I'm sure you've seen people making the claim that someone is instantly undercutting them by 1 copper the moment they post and you scoffed at them. Then it happened to you and you were probably a little angry and confused as well. How can someone "bot" the auction house and get away with it?
The dirty little secret is that there is an addon, well it's more like a plugin for an addon, that allows you to constantly check for items you've been undercut on as well as post whenever one is found. The addon is perfectly legal and will cause your character to go afk if you don't move at some point while using it. It's no different than say queing up 100 frostweave bags and letting your toon craft without pushing any other buttons.
There's quite a bit of controversy about this little toy and many people are scared to use it for fear of being banned. I think it's entirely possible that some day blizzard could turn around and ban this addon but I doubt they would ban the players using it. It would be no different than when blizzard removed the AVR addon.
So How Do You Deal With Undercutters?
The fundamental question I get asked constantly from players is how do I deal with undercutters. There are several strategies so I'll take each one and give my feedback on how useful they are.
QA3
One obvious option is to fight fire with fire and use the same addons against them. If you do choose this semi-suicidal tactic, well be sure that you have tons of items in your bags to avoid having to run back to the mail box (this will also give you a period of time where your competition is unloading mail and you're selling unhindered by them). Check here for a mini-tutorial on using QA3 to setup items.
Mobile Auction House
If your competition is waiting for you to get on to run their scans then you can use the mobile auction house as a way to bipass this method of tracking you. The mobile auction house is a weapon of immense power when used correctly.
"Friends"
Friending your competition will allow you to sneak onto your auctioneer the minute your opponent goes offline and unload your auctions in their absence. If I ever log on and see the vast majority of my competition offline then I go balls to the wall and post everything I can (within reason of course).
Avoidance
Let's say you have some nut who is willing to make almost nothing or is just playing with your favorite market. Perhaps it's time to take a few days off and work on your other strategies. Having a diverse portfolio (hehe I love economic speak) allows you to avoid anomalies in the market.
Playing With Thresholds
The key to understanding QA3 is thresholds and fallbacks. Thresholds are the price at which an auctioneer will sell no lower than when using QA3. Their fallback is the price at which they post an item when either the lowest price is beneath their threshold or there are no other auctions present.
Knowing this, you can perform two interesting strategies... post just above or just below their threshold. Posting just below will mean that all their auctions go to fallback price and they are no longer competing with your auctions. This could be a good thing if you are still making some degree of profit and it's always worth trying to go very low and seeing what your competition does. If you try the reverse and post just above their threshold you can buy them out at the lowest they are willing to sell and then flip these items at a later date. I did this to someone selling eternal fires by posting at 12 gold, he undercut all day long at 11.99.99 gold and I reposted them two days later for 40 gold each.
These are my strategies for dealing with undercutters, what are yours?
22 comments: on "That's Not a Bot Undercutting You"
JayTekStorm said... September 21, 2010 at 9:47 AM
I love QA3 BTW. You can also use Auctionator to check undercuts if you don't want to use QA3.
I did see that one of my auction house competitors was banned about a month ago. There was one weekend where I was getting undercut almost instantly Friday through Sunday in epic JC markets. Some of my fellow jewelcrafters even whispered me about who the heck this player was because it was getting out of hand. They would try to contact this player but would receive no response.
Next day this player wasn't online and I have checked the armory too. No login since that date. Guess this player really did have a bot.
April said... September 21, 2010 at 10:24 AM
It's been a few months since I actively played, but at the time the AH and trade channel were full of stuff being sold by gold sellers. They would always sell on level 1's with bizarre nonsense names, and change their names every 5-6 days. I finally got one to talk to me, and in broken English he admitted his quota was 5000g per day.
I enjoy competing with regular players, but these people were always tough to beat because most of their goods were priced in such a way that they were probably stolen from hacked accounts.
