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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsGold Capped: Quick Auctions Poster does the undercutting for you
by Basil Berntsen 
Sep 22nd 2010 at 9:00PM
Quick Auctions Poster is here, and it's going to change your life. It was written by one of the auctioneers who inhabit the Just My Two Copper forums, and here's the description of what it does, straight from the download page:
In essence, you can fill your bags up with stock, and instead of using QA3 to post a single batch, it will keep refreshing your scan for you while you wander off to do something else. It will keep automatically undercutting everyone until you run out of stock.This addon is a plugin for Quick Auctions that adds a checkbox to the auction house posting frame with which you can toggle continuous scanning and posting of Quick Auctions. It saves you the effort of hitting the post button whenever a scan has finished. Sadly, because this Quick Auctions button doesn't have a name and its function is private, this action can't be macroed, but this addon manages to obtain the correct button and simulates a click on it.
There's only one button the addon adds, and that's the one at the top of the following image:
Once you check the box labeled "Continue posting after initial post," you will keep relisting your inventory, only undercutting by your QA3 settings when someone undercuts you. You need to check in every half-hour or so to cancel all your undercut auctions as well as pick up mail.
This would be most useful in situations where there is very little deposit cost; however, there's a minimum of 1 silver per auction since the last patch. If you're going to use this on glyphs or enchant scrolls, be aware that you're putting yourself at a slight risk for churning through lost deposit money.
This would be most useful in situations where there is very little deposit cost; however, there's a minimum of 1 silver per auction since the last patch. If you're going to use this on glyphs or enchant scrolls, be aware that you're putting yourself at a slight risk for churning through lost deposit money.
This looks unfair!
I know -- but now that some people use it, anyone who doesn't use it is basically allowing himself to be priced out of the market. Now, instead of whoever posted latest being the deciding factor in who gets the business, it will be the person who is willing to go to the lowest price. This is good for buyers, because competing auctioneers won't win business because they happened to be the last to log in but because they have a lower bottom limit on their prices.
My esteemed co-host on Call To Auction, Markco, holds that this new tool is not breaking the terms of service. He may be right, but I suspect it's probably not an intended use of the addon development tools provided by Blizzard. We've seen situations like this before:
- Auctioneer used to have a feature called BottomFeeder that would trawl the auction house for cheap deals; it ended up getting removed on the advice of Blizzard.
- AVR was deliberately broken by Blizzard because it trivialized certain parts of the game.
Some tips for effective usage
When you are setting up, remember that the more stock you have in your bags, the more undercut cycles you have. Assuming your competitors will be using Quick Auctions Poster, you have two ways to beat them: have more stock than they do, or have a lower threshold than they do.
When you are setting up, remember that the more stock you have in your bags, the more undercut cycles you have. Assuming your competitors will be using Quick Auctions Poster, you have two ways to beat them: have more stock than they do, or have a lower threshold than they do.
If you elect to have more stock than your competitors, you should consider the maximum stack size when you're deciding the markets in which to use this. Cut gems, for example, cannot be stacked. The new metric you should consider is the profit per inventory slot, and this will depend on how often you expect to have to undercut before you reach the bottom of your opponent's pile, as well as how many you think you can sell in a night.
If you go in the direction of trying to out-price your competitors, remember that you can't shock them into another market. QA3 doesn't get bored or upset -- it will just continue to list until your stock is cheaper than it's willing to sell for. My threshold is usually set to my cost plus 10 percent; however, it gets messy. Some players consider the cost of their goods what they paid for the raw mats before processing, and some people prefer to use what they could sell the half-finished goods for. For example: If a stack of Adder's Tongue costs 12g, and you can sell an Ink of the Sea for 1g and Snowfall Ink for 10g, how much does a glyph that takes a single IotS cost? If you base it on the market price for ink, remember that you'd never be able to sell all the ink you put into glyphs and vellum, and trying to do so would drop the price down significantly. If you base it on the cost of the source herbs, you will get an average of six IotS and one snowfall per stack. Did those snowfalls cost you 6g and the IotS 1g each? Or half a gold for each IotS and 9g for the snowfall?
Maximize your profits with more advice from Gold Capped, plus the author's Call to Auction podcast. Do you have questions about selling, reselling and building your financial empire on the auction house? Basil is now taking questions for a special series, "Ask an auctioneer," at basil@wow.com.Filed under: Economy, Add-Ons, Gold Capped
Reader Comments (Page 5 of 5)
Malenx Sep 23rd 2010 10:18AM
The best way to get rid of a questionable addon is for everyone to know about and use it.
