From Norganna's AddOns

The following is an edited copy of a post to the forums.

Contents 1 A Day with Slott Industries™ 1.1 Introduction 1.1.1 Background 1.1.2 Market Intimacy 1.2 Starting your career as an Auctioneer 1.2.1 Know your prices 1.3 The Settings 1.4 Daily Workflow for a Dedicated AH Mule 1.4.1 Step 1 Start of day - collect from the AH 1.4.2 Step 2 - First Scan 1.4.3 Step 3 - Placing your auctions 1.5 Selling tips n tricks

A Day with Slott Industries™

Draft

Introduction

Background

I rape and pillage all WoW vendors with numerous members of my little family parked on station. The results are all Mass Mailed (CT_Mod + Igors revised updated to CT_MailMod) to me, Slott - Queen of the Malygos Horde AH. I represent between 33% and 50% of the entire Horde economy when in full production mode. This includes profession-made items for quests, some of which I pester my guild professionals for, some I make myself.

In full production mode, I clear well over 1k a week in a reasonably competitive market, without any 'buy and put up again' schemes. I am only just starting to investigate those as they offer an additional source of income for low time expenditure. Said schemes do rise some ire in the community, so I have avoided them. That being said, there are some silly prices sometimes.

I used to use Auctioneer, but didn't realise there was a dedicated site so switched over to AuctionIt during a patch-related outage (1.7). Additionally, pre-custom saved variables, I had to blow away my WTF to log in so had lost a lot of historical data anyway. This was actually a blessing in disguise, as the server market matured in that month and the pricing system changed drastically. I missed the extra features of Auctioneer and have come back to the all-new singing dancing version that rocks even harder than before. GOOD JOB GUYS!

Market Intimacy

An example of a maturing market for AH noobs. Even though the newly lowered Felcloth drop rate was promising to lift the price of mooncloth (I had invested lightly), all the bigger guilds achieved saturation point with 16 slot bags and started flogging off their surplus in a huge glut market. This meant mooncloth was no longer being consumed for simple containers, and thus stayed stable in low demand, high supply. I converted many of my duplicate tailors to more useful skills at that stage.

However, this also meant that many rich lowbies were making their way up the ranks, assisted by older members of their family. Recipes went up in price. Mats went up in price. Crafted goods went up in price. Then AQ started. Mats went skyrocketing - I made the record price of 10g a stack of rugged leather on several stacks in that first mad day. Armor items plummetted in price, and the AH is full of dusts and essences waiting for the new AQ chanter recipes to consume. My chanter is about to skill up his artisan level to master. Great for me! Low prices, I can buy everything I need.

THIS is the sort of intimacy with your market you need. To get truly finicky, use Census to keep an eye on what levels are working their way through so you can have goods prepared for their next upgrades and quests.

Starting your career as an Auctioneer

Know your prices

Pick a highly defined area of the market and start with just that. An example may be Potions. Become the server expert on where the mats for those potions can be found, what the mats are worth, how many of the pots get consumed a week, then the three important prices for every potion.

• The cost to make. This is if you buy the materials, or time to gather and produce the goods when your main can only make <g> gold/hr.
• The market average.
• The most people will pay for it during a shortage (any day with no competition)

Example Strong Troll's Blood Potion goes through phases on my server where the alchemists see what I am getting for a pot, and go nuts and make a hundred and sell at small markup. For the time spent making the pots, they would have made more money selling the mats. Price 2 (45s) - Price 1 (40s) < what I will be interested in for my time. However, price 3 (1g 49s) is quite high so I watch the market, bulk buying when prices plummet, slowly releasing during shortages. Simple stuff.

The Settings

The first thing to do with Auctioneer is to customise the settings. I'm a cold-hearted bitch, so my customised settings reflect that.

Set the AH mule to always load Auctioneer and set all other family members to never load. I am considering assigning someone to be dedicated neutral AH mule, but I cross-trade with an alliance mate anyway for direct to main AH sales.

Had some problems with the tooltips, and rather than rewrite the defs file, opted for the embed in tooltip approach for both Auctioneer and Informant.

• show-warning off - It is going to make no difference to me :-)

• pct-markup 300 - (used for items with an unknown price - less useful as you scan more). Vendor price on the buyout for many items is 500%. If nothing else, it serves as a guide as to what a game vendor would charge me without having to consult the tooltip. Then we add in rarity factors, actual adventurer demand and so on. So if no-one has ever auctioned the Pink Jockstrap of BRS Pwnage, you have an idea of what the clueless NPC vendor would sell it for. As it usually needs marking down to ensure a sale, I find 300% is good for a quick sale.

• pct-bidmarkdown 17.5% - I like to encourage buyouts and I find this figure works well. The truly tight will bid as there is a saving, anyone with any money will just buy.

• pct-nocomp -20% - That is, if there is no competition, I will tend to sell it for higher than market rates as demand should be slightly higher. Also gives room for the inevitable gank war when the competition starts. I will probably end up with macros on buttons to change some of the above settings on the fly as I move through different item types.

• pct-underlow 2% - Like I said, I'm a bitch, I only just undercut any competition. It's enough. GANK!

