The Auctioneer Add-on for World of Warcraft
One of the most useful World of Warcraft utilities I’ve found to date is the Auctioneer Complete Package. This includes several actual tools, including Auctioneer, Bean Counter, and Bottom Scanner. If you are a regular WoW player and you haven’t picked up this add-on set, you’re probably not making as much gold in the game as you could be. In this article, I’m going to cover the major functionality of the Auctioneer package (but there’s a lot more I won’t be covering – mostly because I haven’t used those capabilities enough yet).
After you install Auctioneer on your system, the first thing you’ll notice is that you start getting a LOT more information about the items you move your mouse cursor over, as shown in the image below:
The topmost window you see here is the normal Wow information about an inventory item. Below that is a second window provided by Auctioneer. Auctioneer provides a lot of information, starting with the item’s level (if any), how many times Auctioneer has seen the item up for auction, average starting bid, current bid, buyout, and median (most-common) buyout price, and so forth. It provides a suggested price for the item you’re carrying, automatically quoting the price based on the size of the stack of items you’re carrying at that moment. It also tells you if your “competition” in the auction house is overpriced (“Competition above market”), underpriced (“Cannot match current price”), or not. The “Buy 20″ and “Sell 20″ refer to the in-game vendor prices for the item. In other words, if I tried to sell this stack of Runecloth Bandages to an in-game vendor, I would get 1 gold coin for it. However, based on the suggested selling price above it, I should be getting 1 gold, 14 silver, and 40 copper from other players in the auction house. Thus it makes more sense to sell this item at auction than to dump it on a vendor.
This functionality is useful when you’re at the auction house trying to price something, but the real value is when you’re out questing or farming in the game. For example, imagine that your inventory is full of things and you’ve just found a potentially valuable sword. To pick it up, you’re going to have to drop something. But what? If you drop something more valuable than the sword, you’re throwing money away. To figure out what to drop, take a look at the suggested price of the item you want to pick up and the items you’re already carrying. This will help you decide which item you’re carrying is the least valuable, so that you can drop it in favor of the new sword. Thus, Auctioneer is helping you make money even outside the auction house.
Aside from the item pricing windows, the next most visible change Auctioneer will make to the WoW interface is in the auction window, which will look something like this when you bring it up:
Notice that there are now several tabs at the bottom of the Auction interface now, and a new button marked “Scan”. This Scan button is a very important one. When you have about 15 minutes to spare, click the Scan button. This tells Auctioneer to go out into the auction listings and “learn” the current item pricing on this particular server and auction house. While it’s scanning, you’ll see a display like the following in the auction window:
This tells you that Auctioneer is busy learning what items cost at the auction house. In this example, it has 165 pages of items to go through, and it goes through each page at about the rate of 10.53 items per second. Based on that, it will take about 12 minutes and 58 seconds to complete the scan.
About 13 minutes later, Auctioneer will have scanned all the items in the auction house and will “know” the real market value of all of them. The more times you scan the auction house, the better Auctioneer’s pricing estimates will be. For example, while the price on an item it’s seen 3-5 times in the auction house MAY be a good one, the price on an item it’s seen 120 times is probably going to be a lot more accurate. Thus it is to your benefit to scan the auction house regularly. Personally, I like to start the scan when I am about to log off for the evening. I just go to one of the auction houses, click the button, go AFK (type “/afk” in the WoW chat window), and leave. Eventually my WoW session will time out, but in the meantime Auctioneer will be able to collect all (or at least most) of the auction data.
Another major change Auctioneer makes to the WoW interface is on the Auctions tab of the Auction interface. As shown in the example below, it will automatically fill in a Starting Price and Buyout Price for you, based on its past auction house scans. It will fill in the Auction duration you normally use as well. If you decide to set a price that is different from Auctioneer’s suggested price and you want Auctioneer to always use your price instead of its own, checking the “Remember price” box before creating the auction will ensure that Auctioneer remembers your price and uses it.
Technically, BottomScanner is a separate add-on from Auctioneer, but they are so well integrated in the complete package that you wouldn’t notice. The BtmScan tab in the auction interface allows you to start, stop, and monitor BottomScanner.
What is BottomScanner? Like Auctioneer, BottomScanner scans through the items in the auction house for you. Unlike Auctioneer, BottomScanner looks at the lowest priced items and compares them to its database to see if there are any “bargains” on the auction house right now. That is, if an item currently up for auction has a buyout price that would allow you to make some quick money, it will display an alert like the following:
In this example, BottomScanner is telling us that if we buy the Shadow Draenite that it’s telling us about, it will cost us 1 gold and 19 silver. It believes we should be able to resell it later for 1 gold and 75 silver, making a 56 silver, 15 copper profit before auction fees. If we think this is a good deal, we click “Yes” to buy it. If we think it’s not a good deal, we click “No” to ignore the item. If we don’t want to “speculate” on this particular item, we can click “Ignore” and we won’t see it again this session.
So how do you know if something’s a good deal? Use that Auctioneer window! Note the following example:
In this case, BottomScanner has found us a Libram of Rumination which is priced at 1 gold for buyout. It believes we can resell the item for 1 gold and 97 silver. When we move our mouse over the Libram’s icon, Auctioneer tells us what it thinks, based on previous scans of the auction house.
As you can see, Auctioneer says that we should be able to sell this item for 1 gold, 26 silver, and 8 copper starting bid, 1 gold, 57 silver, and 61 copper buyout price. (I look at the suggested price rather than the BottomScanner prices since you’re more likely to get the Suggested prices than the others.) Auctioneer also tells me that it’s seen this item 15 times in the auction house, so its pricing is probably pretty accurate. If I choose to buy this item and return to the Auction house with it, I can drop it onto the Auction tab and Auctioneer will automatically fill in the suggested prices for me. With a 1 gold investment and a few mouse clicks, I stand to make at least 57 silver. (Whether or not that’s enough for you to personally risk 1 gold is naturally for you to decide.)
When you use BottomScanner and Auctioneer together in this way, you can sometimes make a lot of in-game money. You can also, if you are unlucky or not very careful, lose a lot of in-game money. Personally, I avoid buying any item that Auctioneer hasn’t seen a lot of, or for which it suggests a price that isn’t at least 50% higher than the item’s current buyout price. Even at that, I occasionally get stuck with something and have to either use it, sell it to a vendor, or auction it off for less than I paid. A good strategy is to buy items during the week while fewer people are playing, then hold on to them until the weekend. Then relist them when lots of people are playing and bidding. This should give you at least a small profit in most cases.
Remember, Auctioneer’s prices are always a “guess” and not a guarantee. While Auctioneer may have scanned 100 auctions and make you feel pretty confident that the shield you just paid 1 gold for will sell for 2 gold, you might find that there really isn’t a demand for that particular shield on your server anymore and you end up having to sell it to a vendor for 1 silver (thus losing 99 silver!).
I hope I’ve helped you see the value in using the Auctioneer package while playing World of Warcraft. If so, you can download it here and install it for yourself. If not, there are other auction tools you might find more useful. Have a look on the web and see.