Auctioneer Tutorial – How to Auctioneer from A to ZPosted by xenith on March 18th, 2010

Auctioneer is a big, complex add-on and even when you know how the different parts work, it can be difficult to figure out a process that will make you gold without spending hours staring at the Auction House screen. So to get you started, I am going to outline the main steps you need to follow to get started. As you learn more about Auctioneer and the market on your server, you can adjust as needed. Don’t forget to refer back to the tutorial if you forgot how to do something.

STEP 1: Create low level mules and park one at an Alliance AH, one at a Horde AH and one of your main faction at a neutral AH. YOu will need a mule on the opposite faction on a different account or a friend on the opposite faction to help you transfer items. If you do not want to do cross-faction arbitrage, just create one mule on the faction of your choice. If you have gold on a main character, buy the biggest bags you can afford for your mules. If not, buy bags as soon as you make some gold.

STEP 2: Get 5-7 days worth of scans from each faction you are working on. Scan twice a day if you can but once will be ok.

STEP 3: If you GATHER or CRAFT, create batch posts for all the items that you sell regularly. If you are going to use DISENCHANT, MILL or PROSPECT arbitrage, set up batch posts for the products you will create using those skills. You will need to have at least one of the item in your inventory to set it up as a batch post item so collect the items and mail them to your main mule first.

STEP 4: Configure a RESALE and CONVERT searcher. You initial settings need to reflect how much gold you have to invest. If you only have a small amount, set your maximum item price and minimum profits low. As you build up your bank balance, you can increase these. Make sure that you SAVE the searchers for later use.

STEP 5: OPTIONAL – Configure an arbitrage search. Don’t forget that when you buy items using this searcher, you will need to mail them to your neutral AH mule on your current faction and have a character on the opposite faction (on a different account) buy it. You can then mail it to your opposite faction AH Mule and list it on the opposite faction’s AH. Phew. Sounds complicated but it really isnt and its very profitable!

STEP 6: Configure DISENCHANTING, MILLING, PROSPECTING if you have any of those skills. Make sure you set them up to return items appropriate to your current skill level.

STEP 7: Load and Run your searchers. Review the results and buy the items you want (or CTRL+ALT+SHIFT click Purchase to buy everything in the list.

STEP 8: If you identify items that you can profit from regularly on your server, add them to your SNATCH list. Enter a price threshold that you are sure will guarantee you a good profit at resale.

Now, when you have everything set up, on each visit to the Auction House on your mule, you will do the following:

1. Scan (Get All if it works well for you)
2. Run Searchers and make purchases
3. Collect purchased items from mail
4. Collect gathered, looted and crafted items that you have sent from your alts (including cross faction or from main characters) from mail
5. Convert, Disenchant, Mill, Prospect items
6. Batch Post gathered, looted or crafted items
7. Appraise and post additional items

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.

Auctioneer Tutorial – Improve Your Profits Using BeanCounterPosted by xenith on March 18th, 2010

The final tool that you get with Auctioneer Advanced is BeanCounter. All this module does is allow you to search your auction history for all you characters to see what items you have bought and sold and at what prices.

You can limit the information that BeanCounter displays to bids (yours) or auctions. You can also choose to list things like unsuccessful auctions.

You can use this tool to see how well certain items performed for you in the past and to help you decide if an item is worth continuing to buy. For example, you can check how many times you had to relist an item in the past and what it finally sold for. This might tell you that the item just does not sell well.

If you want to really be successful at making gold using the Auction House, BeanCounter is deceptively simple but is in factone of the most useful tools in the Auctioneer Suite, even though it is much easier to learn to use than the other modules (just search for what you want). The complex part comes in when you need to figure out what information to look for and then what you should do with it. You need to learn from your mistakes and then change your strategies. I have tried to show you the technical parts of actually using the add-on to help you in this tutorial, but the strategies have been simple; usually just help with default settings.

But you are certainly aware that there are much more interesting strategies you can develop and that goes beyond what I can tell you here. If you are serious, your next step should be to consult other Auctioneers – although don’t expect them to give away too many secrets – or move on to an advanced Auction house strategy guide.

