Auctioneer Tutorial – Using AppraiserPosted by xenith on April 9th, 2009

Ok, so now we are getting into the advanced stuff that you can do with Auctioneer to make gold in WoW. At this point, it is important that you collect at least 3 days worth of scans and preferably 5 or 6.  Perform a full scan at least once per day. The results you get out of Auctioneer are only as good as the data that goes in. You will need to use the full Auctioneer Suite for all the remaining chapters of this book.

Fast scanning with Get All

The latest version of Auctioneer Suite includes a ‘Get All’ function (I can’t confirm if this is in the cut-down version of the add-on. I suspect that it is). This takes advantage of a new ability that Blizzard recently gave to add-on developers that lets them grab all the Auctioneer data in one quick operation. Great news right? Well yes, for those of us who can use it. There are limitations and you will need a very good connection and a pretty decent PC to use it. From the Auctioneer Addon wiki:

• You can only do one GetAll scan per 15 minutes, unless you logout and back in. This shouldn’t be much an issue, since why would you want to do two complete rescans so quickly?
• GetAll may cause you to disconnect. This appears to be an issue on Blizzard’s side which we cannot do much about. We have, at best, anecdotal suggestions about how you can minimize the chances of this happening: have a reasonably recent computer and CPU; do not try to scan when the server itself is behaving sluggishly, or when you have high latency ping times; do not attempt when there are lots of people using the AH; do not attempt when a lot of people are physically nearby. Basically, try using GetAll at off hours and at the less populated Ha’s if you have trouble getting disconnected while using GetAll. e.g. Silver Moon City for Horde and Exodar or Darnassus for Alliance
• GetAll will not have seller info for most auctions. This is caused by a Blizzard limitation in how quickly we can request seller names for auctions. We have adjusted our code so that most of our auctioneering functionality is not affected, but this will affect any seller filters you have in place (as you won’t be able to filter them out if we don’t know who the seller is when the scan is processing). If you want to get seller information, your only option is to use the regular, page by page scan (possibly in conjunction with a GetAll scan).
• When using GetAll, we no longer have to worry about items slipping between pages while scanning, so any items missing from the GetAll scan are immediately removed from the snapshot (as opposed to needing to be missing from two successive scans, as we require during regular scans).

I have used ‘GetAll’ with great success. It really is incredibly fast so give it a try. If you are lacking a little power in the CPU dept, follow the FAQ advice and scan at a low traffic time like early morning.  This is a fantastic new feature that will let you make gold in WoW even faster!

Appraiser

So, now you have auction data to work with, lets look at Appraiser. To get to it, click the Appraiser tab at the bottom of the Auction House window.

Auctioneer Appraiser

The left hand pane lists your inventory. Click on an item to work on posting it. At the top right of the Appraiser pane, you see information about the auction. Stack Size and Number allow you to set how many you want to sell at a time and how many total stacks you want to sell in this auction. In this example you can see we have chosen to separate our two Felsteel Stabilizers into two single item auctions instead of posting them in a stack of 2. Below the stack settings is the Auction Duration setting. Take a look at chapter 2 of this book for some discussion of stack sizes and auction duration settings.

At the top right is where we decide how much gold we are going to charge for the item. You can see the Bid and Buyout costs that will be used if we post the item now. You can manually edit these values if you need to. Above that is the Pricing Model menu. This is the most important part of the Appraiser tab when it comes to making fast gold. These options are not available in the Simple Auction Post tab but they are the key to making gold in WoW at the auction house, especially if you are a crafter or gatherer selling your own products.

The Pricing Model determines how the automatic pricing will be set.

Auctioneer Pricing Models

Simple: This is an  arithmetic mean (average) of prices seen over 3, 7 and 14 day intervals. This is more accurate over a longer period

StdDev: This calculates the standard deviation of the prices, then takes the arithmetic mean of all prices within 1.5 standard deviations of the simple mean; this may discard some extreme values.

Purchased: attempts to see auctions that were bought-out before expiration, and averages those buyouts

Market: An average of the results of the models listed above.

Vendor: Sets the price at 3* the amount you would get if you sold the item to an NPC vendor.

I primarily use Market and Vendor. Market gains accuracy as you collect data. At 3-5 days worth of scans you should be getting reasonably accurate results. I use this model for everything except equipment drops that don’t show up very often and don’t have much (or any) data. For these I use Vendor. You can change the Vendor markup from 300% in the Configuration screen, but I find the default works pretty well.

You can always check the data listed for item in the bottom half of the screen to see if the prices the Market model is giving you seem accurate. You always have the option to undercut by checking the Enable Price Matching box. This will attempt to undercut using the price matching model that you have set in the Configuration screen (or you can use the default). Configuring price matching is discussed in the next chapter.

When you are ready to post the item, click the Post Item button at the bottom right of the window.

If you want to learn more about Auction House gold making strategies, Mayley Winters has launched a complete video series that shows you how to master the Auction House. Check out my review here.