Making Money: Guide to Auctioneer Advanced Part 1

Are you a casual player looking to make some money in WoW?

Casual players not looking to make money in WoW should stop reading at this point. Maybe you have a few gold making strategies and know the prices and likelihood of sales for a few items at the AH very well. Perhaps you do not(more on strategies in an upcoming post). Regardless, an addon will likely help you make money in WoW.

I started using the addon Auctioneer Advanced a few weeeks ago and would like to offer it as a very powerful tool to the casual WoW player looking to make money.

Auctioneer Advanced (AucAdv) can be downloaded from many sites. WoW Matrix offers many mods, including AucAdv and the older Auctioneer. The alternatives for downloading are either the Curse addon site. Similar AH mods can also be found on the WoW Ace platform. Read and follow the installation instructions carefully and installation should be no problem. Note that AucAdv is currently in Beta testing. The final version should have a feature to allow searches (Auc Classic had this feature).

Before you delete your Classic Auctioneer, note that all of your previous data will be lost and that not all the functions of Classic Auctioneer are present in AucAdv. AucAdv runs on an entirely new database.


DAY ONE: Configure General User Preferences, Appraiser and Bottom Scanner

Bottom Scanner (BtmScn) activates when you are at the AH and have an AH window open. Btm Scn is an AH search that looks for items that you can profit from by vendoring, disenchanting to resell the results, prospecting for gems or reselling as purchased above the price offered in the AH. Just sit in the AH and wait for the doorbell to ding, which is your notification that BtmScn has found a deal for your consideration. Btm Scn can look through the AH much faster than you can for deals, but is not infallible or a 100% improvement upon your own intuition and market knowledge.

Configuring BtmScan sets up parameters that controls the incoming AH sales. For example, AH finds a Braxxis Staff of Slumber priced at 25g. You need to tell BtmScn whether or not this item at this price fits your intended profit model.

Appraiser is used within Btm Scan to find the correct items to purchase and alone in the Appraiser tab to help price and list your auctions.

Having Appraiser set up correctly and having all of the competing modules turned off is the key to using Auc Adv.

Before you get started on changing settings start by reading this for a guide to interpreting the tooltip in Auc Adv.

Here is a synopsis of Auc Adv:


Bottom Scanner-

Core Options:
General-
Display Settings- Activate this option so that you can see the information when you mouse over an item.
Reserve Amount is simply how much money you will allow AucAdv to spend on deals in the AH. This is completely up to you, but I would recommend reserving less of your wealth when you have little money and reserve more when you have large nest egg. As you make more money you will get a better idea of how much return you will get and which items have more risk than others.
Example: Level 1 with 15g- set reserve to 5g (33% of wealth);
Level 70 with 2000g- set reserve to 1800g (90% of wealth)

Maximum Price is a measure of how much risk you are willing to take on any single item. I keep this low at most times, because there are some AH scams that can trick BtmScn into thinking that Ruined Pelt is a great deal at 100g. Again, the amount you set here will depend on your wealth.
Example: Level 1 with 15g- set Maximum to 1g
Level 70 with 2000g- set Maximum to 10g

Allow Bid or Buyout allows setting of the potential.....it's really quite obvious I suppose. Only one point here: Bid will tie up your money from being used in buyout. There are scenarios for using bids, but they are few. Choose buyout to start and consider adding bid later when you are more comfortable with the mod.

Profiles- make a name for your account.


Evaluators:
Appraiser- This is the workhorse of AucAdv. It both tells BtmScn which items are deals and helps set the price for those items in the AH.

Minimum profit- Base this value on your wealth- setting the minimum percent profit lower when you have less money and higher when you have more. This is a measure of how much you want each gold spent to return in AH sales. It will somewhat depend on your maximum price per item, because a min profit of 10% on a 100g item is still 10g, while min profit of 10% on a 1g item is only 10 silver profit. If your are a level 70, 10s doesn't help much. If you are level 1, that is a good profit. There is also a minimum discount, which allows you to set risk again- this time as a percent.
Example: Level 1 with 15g- set minimum profit to 10%
Level 70 with 2000g- set to 25-50%

Level 1 with 15g- set minimum profit amount to 50s
Level 70 with 2000g- set minimum profit to 3g

Q-check simply allows items of a certain quality to be considered. Set this to common, unless you want to speculated on greens or better gear. I will need to confirm if setting quality above white will filter out herbs and materials.