Happy Auctioneering

Auctioneer Tutorial – Using Searchers and Filters in SearchUIPosted by xenith on March 18th, 2010

The Resale filter that we looked at in the last chapter finds items that you can resell at a profit without modification. The other profit searchers in SearchUI find items that you can buy, modify in some way and then sell at a profit. Most of these require your character to have a certain skill, like disenchanting or milling. The exception to this is Converter, which finds items that can be converted in some way with no special skills. For example, motes that can be combined into primals.

Auctioneer Disenchant Filter

Using  Searchers for Fun and Profit

The complete list of profit searchers is:

• Converter: convert items for profit without using a specific skill
• Disenchant: Disenchant items and sell results for a profit
• Milling: Mill items and sell results for a profit
• Prospect: Prospect items and sell results for a profit

All of these work in a similar way and their settings work just the way resale does. Just like resale, you need to set it up to work with your own situation.  In general, you should use all profit searchers that you have the skills for for maximum profits.

One setting to be aware of is the ‘Use custom levels’ option. This lets you search for items that you can convert using a skill that is in a specified skill range. For example, if your Disenchant skill is at 300, you can select Use custom levels, then set the Minimum skill slider to 0 and the Maximum skill slider to 300. Now the search will only return items that you can disenchant at your skill level. You can also use the Minimum skill slider to eliminate low level items from your search (although setting an appropriate minimum profit will take care of that more effectively). Once you are happy with your configurations, click Search to see your results.

Purchasing and ignoring works in exactly the same way as Resale.

Using Arbitrage Searchers to For Even Bigger Profits!

An additional profit searcher which works a little differently is Arbitrage. What Arbitrage does is find items that you can buy on your current faction and sell on auction houses of the opposite faction. This can be one of the best money making strategies you can use if you do it right.
You will need to use the neutral Auction Houses in Everlook, Booty Bay or Gadgetzan to transfer items. You will also need help from a friend or a second account because you cannot buy auctions that were posted by a character on the same account as the purchaser. The neutral AHs take a 15% cut so post your items at a low price and be very quick about having your friend or character on a second account purchase them. Leave it up too long and another player might come along and buy it. There are so called ‘Auction House Snipers’ who spend time doing just that. I suggest making your transfers at a quiet time for your server to reduce this problem.

When you use the Arbitrage searcher for cross-faction selling, you will need to make sure that you have several days of scans for BOTH factions if you want to get accurate results. While the whole process seems a bit involved, this is really a great way to make gold on the Auction House. Make sure that you have alts set up at all the Auction Houses that you want to trade on to save you time!

Save Time Using Snatch

If you really know the market for some specific items, such as certain crafting components and you know that the price can really fluctuate throughout the week, you can use the Snatch searcher to automatically find those items when they are listed below a certain price. You can add items from your bags to the snatch list and then set the price threshold or you can add an item from a search results list created by any other searcher.  Just select the item in a search list and click the Snatch button. To run the Snatch search, click Search on the Snatch page to show any item in your snatch list that is below the price threshold. Then alt+ctrl+shift click Purchase to buy all the items that it found.

Applying Filters

Filters are useful because they let you exclude classes of item that you never want to see listed in your search results for any searcher.

• ItemLevel: Filter the list by item level. Use to exclude low level items that don’t sell well or make much profit
• ItemQuality: Filter by item quality. Use to exclude gray items for example
• TimeLeft: Filter out items by auction time remaining. Useful if you are going to bid on resale items etc instead of buy out and you don’t want to have too long remaining when you can be outbid.

Saving and Loading Searchers

If you have created a search that you want to run over and over, enter a name for it click the Save button at the top of the Search tab.

When you want to run the searcher again, select the saved search from the drop down menu and click Load to load those search settings. Click Search to run the search as usual.

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.

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.

Auctioneer Tutorial – Posting Items Using the Simple Auction Post TabPosted by xenith on March 30th, 2009

In this second part of my tutorial on how to make gold in WoW using Auctioneer, I’m gong to show you one really simple way to use the addon to make gold.

