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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 4 of 5)
Basil Berntsen May 27th 2010 10:22AM
You should see my AH alts :)
I never level anything unless I have to. I have my hunter at 80, my old main at 75 (from before I decided that pallys drool and hunters rule), and everyone else is basically as low a level as I could manage. This might change in cataclysm, because I want to see what they've done to the leveling experience, but once is enough for me, thank you!
Lichbane May 26th 2010 8:15PM
The only issue I have with the iPhone app is the fact the authenticator app is not integrated. It's a bit of a pain switching between apps to get the timing on the authenticator correct, so I'm now carrying around my lite security token; personally I'd prefer to leave the token at home ... as I don't want to risk losing that little sucker.
Apart from that, this app is sucking way too much of my time. :)
ControlledBurn May 26th 2010 8:38PM
Something is wrong with your Armory or Authenticator then. Mine automagically imports the Authenticator key when I log in to remote Auction House
Wellsee May 26th 2010 8:39PM
Just tried it out by collecting gold through the browser. Logged into WoW and I have a bunch of "Auction successful" emails with no money attached. My assumption was that this is a bug, but maybe it is there so Auctioneer and its ilk can count it?
Lichbane May 26th 2010 8:51PM
Your right. I uninstalled and reinstalled. Working now. It must have been glitching for some reason. Thanks for that!
hoss May 26th 2010 8:53PM
Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't this just invalidate your beancounter information since it does not get to see the value of items sold via the auction house.
If you know the market I guess it's not a problem since we also have addons like marketwatcher, but every time you use the armory to sell stuff you are effectively breaking auctioneer.
Abbadon May 26th 2010 10:03PM
http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2010/05/24/daily46.html
Google's PacMan anniversary stunt cost the US 4.82 million man hours and over $120m in productivity.
That was just one day.
Imagine what this is gonna do over time!
Psyche_DH May 26th 2010 10:19PM
You reference a pretentious article from over three years ago on why Macs aren't real computers. The entire article not once even mentions anything concrete about Macintosh or Windows/PCs. Nice.
Amaxe-1 May 26th 2010 10:41PM
My AH toon is a level 1 that I route everything through (the idea is the toon name won't be visible in the armory and thus traceable to my mains in case someone tries to hack me... maybe this is a stupid idea?). Since
Amaxe-1 May 26th 2010 10:43PM
Ugh... trying to use a less than sign means I lost part of the post. It should have said
Since less than level 10 doesn't show up in the armory, I can't access my AH toon.
I'm guessing I won't be using this function, though it seems potentially useful.
Bronwyn May 27th 2010 12:16AM
Just something to think about, but I always level my toons up to at least 10 because I've heard it's a lot more difficult (possibly impossible) for Blizz to restore your items and whatnot if you're level one because they don't make backups of lowbie characters or something like that.
Cynwise May 27th 2010 12:22AM
You can use your level 1 toons with the mobile Auction House application, at least the iPhone version. Here's a guide:
http://cynwise.wordpress.com/2010/05/23/cyns-guide-to-using-level-1-characters-with-the-remote-auction-house/
I haven't checked the web browser version yet, but I've been banking on my level 1 toons all week from my phone.
Basil Berntsen May 27th 2010 10:24AM
@Cynwise Thanks for the link :) I actually ran into this problem when I first tried it, however when I went back to the tool to write this, magically they had moved my bank alt up into one of the slots.
Amaxe-1 May 27th 2010 10:53AM
Well the browser version seems to be extremely buggy (also not laid out nearly as easily as your phone version) but I at least found mention of the toon I wanted. I just couldn't access it (kept getting taken to blank pages). I'll try again later in case it is merely another case of Armory screwing up.
Thanks though. This might work :)
gabeshackney May 27th 2010 1:19AM
Since so many people like reading articles about computers here is one the author might want to read http://us.mobile.reuters.com/mobile/m/AnyArticle/p.rdt?URL=http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64P5PE20100527
there is no need to be smug with the facts when they show results like these.
Basil Berntsen May 27th 2010 10:28AM
All that proves is that there are a lot of people willing to pay 1000$ for a 400$ laptop. And that the iPod etc are very well done popular products if you afford them.
FWIW, I always said I'd switch to Linux or Mac if I ever have to use Vista.
Terethall May 27th 2010 1:47AM
Basil, what happened to Aetherial Circle? No longer raiding with them?
Basil Berntsen May 27th 2010 10:19AM
They stopped raiding until Cataclysm, so I started my own guild with Darkbrew and my brother in law.
pr1me May 27th 2010 4:21AM
--"a webscript would end the day in a couple hours at most if it does what you are proposing."
It's certainly possible to schedule conditional timed events via scripting. Actually, I think it would be necessary to do so for this particular application to function at a reasonably successful level.
Still, going with the 25% sales estimate, you'd only need to post those items at around 20g each to hit a zero effort 1,000g per day profit. There's plenty of room in the market for all kinds of things at that price range. So, $3 for an extra 28,000g per month? Given the information I've seen so far, I still think it's going to be possible to exploit this. I'm looking forward to seeing how it plays out.
pablo May 27th 2010 4:49AM
When people pay for crap like this(and i say crap not because it sucks but because anything causing blizz to nickel and dime us is crap) it only encourages blizzard to do more and more things they can charge extra for.
I wont pay anything beyond my monthly fee for this game and i encourage everyone to do the same.