Gold Capped News: Critical AH addons broken by patch 4.0.1
by Basil Berntsen 
Oct 8th 2010 at 7:00PM
If you were to install the PTR right now and try to post a batch of auctions for sale with your favorite addon, there's a good chance it wouldn't work. Blizzard has changed the way that addons can interact with the auction house so that it's no longer possible to queue up a large volume of auctions and let them post while you read my columns.
Both Auctioneer and Quickauctions 3 have been hit hard, obviously. These are the most commonly used addons for queuing up a bunch of auctions. The rule previously seemed to be that we're not allowed to buy in batches, but we are allowed to sell in batches. Well, it looks like Blizzard has decided that we can no longer sell in batches, either. In addition, QA3 has lost its ability to automatically cancel auctions that have been undercut. The new patch requires a hardware event per action, and this has not (at the time of publishing) been written into these addons.
So what is a batch? Since you can queue up multiple stacks of the same item using the default UI, that seems to be allowed still. What is no longer allowed is putting together a list of different types of items that you want to sell at the same time. Take heart, dear reader: There is a workaround!
First, the workaround is fortunately not to simply manually post all your auctions. When you have 300+ glyphs (for example) and dozens of types of cut gems that you probably want to be listing for all the new demand that 4.0.1 will generate, sitting there with the default posting interface does not cut it. It doesn't show you the similar auctions you will be competing with in the same frame, and it doesn't suggest a remotely intelligent default price.
That said, to fix QA3 (only, for now), simply download and install this addon. [edit: credit where credit's due. This was written by the awesome folks who spend their days at the JMTC forums, specifically Zerotorescue, the author of the QA-poster addon]. Without it, QA3 will just hang. With it, you're presented with a handy-dandy little box saying, "Do you want to post this auction?" It doesn't seem to work with Auctioneer (currently, the box comes up but doesn't seem to work when you click it), but I have faith in the Auctioneer dev team's ability to get a new build out fairly soon when its product stops working. Still, gems and glyphs are expected to be the big sellers come patch day, and those are both markets that QA3 does very well.
Apparently, addons are still allowed to automatically price for you, and that's one of the two biggest advantages that QA3 gives us, in addition to automated batch selling and canceling. The only change is that you need to click once for every group of auctions. Luckily, you can still keybind the action of clicking the Yes button: Simply create a macro with this line in it.
/click StaticPopup1Button1It will work for canceling as well as posting. Drag the macro to a button, keybind that button, and you're set. This type of automation was covered in another article: same principle, different application. It's not perfect, but at least it's better than using the default UI to post several hundred types of products by hand.
Why now?
I am not going to hazard a guess about what drove the fine folks at the Blizzard UI dev team to make this undocumented change to the functions used by these addons specifically to service the glyph and gem markets, but it's a little rough that it's happening simultaneously with a patch that's expected to drive more demand for them than any other patch in the history of the game. Patch 4.0.1 is drastically changing the desirability of stats to many classes in the game, and a huge number of people will be regemming from armor penetration to something other than crit (which is what ArP gems will give you after the patch). Also, now that we can learn every glyph in the game, there's going be a huge surge in demand for glyphs as people scramble to get one of each.
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, Cataclysm, Gold Capped
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 7)
Drob10 Oct 8th 2010 7:13PM
As one of the AH PvPers on my realm I can't decide what this is really going to mean for us. A lot less people competing on the level they are now, but a lot more work to compete myself.
Drob10 Oct 8th 2010 11:37PM
I also find it interesting that it seems most of the people here cheering this change are the consumers, when it's very likely this will just make things get more expensive to buy. Undercutting isn't a bad thing for most people.
Elmouth Oct 9th 2010 3:03AM
Meh, I'm fine with people playing the auction house, but things like they were now were ridiculous.
This should even the playing field.
jfofla Oct 8th 2010 7:14PM
UH OH!
Aley Oct 8th 2010 7:18PM
As a scribe i really dislike this change, posting 400 different items every batch wil get really annoying. Add the milling process and the creating of the glyphs themselves and i might just as well cancel my whole business, this will make the gold / hour value really low. A "workaround" is to use 3rd-party programs to spam your buttons, but that tends to be against the TOU.