For a lot of players, SimpleAuction contains all the functions that you need. You will get the improved Browse tab and the simple Post tab which allows you to search for items and post items easily. You will not get the more advanced Appraiser window for posting, nor will you get the SearchUI or BeanCounter. These last two are primarily useful to people who are intending to use the auctioneer method (buy items at a low price and immediately resell for profit) covered later in this e-book.

The simple interface is a great, easy way to make gold in WoW without spending too long figuring out the add-on.

If you only want to sell items that you gather, loot or craft, SimpleAuction may well be enough. In this case, you can download the simpified version of the add-on from the Auctioneer Addon site downloads page. Click the icon for the current Release version at the top then select the download in the Auctioneer section (not AuctioneerSuite - this is the full version). Make sure to delete or disable the full version if you already installed it.

Now head on over to an Auction House and interact with the Auction House NPC to display the interface. The add-on makes some useful modifications to the default Browse window. This will still be the default screen that you see when you visit the Auction House. You can always click the Browse tab to come back here.

Auctioneer Browse Tab and Compact UI

Auctioneer Browse Tab and CompactUI

If you installed the Auctioneer simple package instead of Auctioneer Suite, you may not see all the tabs and buttons shown in the image.

The main changes to notice are those in the list of items (provided by the CompactUI module in Auctioneer):

• the stack size and minimum level in separate columns
• a checkbox at the bottom of the list that allows you to display price per item instead of total price. This is very useful for making price comparisons.
• a color-coded percentage of market value (if you have the add-on configured to show this).
  This is a great feature if you want to make gold in WoW because it will help make sure you never pay too much for an item. You will need AuctioneerSuite for this to work since simple Auctioneer doesn’t provide statistics to calculate market value.

Now, click on the Post tab. This tab provides a simple way to post items on the Auction House for the best possible price. You will need to have performed at least one good scan before using it and the more recent the scan was done, the more relevant the price it recommends for your items will be. So if you haven’t already, go ahead and scan now by clicking the Play button at the top of the window.

Auctioneer Simple Post

To auction an item, drag the item (or stack) to the box at the top left (currently ‘Borean Man O’War’ in this screenshot). Directly below the item name, you will see what is being auctioned and for how much using the current settings. When you are happy with this, click Create Auction to post the items.

In the left hand bar, you can see settings for this auction in more detail. You can also edit anything that you are not happy with. If you like, you can change the bid and buy out prices for your item. But generally you will want to use the suggested price.

You can also edit how your items are stacked. In the screenshot above, you can see they are auctioning one stack of 10. But you could changes this to 2 x 5 and auction two separate stacks of 5 items, price adjusted accordingly.  One good gold secret of World of Warcraft is to only list items in full stacks if players always want to buy full stacks.  Some stackable items sell better if posted singly, so experiment with different stack sizes for your items.

You can also set the duration of the auction. I always set mine to 48 hrs personally (because I am lazy and don’t want to relist often). The downside to this is that your deposit will be higher. But you only lose the deposit if you do not sell the item at all.

The important options are at the bottom.  If you already have this item listed on the Auction House, you can select the  ‘Match my current’ option to list extra items of the same type at the same price.

Select ‘Undercut competition‘ to automatically undercut other sellers by a percentage (the exact percentage is configurable in the options. I find the default works well enough).  You should usually use this option, but look out for sellers with ridiculously low prices and don’t bother undercutting them. Particularly for trade and faction items that sell in large amounts, the cheap stuff will sell quickly then people will start buying your modestly priced items and you will make more money than if you had undercut the stupid cheap ones.

Finally, you can select ‘Remember fixed price’ to use this price for all future auctions of this item (until you change the option or manually edit the price). Most of the time, you won’t use this. You are usually better to set prices in line with the current market.

If you want to update the list of auctions of this item, click the Refresh button.

When everything is to your liking, click Create Auction. Often, this is all you will need to do to list an item, so you can get everything on the Auction House very quickly. What better way to make fast gold that with single-click price optimized auction listings?

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.

Auctioneer Tutorial – Introduction to Auction House ScansPosted by xenith on March 18th, 2009

So what is Auctioneer?

Its an Add-On to the WoW user interface that expands the functions of the Auction House in the game. Basically it provides just about every feature that you could ask for when it comes to getting rich at the Auction House. If you are trying to figure out how to make gold in WoW, this add on should be one of your first steps.

