Get Auctioneer or a good auction house addon!!! No seriously, addons will save you both time and money. This tip goes out to everyone that is starting to become a goblin in wow. Addons such as auctioneer and auctionator will show you the lowest priced goods on the auction house without having to scan through pages and pages of items.
As you can see below I'm using auctioneer, it alters the auction house window to show a thing called "PCT". PCT stands for Percent, it tells you at what percent an item is priced at according to it's Market Value. There are four different colors, red means the item is priced above it's normal market price thus you probably shouldn't buy it. Yellow means that it's priced at it's normal market value ( 100% ). Green means it's a tad below market price and is a great deal. Last but not least we have blue, meaning it's an awesome deal.
Above is an example of what I'm taking about. Notice that I'm trying to buy some Dense Stone to turn into the Darkmoon Faire. The first page shows me Dense stone in stacks of 1 at 284% Market Value - It's heavily over priced so I won't buy that. The next screenshot shows page 2 with 2 postings of dense stone at 47% Market Value - I will instantly buy that because it's extremely cheap ( There were roughly 40 stacks before I took the screenshot, I left 2 stack so the market wouldn't reset! ).
Without auctioneer I would of probably thought that the first page of Dense Stone was the cheapest when it actually wasn't. By using auctioneer or a similar auction house addon you're going to be saving yourself a good amount of gold.
10 comments: on "Saving Gold In Azeroth Tip #3"
daniel.stewart1993 said... June 17, 2011 at 8:02 AM
Good post. Unfortunately for me scanning with Auctioneer takes forever so I don't use that addon anymore. I tend to just use Auctionator it's basically the same it just doesn't show the PCT but sorts automatically by price per item.
Anonymous said... June 17, 2011 at 9:32 AM
@Daniel.stewart1993
In the top left hand corner of Auctioneer there's a Quick Scan button, it look's like two little blue arrow's. If you have a fast enough connection it will scan Auctioneer in around 3 minutes. If you have a slow connection I believe it can crash wow so be careful!
Skorpsy said... June 17, 2011 at 10:30 AM
Good post, I would just warn people though to be slightly cautious if an item they are not very familiar with shows up as blue. If there is a large price difference, make sure you know your item.
One of my favourite strats is a twist on this one kind of. I like to manipulate the fact that on my server we always have that one or two crazy person posting nutty prices on odd things. This is great for me cuz if I see a 50-100g item listed for 2k i know on my server nobody is going to buy it, but if i come in and post it for only a few hundred more than its usual price, but massively undercutting the crazy guy, then someone that doesnt even need or want the item is gonna buy it thinking quick flip, cuz his addon told him so.
people who are scanning and just snatching stuff up that looks like good deals buy my stuff up faster than they normally would, if I had to wait for someone to actually be needing that often obscure but not overly useful item.
lol Then for added amusement (Yes I am mean sometimes, I know) I roll in after I see them re-list their overpriced crap i just lured them into buying. If I'm super lucky they will buy all my items one by one thinking they are gonna hit the jackpot eventually in flipping. Sometimes, I watch them try and sell it for an absurd price for days before they give up and wind up posting it for another absurd price the other direction. double-wammy. lol sometimes they even send me an annoyed whisper before they get frustrated and just give it away on the ah. :P
This is probably server dependent though and admittedly my server is microscopic so has some odd quirks to it.
Theruling said... June 17, 2011 at 10:35 AM
I actually stopped using Auctioneer because of the feature highlighted in this post. It is clunky in my opinion and it's a pain to try to find or buy anything. When I used it I actually kept 1 character without it and I'd buy all my random stuff not on snatch likts on that character. Auctioneer takes far to long to scan ("quick" scan is 5 minutes sometimes) and is stubborn about updating pricing data when shifts in the market happen, making it the most inaccurate in my opinion as well.
Clint R. Murphy said... June 17, 2011 at 11:10 AM
Mageshadow,
I think a key is definitely to warn people to know their markets as posted above because it can otherwise get you in trouble.
With regards to shopping and add-ons, I tend to use trade skill masters shopping features, which sift through the data of the item I'm searching for and being up the cheapest items - quite convenient.
Auctionhouseaccountant.blogspot.com
Ytsejam said... June 17, 2011 at 12:17 PM
As others have alluded to, Auctioneer data poisoning is easier than many would like to believe(even with auctioneers attempts at removing large outliers from calcs). Know the Market. Buying it just because it is blue can bankrupt you.
Michael said... June 17, 2011 at 2:52 PM
Auctionator's buy tab is much better for what you want to accomplish. While it doesn't give you a PCT column to compare current price against what the addon thinks market price is, it does show you the cheapest current post per item, which is what you're really looking for here. You don't have the problem of sorting through pages of single dense stones for high prices, before you find that "steal" of a stack of them.
And yeah, I'll echo what others have said. Poisoning Auctioneer data is very easy. I've done it myself with success a number of times.
If you're just a casual buyer and don't have time to learn the markets, it might be worth the risk to use the PCT column (tempered with common sense), but if you're a true goblin, you should probably learn the market yourself. :)
Anonymous said... June 17, 2011 at 3:23 PM
I used to have a big problem with Auctioneer taking forever to Quick Scan (3 min plus), then adding about 30 seconds to my character logout time.
Recently though I installed the latest version of Auctioneer, disabled most of the stat modules then made a change in Core Options - General.
The second last option reads "Scan Retriever Time-to-Live". I reduced it to 5 seconds.
This prevents Auctioneer waiting around doing nothing for no particulary good reason, and has reduced my total scan time to about 20 seconds.
Markco said... June 18, 2011 at 6:52 AM
@last anon - could you send me in an email the details of what you did? I would like to share that with the public tutorial style if possible.
Thanks!
Anonymous said... June 18, 2011 at 2:21 PM
The problem with this post is that I don't use Auctioneer anymore for anything. Reason being its too bulky now and it crashes in more ways then one with TSM which is 100% better use then Auctioneer has become.
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