Seen allows filtering of items that show up only rarely in the AH. I have this set to 10 currently. There are other descriptors that allow you to determine the accuracy of price, but this is probably worth setting to avoid the need to evaluate every purchase for its accuracy.

Fees Adjustment allows you to account for fees in the AH. I would reccomend subtracting this for high level weapons and armor and ignoring the AH fees for most other auctions.

Comparable I believe this function looks for gear of the same kind you have. It can be used for gear replacement. I don't use this much, so no other comments.

Disenchant Configure and enable this if you are an enchanter and plan to buy items for the sole purpose of disenchanting and selling the products.

Enchant Mats comments welcome.

Prospect Allows parameters for obtaining gems from ores. Config and enable if you are a miner looking to prospect from ores as a strategy.

Resale This is where you set the parameters for reselling your items. BtmScn will pick them up for you based on these parameters. Disable this if you want to use your Appraiser settings (I would recommend this).

Snatch Disabled in AucAdv, but may be present in a final version of AucAdv.

Vendor Set parameters for buying items from the AH to sell to vendors for profit. This is a great way to make money when you have very little money to spend. Set the margins low- these sales are guaranteed profit. Even 5s will net a lot of money if you repeat the process 10 times in one day.

Filters: This section of options is somewhat confusing, in that it is unclear whether you are filtering against purchasing or for purchasing. When an option says "activate", it is likely blocking items that do not fit the specified criteria (you will not see these items in Bottom Scan).

IgnoreItemPrice-
Enable Price- I believe this enables maximum cost per item and minimum profit settings to take effect. This setting may be redundant with resale and appraiser. I have this option disabled, to allow Appraiser to do the work.

Resale- disabled for the same reason as above.

Appraiser- allows Appraiser settings to be used when listing items in the AH. This is the easiest way to set up and understand both buying and selling on the AH. Enable this option!

Vendor enables the vendor settings, as above.

IgnoreItemQuality- Setting this to ignore poor and common armor, weapons and recipes will probably prevent some savings, as these items may be less likely to sell than their green or higher counterparts.

IgnoreItemType- Filters items by the level at which you can use them. This is most useful when searching for gear for your own personal use.



Appraiser-

Stat Modules:
Classic- this model using a somewhat complex algorithm to arrive at a market price. This involves a moving average of prices over the number of days that you specify.

Purchased- gives value to items base on what your AH scan believes are items purchased for the buyout price. This means the item disappeared from the AH before its listing time had expired.

Simple- averages of the listing prices (not sales) for the last 3, 7, or 14 days.

Std Dev- mean price (as in Simple) and the normalized mean, which is the mean within 1 standard deviation of the simple mean. This is the mean of 67% of the values around the mean and excludes the other 33% of data- basically stating that they are outliers and not important i the analysis. This attempts to minimize the effect of outliers, but can still be fooled if many outliers are present.

Purchased- probably the most useful stat, as the actual sales (not listings) of the auctions are reported.

Filter Modules:
Basic Filters
Quality- select a trash (0), common (1) or better quality for items. This function overlaps somewhat with the ignore filters.

Outlier- disallows very high and very low values from entering your data stream. It is unclear if this effects the Std Dev valuator (or does it make these exclusions on its own). If the Outlier filter is addititve to Std Dev, then Std Dev valuation would be much more accurate than using the Std Dev of all values alone.

Match- is a function for listing your auctions. Simply set the following:
-under market price %
-max over market price %
-undercut- If the value of the item is at market this will undercut the market value. Otherwise, other filters will be used to determine the value. I don't use this function.


Utility Modules:
Appraiser-allows a model to use for pricing your auctions when listing in the AH. I choose Purchased and the alternate is Std Dev, which will be used if model if data is not available for your first choice model.

AskPrice allows other players to send a tell with keywords What Worth [item]?


Well....that being described, there are many things to be learned about the interaction of these various modules and models in Auc Adv. I would appreciate your experience and suggestions to make this guide as accurate as possible.