Had wow.com not posted this, there is a good chance it would have lasted months longer than it actually will.
Bern00 Sep 23rd 2010 11:57AM
Wouldn't two competitors using this just crash the prices of whatever market they are in?
Neirin Sep 23rd 2010 12:46PM
Assuming both parties had sufficient stock to keep undercutting, yes. Although, if you're only undercutting by 1c each time, that'll take a while and be prohibitively expensive.
QQinsider Sep 23rd 2010 12:00PM
I'm glad this add-on has been featured here, now Blizzard will take notice of it and ban or break it.
With any luck it might also push them to take a look at the bigger AH picture, which is severely broken at the moment. If it wasn't then this add-on wouldn't exist in the first place.
You only have to read this column to see what's going on - lately it's less and less about ways to make gold and more and more about how to dominate and bot the AH. This game is supposed to be casual-friendly, and in most areas it is, more than it's ever been. But most crafting markets are now completely closed to anyone who doesn't camp the AH for hours a day. It's a ridiculous situation and they need to do something about it.
iceveiled Sep 23rd 2010 12:09PM
This type of automation should be banned. This makes me sick!!
You gold hungry people need to get it under control and play within the rules.
This is the reason why I got out of the AH game. Too many people with too much thirst for fake currency.
catharsis80 Sep 23rd 2010 1:31PM
Yeah, you're right. We should just let the Chinese AH/gold farmers reap the botting rewards while Blizzard does nothing, and we should get penalized for this.
Shut up.
Neirin Sep 23rd 2010 12:44PM
This seems like a decent tool for experienced goblins, but I can already see the flood of idiots that let it loose on their inventories and end up missing out on some serious profit. All it takes is 1 other person setting a low wall and these automated processes get screwed. Moreover, I won't have to feel guilty for messing with someone that's not even at their computer to realize that their addon is messing with them.
I think this is pretty clearly in the same gray area as AVR was, so I wouldn't hold out much hope for it sticking around now that it's got some publicity.
Toliman Sep 23rd 2010 6:03PM
TBH, QA3 has become a necessary evil, but i don't see how theres any good way to prevent auction griefing being the norm.if it's not QA, it will be another addon triggering a panic. unless, you put in securities measures or affix terms of service or limitations to posts per hour, etc. or install serverside queues, etc as storefronts, etc. or do something better, things won't change.
judging by QA and auctioneer's progression, auction addons will eventually replace users, hopefully making money along the way as well, but that might be incidental. the minigame that is the AH, is ridiculous for casual users, consuming for regular users.
i don't see the major problem, as this addon just undercuts constantly, profit/sales can still be made, by creating sets or crippling absolute values, which QA won't go below. it will be annoying for the majority of auctioneers to deal with, but really, AH users get no sympathy.
along the way, i've recieved grief over selling rep items for BRD at 200g when they were set at 4k each, when the glyph price on my server is hovering below 2g, while icethorn hovers around 90g/stack, etc. there's just a whole ton of grief going on.
undercutting is never the ONLY problem, but it's inherently destructive, regardless. just as the equilibrium is determined by the mass of users, QA and AucAdv users determine the equilibrium and deltas for each item, and each market distinctively.
it's frankly, the lesser of two evils, creating QA3 "bots" is manageable, at least having those users online, versus having XML powered bots do the same from the remote AH that allows cartel/collusion from multiple RAH accounts to create their own group buyouts and price manipulation en masse.
but it's all fearmongering, undercuts vs price fixing is like comparing vodka and bourbon, in small serves, both are manageable. once you're undercutting 4-8x a day, its a problem.
generally the AH is so easily exploitable because the tools being used are not complex enough to seek out behaviour patterns, filter buyers/sellers by behaviour/volume, etc.
no matter how annoying undercuts are, it doesn't grief the majority of users like 1c bid flooding or +/- 4% ramping does to scam Auc users, or those using repost/ shill/ consortiums, or other ideas/techniques to make money and annoy everyone equally.
chip.aucoin Sep 23rd 2010 3:11PM
It's hard enough beign a casual player who likes to sell excess items on the AH. Now I have to compete with automated bots undercutting me when their players aren't even at the computer?
Shame on you, wow.com, for publicizing this awful addon!
