Keeping Track of Your Auction House

Posted by Markco at 8:00 AM

This post is an application written by Calum. Please respond with your feedback and if you'd like to see Calum hired at JMTC, give him a thumbs up in the comments!

I can't help but notice that every gold guide will provide you strategies to make gold, but they always say the same thing - It depends on your server. But how do you know? How do you keep track of the auction house? US servers have TheUndermineJournal, but not everyone is so fortunate. For those maybe not on US servers, or who might prefer another way to watch the AH, there is an addon for you. Market Watcher scans the auction house for all the auctions of a previously specified item and then complies the data and displays the information in a nice and easy to read graph. I had little success with the auction house. I would sell a couple of stacks of borean leather and be amazed when I got the gold, only to find out that they where selling for 5g dearer the next day. After discovering Market Watcher i was able to make better decisions about buying and selling items on my server.

How to set up Market Watcher

So once you have it installed, you just need to set it up and you will be ready to take control of your auction house. Ok, first thing to do is open up the history tab.

\

These two are your Market Watcher tabs:



Then you will want to add an item that you want to follow:



Click on add item, type the item into the box that shows up, click get item info and then click add. If Market Watcher is unable to find the item, then you can find the item ID from sites like wowhead, for example the item ID of copper bar can be found from the url http://www.wowhead.com/item=2840  so the item ID is 2840.

Once you have added your item another screen will give you options on how



Market Watcher will scan that item:




The highlighted box is primarily what needs changed. First, you will want to tick the Record Scans box. The other two boxes determine how long Market Watcher will keep data for this item. I tend to leave it at 30 days and 30 entries. The other options allow you to control what kind of auctions Market Watcher scans. Now that you have an item for Market Watcher to look for, all that you need to do is scan for it. This can be found in the Scan tab, and there is a button in the upper right side of the auction house window, click scan and market watcher will gather all the information about the auctions for the items that you have specified. After it's finished scanning, it will show the results in the history tab.

After your first scan you should get results as follows:



Now that you have Market Watcher set up it will collect information on all the items in its list and once there is more than one result, it will produce a graph for you.

You can change what lines are shown and what the time period is. Now that you have Market Watcher set up you can see the trends that items on your auction house are taking, which will help you to know when an item is selling low and when it is selling high.

Do you want to write for JMTC? Send in a post to Markco and if it makes it past the initial screening process then I will publish your submission on the blog. JMTC pays 50% commission to writers on the day that their post goes live.