Quick tips about playing the AH game.

[T-ReXTC]

Well been leeching for ages and trying to find something to contribute with and all I ever found was some google hack for some vent info. Well I can't find any good exploits and work is boring, so I can try with a guide instead, hope someone finds this useful.

Tools of the trade: Auctioneer and WoWecon.

I'm fairly sure everyone knows about auctioneer by now, it's the bread and butter for the AH game.

But many are unfamiliar with wowecon, well check it out, wowecon.com - World of Warcraft Auction House Price Database
What it does is collect ah prices and then make a huge database and monitor the prices. I know it's a lovely site and all but you don't really want to look up all those items all the time.
Well the following tips will help you get some nice infomation anyways.
First of all, get their addon, it contains a program as well, which is used to download the newest prices, start wow and then upload your prices afterwards.
Two reasons for this really. First auctioneer contains a evaluater based upon the wowecon price, helpfull at times, but not that important.
The reason I use this is to have a feeling of the global price of an item(across servers), this will help you determine if some item is being marked up on purpose to fool your auctioneer, more on this later.
What else can you use this for, the feature for watching prices sounds quite nice, but surely you don't want to pay for that service.
Following is a small tip for phpbb3 forum, if you use it something else, feel free to post what you have done.
Anyways, go to the administration control panel -> Posting -> BBCodes, and create a new bbcode.

BBCode usage:

[wowecon]{TEXT}[/wowecon]

HTML replacement:

<iframe name="frame102" type="text/html" width="100" height="35" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" src="http://data.wowecon.com/?type=price&amp;wow_id1={TEXT}&amp;server_name=SERVER&amp;region=EU&amp;faction=H&amp;behavior=hover"></iframe>

replace:
SERVER with your server.
EU with your region
H with your faction.

See more at wowecon and the link using our data.

Settings:

Display on posting page: ticked(yes/true)

This gives you the option to post your own topics with the items you are after and then type [wowecon]ID[/wowecon] (substitute ID for item ID) and then get the current price on your server in your post.
Now you just need to check your own posts whenever and whereever to get an update on the items you want to watch(remember the old prices yourself though).
Oh and making your board private is also a nice thing, other people might find it as usefull as you and if you are on the same server you might start battling the same items.

Comming up, Auctioneer.

<insert a refreshing beverage commercial and an annoying jingle>

Welcome back to this... gah it's a short thing, not a 30 minutes show.

Auctioneer.

First off, lets start off by explaining what's so good about enchant materials, you see people speak about this all the time. First off there will allways be a need, seccondly, the MSV is 0.

- "MSV???"
- "Merchant Sell Value"

What you need to understand is that your deposit ammount is based upon the MSV. Following is ofc stolen from WoWWiki

In factioned houses (Alliance and Horde owned houses):

Deposit (12hr auction) = 0.15 * MSV

In the neutral houses (Goblin owned houses):

Deposit (12hr auction) = 0.75 * MSV

For the longer auctions, the base deposit value is scaled by the new length in time. Note that the base deposit is rounded first, and then multiplied as follows:

Deposit (24hr auction) = 2 * Deposit (12hr auction)
Deposit (48hr auction) = 4 * Deposit (12hr auction)

So, ignoring rounding differences we have this rule of thumb:

In factioned houses:

Deposit (12hr) = 15% of MSV
Deposit (24hr) = 30% of MSV
Deposit (48hr) = 60% of MSV

and in the neutral house:

Deposit (12hr) =  75% of MSV
Deposit (24hr) = 150% of MSV
Deposit (48hr) = 300% of MSV

- "Oh so you're telling me that it's free to post on the AH?"
- "Indeed my dear friend, it is"
- "Any other items of value that have no MSV?"
- "Yup, but you gotta do some work yourself"

This whole thing boils down to the fact that you don't really care for the deposit eating up your earnings, it's free.
TIP: Go through your stash of enchant mats, figure out whatever price you want it to sell at a market value is normally good, set the options for how many you want to sell at a time, and click the batch post option.
after this you just batchpost all your enchant mats everytime for quick and easy selling.

Now for the gem of the collection Bottomscanner.

This is where you can make a bundle. Anyways mos of you prob know it allready, but what it does is that it scans the latest auctions every x amount of seconds to see if any items are below some discount
price you set in the options (I won't go into how your options should be, it all boils down to your commitment knowledge of items and time). And if it finds something it thinks could be good to buy it will pop
out and ask if you want to bid/buyout.

The question most asked though is that people are standing there forever and ever and they don't see any good items, and then they do a single search and some OMG item is at 1% normal price and someone else just got it.
The tip here is: start bottomscanner, and do an auctioneer search, this time it searches the whole AH and pops up on every item(hope your settings are in order or you have loads of time =) ).
A word of caution though, if it finds some item at 50% it might also find the same item at 40% later on, so know your prices or you will shop yourself poor.

General tips:
* Use a bankchar that is not guilded with you and you won't plan to play, PM's and mails about you buying low and selling high can be nasty.
* Some people like to post without buyout, this is your luck right before maintenance, good chance for cheap items.
* Learn to use your beancounter, it records failed sells and etc.

-"how much do you make off of this?"
-"ahh roughly between 6-7k a week if i cba to play it this week, and even then it's pretty laidback"
-"and thats only based upon what you wrote here?"
-"nope you gotta do some work yourself"

If Time is Money, friend, I gotta tell ya, Information buys a heck of a lot of time.

Hope it helped someone.

T-ReXTC

[roryjoe]

Nice guide +rep

[T-ReXTC]

thank you roryjoe, it's allways nice with a bit of recognition.
I know some parts of the guide is common knowledge, but I do think the bottomscanner trick and the wowecon usage is pretty uncommon knowledge.

[pludd]

Anyways, go to the administration control panel -> Posting -> BBCodes, and create a new bbcode.
T-ReXTC

I don't really understand that, what "administration control panel"? Where do I find that? I might be dumb or something but I don't know what you mean.


edit* aright I was dumb, anyways I read some about phpbb3 forum, and im on the administration thingy now, but can't find "Posting" there.

[T-ReXTC]

It should be the third tab just below the board logo

/adm/index.php?sid=781f38cf57c5713cf51328001cde983b&i=9
also the url above shows the id=9, you can use it to get to the page where you can edit the bbcode

[Axe Rogue]

What do I put in for servers that have more than 1 word in them... for example Server of Suck ?

[Axe Rogue]

I just did this and get
/data.php: /var/www/wowecon/helix_classes/DB_pgsql.php(981): pg_query() [function.pg-query]: Query failed: ERROR: invalid input syntax for integer: "talasite" (Errno: 2)

[Axe Rogue]

Now I tried to fix it and just get a white box.. I click the wowecon in put in Talasite inside it and just get white box size of iframe.

[T-ReXTC]

Well the method i posted was for using the item id, not the name of the item.