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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsGold Capped: Using the new armory auction house
by Basil Berntsen 
May 26th 2010 at 6:00PM
This game is constantly changing. Every new patch, Blizzard delivers new content, new rules and new interfaces. We've seen some major quality of life improvements in the auction house of late, and these are continuing. The latest one (which is still in beta) is that the mobile armory now lets you trade on the AH from anywhere using either an app on an iPhone/iPod touch or your browser.
Right now, for testing purposes, we're limited to 25 actions a day (purchases, bids, auctions), but we can clear out our mail! To be honest, that's the killer feature for me. I spend an inordinate amount of time clearing out my mail. The majority of my profits in, say, vellums will come from sales of singles. I list stacks of all sizes, but the singles are what sell best. On my mid-range population server, I can easily sell 200 of these a day, and that adds up to a lot of time watching my mailbox empty.
Once the feature goes live and they raise the limit to 200 actions per day, I'll probably use this to list my vellums too. In the interest of using my 25 moves in the most profitable manner, however, I'm going to avoid that for the beta.
Before we go any further: this product is currently in beta. Any money you lose due to bugs is probably gone forever. I posted a load of stacks of 10 Greater Cosmics, and they all ended up getting listed with a stack price of what I intended the unit price to be. This is a buggy beta test, so be very careful and validate your auctions by searching for them after you post.
I'm assuming that most people interested in this probably want to auction from work, and I personally detest any small devices trying to be real computers. If they ever make this available on the iPad and then give me an iPad for free, I'll consider using the app version. Otherwise, I'm all about the real computer version. On that note, Macs aren't real computers.
When you log into the armory's auction house interface, you see this:
The default character was set to my hunter; however, I clicked the top right icon and was able to promote my auction alts into the five available slots for auction house characters. Use the plus sign to the left in the list of characters they show you. First up, I want to empty my mail. This is how you collect your sales:
Clicking "Claim All Gold" is the fastest. Now let's try creating some auctions: click the "create auctions" tab, and then pick your product. You'll see this:
Awesomely, this has more functionality than the in-game selling tab. It will actually show you your competition's prices and let you undercut! Also, it lets you post from your expired auctions in mail, your bank and your inventory as a single source. This is, in fact, way better than the in-game version. I can only hope that they make these features available via the in-game interface.
When I create 10 auctions, this is what it looks like:
When I create 10 auctions, this is what it looks like:
You can relist expired auctions as well, but I don't have any at the moment, so we're skipping to the buying interface. Click on "Browse Auctions," and you can search the AH for stuff you need.
The stuff you buy from this tab will appear in your mailbox and be immediately available for posting. This means that so long as you have transactions remaining, you are able to buy and relist undervalued items. You can equally do this at the neutral auction house, relisting items on your faction AH. You still can't bid on your own auctions, however, so you'll need a friend if you plan to do any cross-faction arbitrage.
I'd caution people about the downsides of camping as a business plan; however, the built-in limits on our daily activity will make this manageable. The best strategy in terms of gold per hour played is one that does not require you to cancel and re-undercut your auctions. If you're having to do this, you're not undercutting steeply enough. If you can't undercut steeply enough, then you're paying too much for your product, or your competitor isn't making any profits.
This feature is a premium service, so once it's out of beta, it'll be something like $3 a month. For the way I play, that's far better a deal than any of these stupid toys Blizzard keeps putting up in their store; however, it's frustrating that something that should be a base functionality has become a "value-added" service. Arena players didn't get higher monthly fees when the devs added enemy unit frames to the default UI. I'd stop complaining if the default in game UI were this functional and the $3 only bought me access to waste my time at work.
I'll pay for this, but grudgingly.
I'd caution people about the downsides of camping as a business plan; however, the built-in limits on our daily activity will make this manageable. The best strategy in terms of gold per hour played is one that does not require you to cancel and re-undercut your auctions. If you're having to do this, you're not undercutting steeply enough. If you can't undercut steeply enough, then you're paying too much for your product, or your competitor isn't making any profits.
This feature is a premium service, so once it's out of beta, it'll be something like $3 a month. For the way I play, that's far better a deal than any of these stupid toys Blizzard keeps putting up in their store; however, it's frustrating that something that should be a base functionality has become a "value-added" service. Arena players didn't get higher monthly fees when the devs added enemy unit frames to the default UI. I'd stop complaining if the default in game UI were this functional and the $3 only bought me access to waste my time at work.
I'll pay for this, but grudgingly.
Being an auctioneer is like being able to print money (or gold, as it were). Wait, that doesn't make sense ... You can print on gold, but you can't print gold. That would be closer to transmutation? I can transmute titanium, but that's only worth it if the price of saronite is low enough to justify the time spent making it. I need some sort of analogy here. ... Whatever, I'll figure it out later. Making gold? Every week, Gold Capped will teach you the tricks of the trade, from setting up your auction addons and user interface, to cross-faction arbitrage, to learning how to use your trade skills. Filed under: Economy, Gold Capped
Reader Comments (Page 3 of 5)
windbourne May 26th 2010 7:04PM
You can sync your calendar with Google Calendar... You can filter it for raid resets, instance invites, etc too. If I remember correctly the link is somewhere up the top of your characters page in the armoury...
Not so sure about chatting from outside of WoW, but perhaps with the Real ID system we'll get an independent chat client too. Though you would still only be able to chat with your battle.net friends presumably...
