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 5 of 7)
Lorini Oct 9th 2010 12:34AM
The 'professionals' can already use hacks and probably already are using hacks, so this change really won't affect them or necessarily increase their numbers. What I think the change is designed to do is stop the activity where one person dominates a market just because he has enough stuff to post thousands and thousands of glyphs, automatically cancel them if they are undercut, and then post thousands and thousands of glyphs again to keep anyone else who doesn't have as much product as he does out of the market. Unless he puts his account at risk by using bots (and if he posts thousands of glyphs in 10 minutes it will be obvious) then he'll just have to post the most profitable ones. Then the more casual player can still make a few gold from what's left.
I play the AH casually but don't use automating so I certainly don't have a problem with it, in fact I'm looking forward to the change.
Pfooti Oct 9th 2010 12:46AM
Actually, Lorini, most serious auctioneers don't cancel undercut auctions. It's *far* easier to (say) craft 10 of each glyph, but only post 2-3 at a time. Then when you're undercut, post new glyphs at the lower price and let your old ones expire. This has the double benefit of reducing the amount of time spent running your AH game and backstopping the market in the event of a run on a particular glyph (sometimes people will buy 5+ of one if they're going to go back and forth for a raid or something, although that's rare).
To your main point: yeah, I don't think there will be more botters in an absolute sense, but I think the botters will adapt and stick around while some of the non-bot competitors will leave.
I am going to continue my theme from above as well: you're wrong when you say "Then the more casual player can still make a few gold from what's left." This change makes it LESS likely that a casual player will make gold. Think about it- you are apparently failing to make gold under a regime where it's easy to post and if you want, undercut and cancel glyphs. Why is making it harder for you to post suddenly going to magically make your life more profitable? Because I'm certainly not going to leave the market just because I had to adapt to the new AH regime.
This change makes Glyphwar somewhat harder to play. The result of that will be the same amount of casual profit to be made in the AH (not much) and a slight increase in the price of glyphs, gems and so on as some people get discouraged and leave. Anyone who is used to dominating the market and wants to continue dominating, however, will adapt. So you'd better hope you're on the server where everybody decides to quit.
That or, you'd better decide to be less casual in your approach to the AH. Then you can make some gold.
Jack Kelly Oct 8th 2010 11:31PM
Looks like I'll be on at the last possible second Tuesday morning making a HUGE AH posting before the servers get shut down.
Jennifer Oct 9th 2010 12:28AM
I'm a little curious how anyone could justify batching together dozens or hundreds of dissimilar items and posting them with one click. To me, that seems to be the very definition of botting. When you add in automated undercutting and automated pulling of auctions that have been undercut, you've moved very definitely into the realm of professional botter.
And, frankly, just because it's been tolerated until now does not make this a legal and justified way of making money.
To use a real world example, this would be like saying that because steroids have been tolerated in the past in professional baseball, we should all just shrug and ignore current use of steroids in professional baseball.
Kudos to Blizzard for implementing this change.
Pfooti Oct 9th 2010 12:39AM
Actually, a better real-world example would be to say, "while steroids have been kind of ignored in the past they're still illegal and against the rules of the game, so there should be better enforcement." Which has little to do with the existing crop of AH addons, which are not only not illegal, they're directly within the domain of the ToU. I can't just post auctions while I'm AFK- I have to say, "hey, post the stuff in my bags" by interacting. So the best real-world example would be something about the olympic committee arguing about whether or not really expensive swimsuits should be allowed in competition, given that they have a proven ability to improve time, but are not broadly available (and are not currently against the rules). Of course, that example also fails, because QA3 is broadly available.
The difference is a botter can use a third party program to automate the running back and forth between AH, Bank, and Mailbox, and can continually shift from post to cancel and back without actually doing anything. Good third-party programs won't behave exactly the same each time, there can be enough randomness built into it to make it relatively hard to spot with automated systems.
So yeah, "to you" that seems like the definition of botting. To me, it sounds like tomato is the very definition of baseball. We're both wrong.