Even then the timeouts will probably make the posting process take an awful lot longer, everyone posting multiple items will be hit by an attempt to fix the AH camping bots.
Blizzard really seems to promote farming this way, as selling 100 stacks of 1 item will be an awful lot faster then selling 1 stack each of 100 different items. It really seems as if JC might become the new moneymaker.
Hahahaha Oct 9th 2010 12:17AM
@Pfooti
There are 10s of thousands of botters out there. It's not hard to confirm if any complain regarding botter is genuine, but it definitely takes time. Blizzard cannot just go around banning everyone before confirming just because someone complained of them botting. You yourself conscend that they have been banning bots meaning they are not turning their backs against this problem, it just takes them a little longer than you would like.
If you have any suggestions on how to hasten the process of confirming, by all means provide Blizzard your solution. They would be more than happy to listen and see if it's feasible to implement it. One thing that you should note though: Banning cannot be completely automated, there has to be a real person calling out if an account (or a group of accounts) is to be banned.
b Oct 10th 2010 10:49AM
One thing that you should note though: Banning cannot be completely automated, there has to be a real person calling out if an account (or a group of accounts) is to be banned.
Having had my account closed out of the blue after I hadn't used it for at least three months, getting three emails from blizzard within a five hour period (during which I was asleep) entitled "Account password change notice" "Account locked - action required" and "Account closed - exploitative activity found" (the last of which makes the second one kinda irrelevant), and being unable to get any kind of reply from blizzard to find out how someone got my password, how they paid for the service (gamecard or credit card), what IP address they accessed the account from - from where I sit, having lost an 80 of each class that I admittedly hadn't used for months but was planning on getting back to when cataclysm came out if not before - the account banning process may or may not be completely automated, but if it isn't automated, it's being run by automatons who can't be bothered to take anything other than the default action irrespective of how obvious it is that someone other than the owner of the account is taking actions to breach the terms of service. Having gotten in to Runes of Magic I don't really miss wow that much, but it will always bother me that the ban process (at least in my case) did appear to be completely automated, and I will never know if anyone at blizzard read my email asking them to compare the IP address used to access my account and do dodgy stuff with the single IP address used to access my account for years for legitimate play and at least check that the former wasn't assigned to an ISP not operating in my country.
Whatever. Maybe there are people signing off on each account ban as it happens, but to someone whose account gets broken into without him having shared his password with anyone (or even accessed wow from under windows, and linux doesn't provide a very hospitable environment to keyloggers), who has his account go from being (as far as he knows) inactive, to temporarily locked, to permanently closed within hours, without him even knowing because he's too asleep to check his email, and after all that can't get any kind of reply from anyone at blizzard - well, as far as I'm concerned they might as well just let a RNG do the job.
Sinthar Oct 12th 2010 4:42AM
@ b
Your post is long and pointless tbh. You complain that you were emailed 3 times and was banned before you could even read them. Imo thats excellent service. You were obviously hacked and your toons used for the hackers own purposes. They contacted you THREE times as soon as they could, and without any response they then quite rightly banned your account to prevent further actions by the hackers.
As to your questions to Blizzard 'How did they get my password' - well tbh it was 99% YOUR fault about that, not Blizzards. "How did they pay" - is financial data, without you establishing your credentials - they are obliged to NOT reveal any data like that. And what IP address? Well since you can mask your IP (something i imagine every hacker would do automatically) seems really pointless.
Considering the above points - and the rest of your rant, I think Blizzard behaved exactly as they should - responding quickly and when there was no immediate response closing the account to prevent damage. You didnt secure your account with an authenticator - instead your post indicates you thought you were safe as 'linux doesn't provide a very hospitable environment to keyloggers'. You have not said how you contacted them and provided information to establish your ID, so I doubt Blizzard would answer any email - esp if it was worded like your post was. Have you even TRIED to contact them and follow the procedure? (Something literally thousands have done sucessfully.) If you cannot be bothered to secure your account (you obviously didnt think it was worth the cost of an authenticator), nor follow set procedures- then please enjoy RoM and other games, and leave your QQ posts with their blogs/forums.
