underlow This controls how much you undercut someone by when Auctioneer does your pricing. The default is 5, but you can go down to 2 or 3. It's a negligible profit gain, but a buyer is going to go for the lowest-priced item, even if it is only a couple silver lower!

/auctioneer pct-maxless This is a handy one. It controls how low Auctioneer is willing to go to undercut someone before giving up because you'll lose too much gold. I wouldn't go below 70%, here. If someone wants to lose hard earned (or ill-gained!) gold by selling an item at only 70% of its worth, let them lose money.

So tweak your settings people! Only amateur install and go. YOU will actually understand Auctioneer, and soon you'll be sharking those other Auctioneer users as well!

More World of Warcraft Gold Earning Tips and Guides at Technorati

Auctioneer Interface In Depth

Auctioneer is very user friendly, even to a World of Warcraft novice, but some explanation is always nice to have! Without further ado!


1.) Your Scan button. The most important tool in Auctioneer! It scans the WoW's Auction House and saves all pricing information in a nifty database.

2.) Search Auctions. Let's you filter through the data Auctioneer gathered, based on bid price, buyout price, profit margin, etc. In depth information further down in this post.

3.) Post Auctions. The tab that brings you to the area where you can post your own Auctions.

4.) Btmscan. Bottom Scanner, very a handy tool. More information further down in the post.

5.) Transactions. This keeps track of what you've bought and how much gold paid. It's a handy way to gauge how much gold you've earned (or, unfortunately, lost!)

1.) Search. This dropdown lets you search according to Bids, Buyouts, search the competition, search for particular items (nice for monopolizing purposes), and search according to seller. Set the Minimum Profit to whatever you'd like, and Auctioneer will only return profits of that amount or greater. I generally set mine to 1 or 1.5 gold.

2.) Min PCT Less. "PCT" stands for percent, and means "percent discount from highest sellable price". So an item listed with 80pct is going for 80% cheaper than what you can get for it on the Auction House, and so is 80% profit. I keep this at 30, because I like to see all my auctions, even the low profit ones. Sorting by PCT is a good way to search out good deals. The highest PCT auctions are usually bids set to 1 silver, with the seller wanting a bidding war to occur. Look for 100PCT items with a "short" time left and bid, and if you win you're making 100% profit!

3.) Minimum Bid Percent. This one is kind of confusing. It filters based on how many times you've seen an item at auction, and it has been bid on. So, if you set it for "1%", it will return any scanned auctions that have only been bid on 1% of the time, and so are very poor sellers. Setting it to, say, 80% will return only auctions that have been bid on 80% or more of the times they've been posted. I recommend leaving this at zero and judging the sale-worthiness on an item-specific scale. After all, many epic items, expensive items and new items in World of Warcraft will have been bid on very few times!

4.) Maximum Time Left. Just what it sounds like. It only returns auctions with the amount of time you set or less. I like to set mine for "very long" to return all auctions, then just sort the list according to time left (click the time left column in the main window) to organize into order of short, medium, long, very long.

5.) Item specifics. Here can you specify what KIND of item to search for (category restrictions), minimum quality (search only grays, greens, blues, purples, artifact, whatever), and search for a particular item, in the last window at the bottom.

For tips on how to buy smartly with Auctioneer, see my post Buying With Auctioneer.

I feel that the post auctions tab requires little explanation, so I will keep it brief. Starting price is the price the auction begins at, what the first bid will cost. Buyout price is how much someone can pay to buy it immediately. You can set the auction to 2, 8, or 24 hours in length before having it expire if no one bids on it. You can find some tips on selling in my Selling With Auctioneer post.

1.) Bottom Scanner is easy to use. Just hit "Play" and review the auctions it alerts you to. It searches the auction house every 20 seconds for the last 50 auctions posted and looks for undervalued items. Go here for more information about it.

And lastly, the transactions tab. I'm not going to put a screenshot up, because you won't need one. It simply logs the date of your transactions, if it was a buy or sell, what the item was, what you made/lost, and who bought it or sold it to you!

More World of Warcraft Gold Earning Tips and Guides at Technorati

Selling With Auctioneer

The Auction house is a great source of income for World of Warcraft. It's not just for SPENDING money, but also for MAKING money. In short, buy low and sell high.

The easiest way to do this is to get Auctioneer.

Get auctioneer loaded up and head to the nearest Auction House.
Use the "Scan" button to have Auctioneer go through each item, recording price, frequency of posting, vendor info, etc. Do this 3 times a day for a week or so, before you try to buy or sell. Otherwise, you might get a misleading set of data and lose money!

Getting Started
Roll a new character with an inoffensive, fairly vanilla name, and hike it over to the AH of your choice. This going to be your mule, and you will be sending all items gathered on your main to THIS one, so you don't need to run back and forth.

Send some gold to this character. It costs money to post items on the Auction House. Also, buy/make/otherwise acquire some 12 slot bags. You'll need them to hold items, but over 12 slots is just a waste of money -- you probably won't ever have that many items in your inventory!

Next I'm going to go over what you need to know for selling items you already have. I'll go over buying them and re-selling them in another post, as it does require some explanation!

