Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Auctioneering 2.0


Thanks to a great tip by one of our readers, we've taken our auctioning to the next level. The Allakhazam site is a decent general reference for prices averaged across all servers in the Warcraft universe. However, as pointed out by our reader, prices can vary by server age and population. The Auctioneer addon provides the player with an extremely powerful tool. Essentially, the tool enables us to scan the auction house whenever we log in and build up a database of prices in which to gauge the true value of items on our server. Read more features at the Auctioneer site.

Our results so far have been impressive. A decent portion of the population either doesn't care to use the tool, prefers to spend their time playing rather than trading, or buys their gold from websites or independent operators like us (or like we hope to be one day). The real hardcore farmer shops overseas also typically work on a quota system, so they'll be more likely to move items quickly rather than maximize their profits. The result is a major advantage in spotting deals and pricing goods correctly. We've made 30g profit alone on only a couple of transactions by buying from anxious sellers looking to cash out their high quality items quickly. We've yet to try, but putting this technique together with the timing strategies we outlined in an earlier post should amplify the results even further. Seems like trading may be even more profitable than building up a character and farming, but the jury's still out on that one.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Auctioneer is a great tool but some people try to scam you. Be careful of what you read on the page.
For example, let's say someone has a sword that costs 50s. He puts it on the AH for 20g. Obviously, no one in their right mind will buy that. So he gets it back and loses the small deposit fee. He repeats the same thing for a few days. Now if you had scanned the auction for the past few days, aunctioneer would have picked up the auction price of 20g. The guy comes back and this time lists it for 10g. Running /auctioneer percent-less shows it at 50% of its estimated price. A real bargain!!! Well, it is NOT.