The main way that the add on helps people to make gold in WoW is by gathering information and analyzing it for you. You can use Auctioneer to scan all the auctions that are currently listed and record the item that is being sold and the price that it is being sold at. You can run the scan daily and over time you will begin to build a very clear picture of what items sell for a good price.  Auctioneer can also compare auction host sales prices to NPC vendor prices and even what the disenchant potential value of the item is, so you know if you will make more money by selling it on the AH, disenchanting it or selling it to an NPC.

This tutorial will teach you how to use the windows and options in Auctioneer to find and resell items for profit and will give some basic ideas on strategies and settings. For more in depth info on Auctioneering strategies and advanced sales techniques, check out Mayley Winters’ highly successful video series, Check out the Auction House Mastery guide for yourself.

Downloading and Installing Auctioneer

So lets get started by downloading the Add On and installing it. Auctioneer comes in two main ‘flavors’. The full ‘Auctioneer Suite’ which contains all the fun, advanced Auctioneer stuff like Appraiser for pricing and SearchUI for finding items you can buy and resell at a profit.  Basic ‘Auctioneer’ just contains the simple pricing and posting functions, so this good for people who just want an easy way to auction items they have farmed, gathered or crafted. This tutorial covers both versions, but I advise you to get the full version because you really can make much more gold with it. Only the full version is available at Curse.com. If you want the lite version, you will need to visit the add-on homepage here .

1. Visit the Auctioneer page at Curse.com http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/auctioneer.aspx. Curse is a great source for WoW addons by the way.

   

2. You can use one of two methods to download and install it. The first is to click the manual download button and then unzip the file into your *wow install directory*\Interface\Addons. Replace *wow install directory* with the directory in which you have the game installed. If you cannot see the add-on when you get into the game and visit the Auction House, try clicking the Add Ons button on the Character Select screen and make sure that Auctioneer is listed and enabled.
3. The second method is to use the Curse Client . This is the method that I use for lots of reasons. You can download and install add-ons with a single click on the website or you can find and install them through the Curse client program. It also warns you when add-ons that you have installed are updated and lets you install the new version. This is a great help on patch days when all of your add-ons get an update at the same time. You should note that the client will gather in-game data from you as you play and add it to wowdb.com, including your character profile.

Once you have Auctioneer installed, log in to the game and head to the nearest Auction House. You should see that your Auction House window got a lot more complicated! Or maybe a lot more interesting is a better way to look at it. For now we are just going to perform a normal scan.

Auctioneer Main Controls with Scan Button Highlighted

Scanning the Auction House For Price Data

At the top of the window you will see controls similar to those on a music player. Click the ‘Play’ button to begin the scan. The text will tell you how long you can expect the scan to take. It could take up to ten minutes so plan to go get a coffee or something. Don’t try to use the Auction House while the scan is in progress because it won’t work very well. Just let its do its thing. (The good news is that there is a faster way to scan that I will show you in a later section of this guide, which will work for most players.)

Once a scan is complete, you have some data to play with. Try to scan every day and you will gain a good picture of trends as well as a snapshot of prices at a single point in time and that lets you make better selling decisions.

How Often Should I Scan?

If you plan to use Auctioneer to help you buy auctions and resell them at a lower price, you should get at least 4-5 days worth of scans (preferably 2 full scans a day) before you completely rely on the data. If you just want to sell stuff you have gathered, looted or crafted, you can get started after one scan, since you mostly need to know what is on the Auction House when you post your items.

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

Add-on Spotlight: SellJunkPosted by xenith on March 15th, 2009

This beautifully simple little add on will save you a ton of time and help you make extra gold. All it does is add a button to the top right of every vendor screen in the game. Whenever you visit the vendor, just click that button and every gray item in your inventory will be sold automatically! This add on makes selling vendor trash a breeze.

Easy Button for Vendor Trash!

You can even set it up to sell junk automatically whenever you visit a vendor. You won’t even have to click the button. Get the add-on at Curse. You I recommend that you get the Curse Client too, it makes updating all your add-ons on patch days a lot less painful.