BladedDingo May 26th 2010 7:08PM
Actually, the ingame calandar does sync up with google calandar. copy the rss feed into google and then (make sure its a public calandar) and use googles own tools to repost the calandar. my guild website has a google calandar tied to the guild leaders main character's rss feed. so as long as the guild leader logs into thaf character then the website updates to. down side is the sync can take several hours to several days to filter through, but not a prob if you plan out a few weeks in advance.example: http://drunkenpirateguild.com/calandar.php
BladedDingo May 26th 2010 7:24PM
Whoops, I fail at commenting. I was doing that on my phone while on the bus. heh.
pr1me May 26th 2010 6:29PM
They've taken some measures to ensure a limited level of automation is possible in the game using addons. This seems far more exploitable though. How are they going to keep people from completely automating buying/selling through the site? Otherwise, I can kind of see a future where a web script is going to take over and making money via the AH becomes a trivial matter of just letting some process run in the background while you're asleep or AFK at work/school.
Pyromelter May 26th 2010 7:24PM
"How are they going to keep people from completely automating buying/selling through the site?"
By restricting the number of auctions per day that you do from your mobile phone/web browser. Even if they set a limit at 1000 auctions per day, this would at least throttle unlimited scripting/web AH camping.
pr1me May 26th 2010 9:39PM
Even with the hypothetical limit of 1000 transactions per day, you could still theoretically generate significant income with very little or no interaction at all. Even if you're only selling 25% of those listings, they don't have to sell for very much each before you're looking at a thousand or more gold a day in profit that comes at zero effort. The only cost is the $3/mo premium fee that you pay to Blizzard. At which point, they might as well just be selling gold for cash in the Blizzard store.
icepyro May 27th 2010 3:49AM
they announced the limit of 200 per day, which really isnt much at all for a true auctioneer (I keep about 250 going and I dont consider myself pro by any means) and a webscript would end the day in a couple hours at most if it does what you are proposing.
james May 26th 2010 6:29PM
You linked to a Charlie brooker article.
You are my favourite person, like, ever.
Basil Berntsen May 26th 2010 7:03PM
I get excited about Charlie Brooker the way my friends get excited about Tolkien.
Amaxe-1 May 26th 2010 11:02PM
From the article:
The ads are adapted from a near-identical American campaign - the only difference is the use of Mitchell and Webb. They are a logical choice in one sense (everyone likes them), but a curious choice in another, since they are best known for the television series Peep Show - probably the best sitcom of the past five years - in which Mitchell plays a repressed, neurotic underdog, and Webb plays a selfish, self-regarding poseur. So when you see the ads, you think, "PCs are a bit rubbish yet ultimately lovable, whereas Macs are just smug, preening tossers." In other words, it is a devastatingly accurate campaign.
I'm glad I didn't have anything in my mouth at the time or I would have choked.
Sharicasti May 26th 2010 6:32PM
Come on blizzard give me an official droid armory app so I get this fun stuff too
KrisseyB May 27th 2010 8:50AM
This, please?
Basil Berntsen May 27th 2010 10:19AM
thirded.
quitterpants May 26th 2010 6:34PM
Love the Mac vs. PC article! Best thing I've read since Frostheim's interview with Ghostcrawler.
I've been giving this new auction house app a try on my iPhone (I know, I know). I mostly just sell what I pick up while levelling my army of alts; so, I'm hoping to get my auctioning done during free moments during the day giving me some a little extra "play" time during playtime.
I've experienced the same stack price problem: I posted five stacks of thingamajiggers for 20s each, the first stack correctly went up for 4g but the rest went up for 20s per stack. I'm sure it'll get fixed soon enough.
icepyro May 26th 2010 6:51PM
To me, the awesome part is being able to easily deal with either auction house. So I play the neutral house online. Then I can keep my toon in a capital and still reap the rewards of crossfaction auctioning. Between that and the claim all gold.... pure win. Still not enough to pay $3/month though. I'd say it's probably worth $1 for me personally. Mainly because I refuse to post without all my addons making life so easy.
Also, you only get 200 results on browse. So when I went to create an auction, I found a stack of cloth at a good price. I thought I would just pop over and buy it real quick. Alas, someone had posted over 200 singles of said cloth so I couldn't buy that auction because I couldn't find it.
mdwimsett Jun 3rd 2010 1:16AM
One issue with this is most Bank Alts/Auction Alts are low level characters, they wont show in Armory.
bobikinbobwalker May 26th 2010 7:10PM
I saw this article in the RSS, went to check the armory, and would like to quote the most succinct description of this new feature, which comes from the picture at the top of this page.
"WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!"
Bossy May 26th 2010 7:39PM
I could cite 3 reasons why Blizzard can ask an extra fee:
1. The application is a new "game element" on mobile platforms. You also pay for other games coming out for that platform and since it is an extension to WOW, why not ?
2. I consider the I-pod and I-phone overpriced toys anyway (just like the Mac's are 50% too expensive compared to PC's). So why not ? Those people already paid without much knowledge of price settings.
3. As long as people buy "pets" and other merchandising things from anything they like... why not?
I would like to see other WoW and even Blizzard features on moblie platforms though and everyone has to decide if it's worth it or not.
Discussion closed.
jrizutko May 27th 2010 10:15AM
Oh well, if YOU said the discussion is closed, I guess it closed.
Of course, no one was discussing whether or not Blizzard CAN charge a fee. Of course they can charge a fee. They're a business offering a new service. I don't think that discussion was even open to begin with.
I'm pretty sure discussion of whether or not its a good business practice, how it affects consumer satisfaction or what it means for Blizzard's position in the market are all ongoing not subject to your authority.
Pyromelter May 26th 2010 7:53PM
Anyone notice that Basil's bank toon up there is a Death Knight at level 65? 65 is the min level for northrend grand master professions. That is a true AH playa right there.