Stilhelm Oct 12th 2010 9:09AM
To the one that got hacked, you're not the only one getting hacked when you've only played in an environment where you are absolutely sure there are no keyloggers.
To everyone else: the reason to get the authenticator is because it protects your account from being hacked after the hackers hack your information from Blizzard itself.
Sleutel Oct 8th 2010 7:18PM
I can't say I'm going to cry that the big AH players have to take a bit more effort to spew out their scores of auctions undercutting everything on the market.
Sleutel Oct 8th 2010 7:20PM
Also, I think it's exaggerating to say "Critical AH addons broken by patch 4.0.1." One feature--the ability to make batch posts--has been broken. The addons can still scan the auction house, maintain databases of auction data, break your items into stack sizes and numbers of your choosing, suggest prices for your items, etc. They just can't do quite so much of your work for you.
Pfooti Oct 8th 2010 7:50PM
The real question: will you cry if the result of this is increased prices to the consumer and the gold from those auctions mostly going to goldselling botters who *can* still automate their processes because they don't care about the ToU? Because that's a possible outcome of this move.
Sleutel Oct 8th 2010 8:10PM
@Pfooti:
And those people will get banned. And there will be much rejoicing.
SunGod228 Oct 8th 2010 8:12PM
I enjoy Playing the auction house, and would probably argue to put up the numbers currently does require amount of work, it is not all automated and does require time.
I do agree that the title is seems to by crying wolf, I was expected changes similar to that 3d deadly boss mods type addon that happened this summer. Not 'you can't batch post'
relmatos Oct 8th 2010 8:13PM
yay. no more hundreds of 1 dust\cloth on the AH.
Pfooti Oct 8th 2010 8:24PM
You really think they'll get banned? Because they aren't getting banned right now. Almost every server I've been on has botted AH players. Every couple of months they get banned, prices go crazy, and then they come back in a few weeks. Watch herb prices fluctuate too- botters drive herb prices way down (especially lichbloom), after a month they're banned, and then two weeks later, they're back.
I honestly wish Blizzard could do something about that. But they aren't- they either cannot or will not effectively crush the botters.
zumajay Oct 8th 2010 9:09PM
Odd thing for a consumer to be complaining about undercutting
Silversol Oct 8th 2010 9:15PM
"I honestly wish Blizzard could do something about that. But they aren't- they either cannot or will not effectively crush the botters."
With this change, any automation would be a hack, the botters would stick out like a sore thumb instead of there being some question 'is it someone using an addon?'
Pfooti Oct 8th 2010 9:39PM
I suggest you look to the various regular blizzard forums where people talk about watching underground miners in wintergrasp (they hack the terrain so they can still mine, but they do so from underground so you cannot stop them), or look at the many posts about reporting botters made by people like Gevlon on his blog. What we have observed is that it can take months of continual reporting before blizzard will ban a bot, even if they're so obviously automated that anybody could notice that automation in no time.
So yeah- I still think that Blizzard's track record on banning obvious botting and automation is so abysmal I'm not very optimistic about this.
And @relmatos- these changes will not affect that in the least. Posting 1000 individual auctions of 1 infinite dust still only requires one mouseclick. It's one mouseclick per item type posted, not per auction, as you can still in the default interface (with no addons) say, "Please post 25 stacks of 5 of this item, please". Sorry to disappoint.
Sleutel Oct 9th 2010 12:32PM
@Pfooti:
"What we have observed is that it can take months of continual reporting before blizzard will ban a bot, even if they're so obviously automated that anybody could notice that automation in no time."
Blizzard has said time and again that if you report something like a botting farming or goldselling body spam to not think you're being ignored if it doesn't immediately disappear. They leave them active *to gather more data on them*.
"Posting 1000 individual auctions of 1 infinite dust still only requires one mouseclick."
Yes, but these sellers aren't just posting one type of item.