Auctioneer Tutorial – Introduction to Auction House Scans

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. If you would like a detailed walkthrough of one effective Auctioneer strategy to get started really quickly, get my 21 Steps to Making Gold at the Auction House guide.

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.

Fast scanning with Get All

The Get All scan  takes advantage of an ability that Blizzard recently gave to add-on developers that lets them grab all the Auctioneer data in one quick operation. This lets you scan the entire Auction House much more quickly. 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 ‘Get All’ 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.  Also try a lower traffic city instead of Stormwind and Orgrimmar.

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.