(unless you're publicizing it to bring it to Blizzard's attention so they'll ban it)
zulwiga Sep 23rd 2010 4:29PM
I've seen this used by an auction house heavyweight together with something that's keeping his character active and running back and forth to the mailbox. Log in, push start, walk away from the keyboard for 16 hours, profit. It's disgusting and there's no way Blizz will tolerate this. If they killed Skillet's auto crafting queue and Auctioneer's Bottom Feeder, this one is going away too. The sooner the better, IMO
Hagu Sep 24th 2010 5:30AM
I think there are two issues:
1) ToS - seems problematical. My guess is the author knew that and brought it up to get it banned or at least a clarification from Blizzard.
2) effect on the market assuming it were legal. Take the way ebay works: when I place a bid, I can also place a secret price and the server will raise my price automatically. Nobody calls that botting or thinks it a bad thing; it more efficiently auctions your product. You could do something like that in WoW provided everyone got to do it. The problem is not a price gets automatically undercut, but rather some but not all sellers have the option. It would make for more efficient markets - efficient markets are less profitable for middleman, better deals for customers. The people who make the gold in the AH would probably complain much loader than the cheers of the people who would get a better deal.
Part of the problem is that the WoW AH is so unsophisticated: if there were a way to place buy orders, then there would be a limit to how low the undercutting would go before it triggered a buy order.
Hirumared Sep 24th 2010 3:04PM
I use it to sell scrolls and gems too not just glyphs. What I'm saying is that if they do disable this add-on I can still sell gems and scrolls no problem, but I would stop selling glyphs because it would become to much of a hassle.
ravenhamer Sep 24th 2010 5:20PM
I am surprised that no one noted that this addon, combined with postal and the "magic" spot in Stormwind is a powerful combination. No running necessary and your bags automatically refill. That is the inherent problem--it allows people do repost auctions faster and with minimal intervention than people who do not have this addon, which gives them an unfair advantage.
Zerotorescue Sep 24th 2010 6:52PM
You will still have to manually hit cancel, access your mailbox, open the mail and then hit interact with the NPC and start posting button again. It's no different from any other location as it still requires you to manually do stuff.
Mercutio Sep 25th 2010 1:25PM
"Nilla" twilight's hammer EU, Alliance side is clearly using this.
Zerotorescue Sep 25th 2010 5:03PM
Shouldn't be hard to fight it once you recognize it. Their are multiple ways to combat it; low-wall at your threshold or if the user posts multiple items per cycle, undercut with just one and let them eat deposit cost / mailbox time.
Also I'd like to stress it doesn't always have to be my "Quick Auctions Poster"-plugin, a clever coder might have written his own private auction house mod, it may actually be done through an illegal application or perhaps it's a "Chinese camper" without similar automation but getting paid to earn gold thus posting every few minutes. I wrote this plugin AFTER I had already noticed very similar behavior from certain competitors, so there are alternative ways which might not have been made public yet.
Mercutio Sep 26th 2010 1:13PM
Personally in my case to make a point I ran them down below vendor+listing price (assuming they'd know to cap it at vendro price at least) so with each re-listing made they were loosing money (albiet small amounts) :)
Tenchinator Sep 27th 2010 2:07AM
This outrage is quite surprising to me, because if you think about it for even a minute, you realize that this addon is incredibly GOOD for your realm's economy, UNLESS you make gold (as I do, and many others do) by exploiting inefficiencies in it. What it does is eliminate the possibility of arbitrage in the market (i.e., selling above the market price).
Imagine if two sellers selling a relatively rare and valuable enchant, say Pigslayer. What often happens usually is that such an enchant sells for well above its market price, as long as there are few enough sellers to undercut each other: I may post a scroll for 450g. In response, half a day later, my opponent might decide he's willing to sell a scroll for 440g. I respond to this later by undercutting him, and this process repeats until the market price is reached. But this process is usually SLOW in the Auction House, and this slowness is precisely how big-shot Auction House players reach the goldcap.
Now imagine if both sellers had this addon at their disposal: their Pigslayer scrolls would almost IMMEDIATELY drop to their proper market price, rather than stay at arbitrarily high prices for long periods of time. This is GOOD for the economy, since arbitrage is a result of market inefficiency.
For whom this addon is BAD are people like me who make gold in exactly this way. I don't WANT my Pigslayer scrolls to drop in price too quickly, precisely because there is so much gold to be made in keeping prices artificially high, which this addon would eliminate for me.
Proceed to rate me down, though.