Drogg said... September 21, 2010 at 11:20 AM
The remote AH is my weapon of choice... the ability to anonymously be logged into the game and watching for bargains/undercutters is great for me... especially when at work lol
And i've even found way's to combat the bots... if you see you're being botted, figure out what is not available, list that item for a ludicrous price wait 10-15 mins, cancel and relist for 1/2 that ludicrous price.... I've sold the occasional common vendor available drink/food for over 2000g when a botter is camping the cross-faction AH... you make money and get the satisfaction of finding ways in annoying them lol
jimmyolsenblues said... September 21, 2010 at 11:56 AM
Qa3 takes a few minutes to understand.
But man it is just as important as auctioneer..and its beautiful because it creates buttons in auctioneer.
Just create a group.
like gems
set the lowest (i think its called threashold..not sure)prices you would be willing to sell say 129
set the highest price (i think its called fallback) say 199g
set the override time to 48hours..i like 48 hours instead of 12.
then click the add tab and add your gems.
you have to have the gems in your bags to add.
i didnot understand that at first.
google markco steps to QA3...its easy and you can dominate posting better than anyone.
m3thlol said... September 21, 2010 at 12:26 PM
Don't be fooled, the bots do exist and are fairly easy to obtain if you have some extra cash.
I won't be posting where for obvious reasons, but they are out there.
nemof said... September 21, 2010 at 1:30 PM
Haruuum. Not QA3 poster again Marcko. You've been trying to push that this is ok for a while, it obviously unethical and against the spirit of the terms of conditions.
Your arguments basis is that you have to be around to make sure you don't run out of stock as QA3 poster checks, cancels and reposts for you, however this is quite obviously massive automation.
Stating that the addon is perfectly legal gives an inference that it's been OK'd by blizzard, when unless I've missed something, they don't know anything about it. It's not that it's legal, it's just very new and not many people have heard of it outside the JMTC forums.
Bottom feeder used to be unknown, Norganna (the auctioneer and BF creator) asked blizzard if it was OK and they said it wasn't, this was in 2006. Both addons offer similar levels of automation.
If blizz really have said there is no problem with QA3 poster than I take back everything I said, otherwise any mention of it should come with a strong warning that people could get into trouble for using it, if a GM decides that a user is botting.
Anonymous said... September 21, 2010 at 1:49 PM
On my server it is a bot.
This guy hasn't been offline for more than 5 minutes at a time in over a year. Constantly pulling and reposting his 1 or 2 of each item in multiple markets... All gems, rares, epics, metas, all item enhancemants, enchants, flasks, herbs, you name it if there's 1c profit to be had he's posting it and undercutting by 1c. If he thinks posting under cost will drive someone out of the market he'll do that too. I've been fighting him multiple markets for a long time but his 24/7 online presence gives him an endless supply of cheap mats.
Reports don't help, he's usually watching the bots (multiple accounts and always at least 2 toons online), speaks good english and has a good innocent act.
It's completely ridiculous. I spend extraordinaire amounts of time fighting him, yet no matter what time of the day or night I log on for over a year he's there within minutes to undercut me.
Liam said... September 21, 2010 at 3:08 PM
Thanks for telling everyone about this amazing addon haha. now the AH will crash and burn !
blacksage said... September 21, 2010 at 3:15 PM
My biggest concern with this add-on is that in order to 'fix' it they may end up doing something or simply deciding that they are unhappy with QA3's default behaviour.
I do not look forward to posting glyphs and gems individually.
tabagold said... September 21, 2010 at 4:30 PM
It's good to see that you read CallToAuction comments even :) You're welcome.
And I agree with Liam. We're doomed now. I am retiring till cataclysm and just powerleveling professions from people unloading mats like crazy these days. I think the 4.0 downloader caused some panic in the world:)
zomg, new calltoauction is out. Props.
Anonymous said... September 21, 2010 at 4:47 PM
I sill stand to what I said in the email I sent to you Call to Auction when you discussed about the use of this plugin addon.
I'm sorry, I must disagree with you. Its not legal at all, it's a form of boting. It is against the TOC, Blizzard just hasn't taken action to it yet. And you know they will come Cataclysm. I'm not going to be shocked if they break QA3 and make it where we no longer can mass bulk anything like that.. as it is QA3 has been warn already, this plugin takes away the "do you wish to cancel/report" screen which Blizard force QA3 to add or get banned. So why should these plugin be any better?