Jennifer Oct 9th 2010 1:02AM
The AH addons are not "faster swimsuits", they're robots that dive, swim, turn at the walls, and collect the trophy for you.
If I write a program that runs to the mob, kills it, loots it, and skins it, is that a bot? The obvious answer is yes. It doesn't matter whether or not I am there to push the button to get it all started, it obviously violates the "one hardware event per action" rule.
An auction bot which batches dissimilar items, undercuts automatically and continuously throughout the auction process, removes items from auction that have been undercut automatically...is that same sort of bot. Again, a bot isn't necessarily something you can leave running at your computer, it's anything which automates something so entirely that you're not actually involved anywhere except at the beginning.
And, interesting historical sports fact: Steroids use was never officially addressed in baseball until 1991, when a memo was circulated but never enforced.
Pfooti Oct 9th 2010 1:44AM
I'll try one more time with this.
The vast majority of the work I do when glyphing is not posting glyphs. Even after this change goes through, that will still not be the case. Buying herbs, milling herbs, queuing glyphs, trading for inks and vellum, actually crafting glyphs. That takes a lot of time.
Also, I spend a lot of time at the mailbox counting my gold. And swimming in it, but I digress.
I add intelligence to the system at all times- I know when to buy herbs (when the herb botters dump their wares on the AH), I know when the other scribes post their wares, I know which glyphs sell well and which are dogs. I make a *lot* of decisions. The only decisions I leave up to the addon is how to specifically price my glyph, which is a tool that's been around for ages (I've been using Auctioneer since literally WoW 1.7 or so).
So yeah, blizzard is going to make the actual posting element of this process more grindy. I already spend a couple hours out of every 48 doing the herb/mill/craft/post process. My time commitment will go up. Those decisions you bemoan? The software will STILL make them. The difference? I click 345 times to create my auctions instead of 4 times (I can't post all my glyphs at once as it is, since there's barely enough bagspace on one alt, including all my bank bags, to hold my stock. This is, parenthetically, the *real* problem with the glyph market, not addons).
Does that bug me? Yeah. Is it the end of the world? No.
The reason I keep posting in this thread (and I think xkcd has just told me to stop with this one), is because all of you people who think that this will somehow improve your AH experience are dead wrong.
This change will make prices go up, and will make the AH no more accessible to "casual" users. All it will do is break the hardcore repeat-posters that actually AFK for hours at a time and continuously undercut using stuff like QAPoster (not QA3, but a separate addition). That's what this is all about. It's not about those annoying 1-stacks of bullets or infinite dust (still possible), or that mean dude who undercuts you (still gonna happen), or the fact that you can't quite afford a mechano-hog (go farm more lichbloom, it sells like hotcakes and often at 30+ gold/stack).
Anyway, enough of all this. I'm for bed. I hope all y'all get back to me on this in a few months and tell me that I was dead wrong. In december, tell me that there's no more botsploitation of the AH, that it's easier to sell your wares without being undercut, and items are selling for reasonable prices. And that all these changes started with this single nerf to AH utility.
I'm looking forward to that.
Jennifer Oct 9th 2010 2:16AM
First of all, my "ah experience" as you so eloquently express it, is limited to the posting of various raw materials I run across while questing, raiding, etc. I've never been one to play the AH...but even if I had, I guarantee you I would not have used the addon's you're lamenting the loss of - it feels to evidently of a bot for me to be comfortable using it.
In the end, it doesn't matter how much work you put into the AH, if the end result of the process is a bot program. I doubt Blizzard's intent here is to make the AH more grindy - rather, it's an attempt to limit the bots that can be used. I think they're heading in the right direction. It does no good to ban botters if you leave the ability to bot in the game - you're going to see those same botters (or others) back doing the same thing in a week. Destroying the ability to bot is a lot more effective in the end.
Granted, we'll probably always see bots of one sort or another - but that doesn't mean Blizzard should stop disabling their ability to bot. Just because someone gets murdered every day in this country doesn't mean we should stop prosecuting murderers. :P
As for the AH being less accessible - I think you'll be surprised. You don't often see casual posters on the AH - but this is because their auctions, underpriced, are usually snapped up so quickly by the botting AH sitters that nobody else gets to see their auctions. Whether prices go up or not, removing the ability to bot can only help the game economy, not ruin it.
