Auctionator

Auctionator is designed for casual everyday auction house users. Auctionator makes the auction house easier to use, by presenting auction house listings clearly and succinctly, and by eliminating the tedium involved in posting and managing auctions.

FAQ
Aren’t auction house mods like Auctionator effectively cheating

• Of course, I don’t think so at all, but that’s not to say that there aren’t problems with the auction house experience. In particular, the problem of auction house campers, who continually monitor and undercut anyone who undercuts them is a real issue, and when it occurs, the victims’ frustration is quite understandable.

  But the solution is not to make the auction house so tedious and time-consuming to use, that campers give up. Not that they would anyway. Imagine that the standard auction house user interface were more logical and user-friendly. Would anyone suggest making it less so, just to attempt to deter auction house campers?

  Now there’s nothing wrong with undercutting – that’s the way markets are supposed to work. And as much as I don’t like when my own auctions get undercut, the other side of the coin is that it’s a good thing for buyers. The problem is that, the way the WoW auction house works, undercutting by a trivial amount yields far too much benefit to the seller and almost no benefit to the buyer. Being the cheapest auction, even if by only a single copper, always pushes you to the front of the line. There’s no real-world market I can think of that works like this. Who would pick one music store over another because it sold CDs for a penny less? Or cross the street to a different gas station that sold gas for 2.39.98 per gallon rather than 2.39.99? In real world markets there are always other considerations (eg. “I’m already on this side of the street”) that trump trivial differences in price.

  The solution needs to be inherent to the mechanics of the auction house. Blizzard needs to make it so that it’s much less effective to camp the auction house. My current thinking is that a good solution would be for Blizzard to implement a minimum undercut of say, 5 percent. That would have the effect of increasing the cost of reposting to sellers and increasing the benefit of lower prices to buyers. Not clear though what the unintended side-effects of this might be but I think it, or something similar, would be worth a try.

Auctionator is Crashing
Auctionator is pretty stable these days so if it’s crashing, the most likely reason is that the Auctionator data files stored on your computer have gotten corrupted. This can happen if Warcraft crashes while writing out these files. There are a couple of ways you can try to fix this:

• Go to Auctionator > Options > Clears and click Clear Scanning History. Then restart WoW and see if the problem is fixed. If the problem is not fixed, go back to that panel and click Clear Posting History and again, restart WoW and see if the problem is fixed. If not, repeat with the other buttons on that page.
• If that doesn’t work you may have to manually delete the Auctionator data files. To do this you need to locate the SavedVariables folder. On my machine it’s at:C:UsersPublicGamesWorld of WarcraftWTFAccountYOURACCOUNTNAMESavedVariable sIn that folder you will find a file called Auctionator.lua and another called Auctionator.lua.bak. Delete the two files and restart WoW.

Can you add a button to let me cancel multiple auctions with a single click

• I’m afraid Blizzard intentionally makes this impossible.

Can you make it so that I can buy multiple auctions with a single click

• I’m afraid Blizzard intentionally makes this impossible.

Disconnecting During Full Scan

• Auctionator has a rate limiter as part of its full scan. Changing the value of that rate limiter might prevent your disconnection. To change the value type in chat /atr fsc 40. That will change the rate limiter value from the default of 50 to 40. If that doesn’t work you can try lower values. This change is sticky – you don’t have to do it every time you log in.

In item tooltips, why does Auctionator display the most recently scanned price rather than an average of some sort

• Of course, what we all want is a good estimate of how much a particular item will sell for at the auction house. The question then is whether there is a mathematical function – be it simple historical averaging or something more sophisticated – that can yield a better estimate than simply showing the most recently scanned low price.

  It’s certainly possible that there is, but I would bet that it would require quite a bit of sophisticated data analysis and would yield a only a marginal improvement. Doing something simple, like averaging prices over time or averaging all auctions of the AH is almost certainly going to be worse, in general, then just showing the current low price.

  After the 4.0.1 patch came out, glyph prices on my server jumped up to around 75g and were selling briskly at that rate. But every once in a while one player would post a bunch at a very specific price around 25g. I’m guessing that some auction house mod was recommending that price based on some average that included prices before the patch. That’s a problem with using historic data – things change in WoW. Even when they change less abruptly, averages will respond slowly to upward and downward trends.

  The other reason Auctionator displays the most recent price, is that it’s very clear what it is. It isn’t some estimate based on historic data of unknown duration, weighted according to some unknown scheme, minus outliers of unknown definition. Is the most recent price always going to be a good estimate of what an item will sell for? Not always. But that’s also the case for the result of more complicated averages. If you look in the comments or on the forums for other auction house addons, you’ll find plenty of questions about wacky price estimates.

Undercut Specific Auction

• Just click on the auction that you want to undercut and Auctionator will change its recommendations appropriately.

What kind of history does Auctionator track

• Auctionator tracks two different kinds of history. For a long time, Auctionator has kept a record of auctions that you post. This is displayed for an item when you click the Other tab. As of version 2.7.3, Auctionator began recording the low price of every item that gets scanned. When you click the History tab you now see the highest low price recorded for each day. By default, Auctionator keeps the history going back 21 days but you can change that in the Auctionator settings.

Why doesn’t Auctionator show bid or starting prices

• My number one design goal for Auctionator is to keep it simple. An important piece of this is reducing the clutter of numbers displayed on the screen and the simplest way to do this is to ignore bid prices. For some people this might be a big inconvenience, but I find that the vast majority of users treat the AH more like a marketplace and rarely, if ever, pay any attention to bid prices. This is fundamental to the design of Auctionator.

Why doesn’t Auctionator show seller names

• This is still something I may add someday. The way the WoW programming interfaces work, it’s faster and more robust to ignore seller names, which is why I haven’t done it yet.