I have to say, to the people who made this addon and the people who use it.. lazy and thanks for making the game worst. Its bad enough people camp the AH all day, but now they can just go off for an hour doing nothing and still undercut you. Everyone should be ashamed of this.
Markco said... September 21, 2010 at 5:44 PM
@The Nu - You will go afk if you leave the computer while this addon is running. It is no different then hitting "craft all" and walking away from your toon.
Other addons which have been banned before do not allow you to go afk and therefore are making use of more than one action per click. QA3 Poster is using one click and one "action" in coding speak which is what blizzard is referring to when they talk about actions per click.
I hope that helps you understand the addon better as I completely understand where you are coming from.
Anonymous said... September 21, 2010 at 5:47 PM
I love QA3! At first I used it for scrolls of enchant and I was hooked, now I have 5 of every epic gem, titanium ore, bars titansteel, belt buckles, ing imaginable in QA3, I also put every recipie sold from venders, List from the first blogging carnival on (took like 2 minutes btw) if QA3 gets banned, ill be very sad :(
Grump said... September 21, 2010 at 7:43 PM
I encourage the unwashed masses to keep believing QA3 is against the ToS/EULA. More sales for me.
Scott said... September 22, 2010 at 12:22 AM
personally, I agree that this is bad addon for the game and will definitely be made illegal. It's ridiculous on my server we have a guy that camps the AH 12 hours straight every night, cant sell a single glyph unless he is out of stock on it.
People can say its okay all they want. It isn't. You have to know this in your heart, no one can possibly really be that obtuse. It isn't in the spirit of competition it is botting plain and simple.
the sad part is the people using this are probably going to run the massive automatic posting and undercutting features that make it possible to run a large glyph business in the first place w/o spending an hour+ at the AH every-time you want to repost.
Raddik said... September 22, 2010 at 3:21 AM
A few days after QA3 Poster went out, someone on the official forums posted about it trying to get an oficial answer about is legality. Then a blue edited the post and deleted de name of the addon saying that they will investigate it. That's the reason I'm afraid of using QAPoster.
Raddik said... September 22, 2010 at 3:30 AM
Ok, this is from yesterday, just have to wait for a blue answer
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=26850258471&sid=1
Anonymous said... September 22, 2010 at 12:09 PM
If someone is camping your realm's AH for "12 hours straight" it's some other addon that keeps him logged in and automating his postings. QA3 wont keep you logged in and I don't see how this addon is different from other AH addons in the same cathegory.
Anonymous said... September 22, 2010 at 12:14 PM
I now realize you're talking about some plug-in addon to QA3, and after reading Raddik's post, I don't think this plug-in should be allowed.
Liam said... September 22, 2010 at 7:02 PM
in pve terms
Quick auctions 3 = Bigwigs / Deadly Boss Mods
Quick auctions poster = AVR
One step away from Being AVR encounters
Kinda how I think blizzard will see it if they ever take an interest, but for now its an amazing addon which i appreciate a lot. Its no different from Crafting mass items like marco said.
Those who say this is botting, Its just telling to post all goods according to how you set up QA3 after each scan, just like telling wow to craft saronite bars constantly
xoxo anaalius
Anonymous said... September 23, 2010 at 4:38 AM
it's all written in LUA, only using the wow-api. Nothing bannable there.
Nevertheless, I highly doubt Blizzard like the way the addon is going. They are going to break it for sure and when they do, I hope for the love of the author that I don't have to perform a hardware-event (i.e. click yes) for each single auction I want to post.
If they do break it that way (and I can't see any other way then making the postfunction needs a HW Event) then the author pretty much killed the whole glyph industry on his own. Congrats to him then, the community will love him
yerishan said... October 5, 2010 at 2:44 PM
They killed it alongside with any batch posting in the latest PTR build.
Now we need a keypress per item (stack) posted
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