And, worst case - I'm perfectly capable of getting things on my own, without resorting to the AH. I imagine I'm no smarter in this regard than any other player.
Skrotus Oct 9th 2010 3:48AM
The whole thing about "these addons are not against the rules" thing is bunk, the addons themselves might be fine, but if you're using them to dynamically post auctions while not at your computer and a GM comes looking, you'll get banned. I don't think QA3 is a huge issue by itself, but the plugin for it that was advertised on this site a few weeks ago clearly crossed the line, and I would say that's what forced Blizzard's hand.
Nipah Oct 9th 2010 1:15AM
No, I'm only the Nipah from Scarlet Crusade and Sen'jin (though that little fellow is only a banker).
I am, however, probably the person who's had the name on WoW the longest (useless bit of self-praising trivia that that is...).
Nipah Oct 9th 2010 1:16AM
... damn reply system.
Ominous Oct 9th 2010 4:12AM
"Gold Capped News: Critical AH addons broken by patch 4.0.1"
No they aren't.
"Both Auctioneer and Quickauctions 3 have been hit hard"
Good. Neither of those should be critical to you.
Almost every post is "Auctioneer this" or "Auctioneer that".
Auctioneer is bloated and the actions of Quickauctions are better done by other addons.
You CAN still get auctions done quickly and efficiently, using neither of those addons.
Hopefully, this thread's authors will now have received the necessary kick up the behind, to go and discover the (very few) addons they ought to have been using.
GoodAndy Oct 9th 2010 4:37AM
Like Auctionator. I love that darn addon.
Amaxe Oct 9th 2010 11:55AM
Prefer AuctionLite myself. While I used Auctioneer in Vanilla and TBC, I think I was getting tired of all the stuff I didn't want making this a huge addon. AuctionLite did everything I wanted in a way I found more convenient than Auctioneer.
I guess hardcore AH PvPers need the services I wouldn't know what to do with, but it would be good to have a "compare AH addons" article to inform people about the advantages/disadvantages to each one.
Who knows, maybe I would have a "Damn... [Addon X] can do this? I didn't know that..." moment.
Saelle Oct 10th 2010 1:06AM
If you think there are better mods than Auctioneer and Quickauctions for managing the AH you are wrong. AuctionLite is a nice mod and I have Auctionator on a few of my AH toons but they are really only good for items that don't need complex posting ability. Serious AH players have both Auctioneer and QA3 installed.
Amaxe Oct 10th 2010 2:51AM
Never said what you claim. Indeed, I said "I guess hardcore AH PvPers need the services I wouldn't know what to do with"
I said *I* like AuctionLite and said I would like to see a comparison of the addons
GoodAndy Oct 9th 2010 4:35AM
I don't really see the big deal. It's just in-game gold that you might miss out on through the undercutting. I'd rather it be more like vanilla where there wasn't as much pseudo cheating. I don't think you should be able to mess with the auction house while away from the auction house NPCs. That sounds similar to botting. I mean, it's really just a game.
Lhock Oct 9th 2010 6:16AM
Ulterior motives abound here. Watch the sales of the iphone auction house app skyrocket now. Before, no one would tocuh it because you were so limited by the number of transactions allowed, but now it will suddenly seem much more attractive.
Lazirah Oct 9th 2010 7:02AM
Actually this is just going to drive prices way up as it requires more effort there will be less competition and in turn prices will go up, so yay for me.
Xarnlen Oct 9th 2010 7:13AM
You all comment on the Glyph market but think of this market, the green/blue drops. I use Auctioneer to batch post green's and blue's, I would flag them as batch candidates and then do a a refresh on my list to check if reasonable then batch post. This will get tedious if I must sit there for hour to post 100 green's one at a time.
And as a whole this will not stop the die hard AH players anyway it just another finger in a dike that's full of holes to begin with..