• pct-undermkt 0% - If I actually bother to list an item during heavy competition, it is because I figure the demand is high enough to buy it all, and I ain't offering any discount. Be thankful it's not -20% I say! I just don't want to overly encourage competition either if there's some already.

• pct-maxless 60% - On my usual insane percentage markups (some in excess of 3000%) this offers a good chase down with gankers. I don't HAVE to submit the auction if it goes too low for any given item, that's my indicator to not bother with that item today. I may increase this if competition picks up to a problematic level. Note that if you ain't chasing down coz you hit maxless, it switches to undermkt.

Daily Workflow for a Dedicated AH Mule

Aka the "if you got it - sell it" method for total Slotts like myself.

Step 1 Start of day - collect from the AH

Day starts with empty-ish bags, a bank, mailbox and several alts full of duplicates or "wait for weekend" items. I go to the mailbox to get my auction results. Some auctions will still be going; many will be finished. I start cleaning out successful auctions. The lack of mailbox interface is extremely noticeable, and as the AH works through the mailbox, this really needs to be addressed.

At the end of this step, we have cleaned out the previous day's trading from the mailbox and picked up our winnings, and we can now see some extra items in our mailbox waiting for auction as sent through by your gatherers - be they alt or mate. We stock up from there and the bank, and any local vendors, before trudging down to the AH. For the Horde AH bandits, I highly recommend UC. Alliance, all three cities are pretty good, as Darnassus makes up for its reduced item count by its items being worth more and selling more frequently. Note: Each faction's auction houses (Alliance, Horde, Neutral) are now combined into a single big AH market, just different locations. It no longer matters which AH you use in a particular faction, the auctions are the same.

Step 2 - First Scan

Open up an Auctioneer dialog, make sure all the categories of items you plan on selling that day (or you just want to collect historical data on) are selected. Hit Scan. This will make the auctioning step MUCH faster and more accurate. It can take a while, so I trudge off and make my meal, have a bio, read the latest patch notes - whatever. The scan collects the items on sale and their prices. This is used to set your auctioning price.

Step 3 - Placing your auctions

Alt+click an item to stick it up on sale (see the Sale screen). Have a look at what sort of pricing system has been selected:

• Undercutting by - You know you have competition - ensure you are happy with the listed price. Informant will list the vendor prices in the item's tooltip if they are known. If you aren't happy with the listed price, and the item sells in quantity each day, use Alt+Right-click on the item in your bag (ghosted coz its loaded into the Sell screen) to automatically kick off a search for that item. Note the AH search can take some seconds to complete, so you may have to pause between such searches.

• Cannot match lowest price - If this is an outrageous profit item, you can Alt+Right-click to search on just how low the idiots have gone this time, otherwise, only list it if it sells multiple quantities a day. This occurs when a potential bid price goes under maxless.

• Marking up vendor - It is wildly guessing as it hasn't been seen on auction yet, and the vendor generally charges 5 times what you can sell it to them for - that's a 500% markup if you wanted to sell it like an NPC vendor. However, if this is a vendor purchased item, we now need to make some profit. Up the figures, and for the first few times, select the "remember price" button so that next time you know what you set your price at. You will want to search for items that you use remember price on in case someone is competing, so when you have enough data collected from weeks of scanning, remove it.

• No Competition - It means we have a market price, and no one is selling, so it then uses the NoComp setting. A setting of over 100% ensures that market prices go up until there is competition or you stop getting sales and manually adjust it back down.

• Using your current price - Umm, you already have one up d00d. However, maybe you want more on.

• Competition over market - Someone else has one up for way over market price.

Selling tips n tricks

Monday - Thursday is pretty poor for sales. Avoid auctioning items with large deposits and small profit margins. This includes most 40+ dropped stuff and top-end crafted items with horrendous mats. Sunday night (server time) for US players is the best - people have thrashed all weekend and are looking for upgrades.

If I had to pick one profession for making money it is Engineering by a long shot. Mining is also ok, but be prepared to log plenty of hours running around collecting. Engineering-made items required for quests include: Widgets, Triggers, Gyros, Mithril Cases, Deadly Blunderbusses, Dummies; and there are lots more. It really depends on your server, if there are several competing engineers owning the market, see how often agility potions go up and fill that hole instead. Gtr agi and Mongoose potions sell for high amounts in high quantities.

I make most of my gold from purchasing from NPC vendors and flogging them off at silly markups. Use map notes (CT_mod) to record who sells what items and the item level. Rich alts thank you for the time saved, lower-level guys thank you for access to goods they can't physically reach. All the expert books are good sellers, and even strong fishing poles and medium quivers can be sold. 97% of Cooking recipes are a must. This rapidly turns the AH into a convenience store and people will start using as such.

If you can, start a character each side, and find a buddy to help you trade across the neutral AH. The stuff like pets and recipes that the other side has exclusive access to is worth a lot more. Send stuff over for 1s ea, although it may cost a huge deposit, you get that back in the mail and the auctioneer takes his huge percentage of 1s.

For large deposit lower profit items, try and auction for 8hrs starting 2hrs before start of peak, or at least covering the 2 hours after start of peak. 2hr auctions are almost guarantying a bid, rather than buyout, so avoid them.