Posting Auctions
Know this first: hold and click an item to have it automatically be priced and ready to sell. That will speed things up a lot!

If Auctioneer is loaded, and you post an auction, the bid and buyout prices are set automatically. This is based on what the competition is selling the item for. Auctioneer will automatically underbid them by 5%, ensuring YOUR item is more appealing to the buyer! You can set the underbidding percent. For example, "/auctioneer pct-underlow 2%" will have it underbid by only 2%.

You may see "cannot match lowest price" in red, when you post an item. If you do, it means that the competition is currently selling that item for LESS than it's worth. If you see this message, don't sell it! Wait for that auction to go away, and sell at the correct price, or you'll be losing money. Alternatively, you can BUY the one that's going to too low, and sell them BOTH at a higher price! Buy low, sell high!

You may see "no competition" in green when you post an item. This means your item is the only one of its kind available on the AH! Auctioneer will automatically raise the price a small amount. You can set it with a command. For example, "/auctioneer pct-nocomp -20%" will make Auctioneer bump the price up by 20%. Since there's no competition, that's fine! Also, it will be handy because when someone DOES undercut you (other people use Auctioneer too!), you've got a buffer of 20% before you start posting the item for less than it's worth.

Think Like an Economist
The economy of WoW is the same as the economy in the real world. The governing principals apply just the same! With that in mind, here are some tips to maximize earnings.

Corner a market. If you can find an item in high demand but low supply, get in on that. Buy out the competitions and resell them at your own higher price. If you're the only one offering them, players have to pay your price to get it. Requires a bit of gold to start with, if you want to keep buying out and reposting items for your higher price.

Obey supply and demand! If you've got an item to sell, and there are 30 other postings for the same item, wait it out. When the supply goes down, demand goes up, and you can charge more!

Consider the item. If you've got a 2-handed sword with defense on it, don't think you'll get much for it. No one needs defense on a 2-handed weapon, because if they're needing defense for tanking, they're definitely be using a shield. Alternatively, if your item is, say, a hat with +intelligence, spell damage, spell hit/crit, understand that people will be willing to pay more for it! Good items go for more money -- try to consider how much YOU'D be willing to pay for it before setting a price.

Always do a scan before each buying/selling session. This will make sure you are using the most recent data, which is essential for letting Auctioneer automatically underbid the competition.

More World of Warcraft Gold Earning Tips and Guides at Technorati

Buying With Auctioneer

Make sure Auctioneer is loaded, and head to the Auction House!

Short Duration Auction Sharking
Remember, before you buy, you need to scan to make sure you have the most current information.

Talk to the Auctioneer and hit scan. Do not leave the computer! You need to be READY when the scan is finished.

As soon as it is finished, go to the "search auctions" tab. Set the first dropdown to "bid". This will search through the auctions without buyouts available. Leave everything else alone for now, speed is the name of the game.

When the auctions come up, scan through anything labeled as "short" for time left. That means it's under 30 minutes left. It could be 15 seconds, for all you know. Check out the "profit" column. If you see big numbers somewhere, bid on it. Hopefully, no one else will get to it before the auction ends. This is the easiest way to score big profits, because often times people set their bids too low, hoping to encourage a bidding war. If that doesn't happen, you can snag items for far less than they're worth, and resell them! Always do this first, and as soon as the scan is done. Otherwise, you might search for "short" duration auctions and find out there aren't any, because they all ended before you got to them. You can bid on "medium" auctions as well (2-8 hours left), but odds are good you'll be outbid. Still, if you are, you get your money back, so you can do this later. But not now! As soon as you're done trying to shark those short duration auctions, set the first dropdown to "Buyout", and hit search.

Buyout Profiteering
When the results of the buyout search are up, click on the "profit" tab to the right to organize them according to potential profit. Look for big numbers here. If you see something that's obviously being sold under value, snap it up. Use discretion, here! If you mouseover the item and see something like "seen 2 times at auction total", it is NOT a highly bought/sold item. You might not be able to sell it easily. This kind of "feeling out" will come with experience, and eventually you' know if something is worth buying or not. I'll do a post about this at some point, so check back.

After organizing according to profit, do the same for the "pct" tab. PCT is basically how much profit you get for buying at the buyout price and reselling for Auctioneer's suggested price. An item bought with "99 PCT" is essentially 99% profit! Again, use discretion here. Not all items ranking high in PCT will be sure sales. Again, your sense for this will come with time!

BTM Scan
This is a separate addon from Auctioneer, but is now bundled in with it. What it does is scan the Auction House every 20 seconds for the last 50 items posted, and search for a good deal. To activate it, click the "btmscan" tab and hit the yellow triangle (play) at the top of the window. When an item is posted that you can get a deal on, a window will pop up showing the price, the profit, and give you an option if you want to buy it. Again, use your best judgement! You need to have some feel for the economy on the server to spot the real good deals and the ones that aren't really so good.

Bottom Scanner is configurable, but can be somewhat confusing. Go here for more information!

More World of Warcraft Gold Earning Tips and Guides at Technorati