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Auctioneer Addon

Auctioneer is an addon that allows you to view information about an item that may be useful in helping you determine what it's worth.

Straight out of the box, Auctioneer knows much about many items in the game, and will tell you many things about the item when you move your mouse over the item in the game.

Right at the start, the information that is provided (via the Informant addon) to the user is:

An example tooltip:

So what does this tell the user?

  1. It tells the user that they are looking at the item "Linen Cloth"
  2. The buy price (that you can buy this item from vendors for) for three of these items is 1 silver and 65 coppers. (which is 55 coppers each)
  3. The sell price (that you can sell this item back to the vendors for) for three of these items is 39 coppers. (which is 13 coppers each)
  4. This item can be stacked together up to a maximum stack size of 20 items
  5. Blacksmithing , First aid , Tailoring and Engineering professions all use this item in their trades.
  6. It is a quest-item in 4 quests.

Note: Items that you may not actually be able to buy from vendors still have a value in the game. This value determines things like deposit price and starting price at the auction house and repair costs for durability damage. What is this scanning about?

Once a user moves to the auction house and beyond just buying and selling from/to vendors, the whole game changes. No longer is the user dealing with the static prices of the vendor to support their character's income. We are now dealing with the fluid and hectic nature of a dog-eat-dog market economy.

In such an economy, which is in a constant state of flux, it can be difficult to select the correct pricing points for your item at the auction house. Sometimes the prices and value of your items can be wildly different to the vendor price due to many factors, the value of items that can be made from your item, the use of a particular item in a quest, the suitability of a particular weapon or armor to specific classes, and the disenchantability of an item to enchanters.

Primarily, the driving factor of the price fluctuations, as in the real world is supply versus demand. When supply is high, but demand is low, competition drives the prices down, and conversely then supply is low, but demand is high, the market is driven into a sellers market. What can Auctioneer do to help me ?

Auctioneer can help you alleviate this lack of market knowledge over time by watching the market evolve. When you go to the auction house for the first time after installing auctioneer, you will see a new button marked "Scan" at the bottom of the Auction window's browse pane. Clicking on this button will put the Auction window into an automatic scanning process which will look at the current market snapshot and record statistical data about the prices and quantities of items at the auction house.

Once the market analysis has completed, you will notice additional information about the items in the tooltips when you mouse over them:

An example tooltip:

OK, what is this new data telling the user?

The new data is displaying the market statistics from all auction scans. It is telling the user that:

OK, but what do these numbers actually mean?

Understanding of what the numbers are telling you can be the most difficult part of understanding this addon.

Let me tell you what this data tells me.

  1. The sample size is high. 4062 items, which means that we have a lot of information about the item.
  2. The auction house has some nibblers who are taking bids on the lower priced items in the auction house. 10% of the items have bids, however they are not coming close to the average starting bid (even lower than halfway towards it). This indicates that there are people looking for bargains on this item (likely to try and buy and resell it at a better price)
  3. The buyout rate being at 92% indicates that people are fairly confident that they know the value of this item.
  4. The Average buyout being about 2 silver 85 copper higher than the average median (around 40% of the median) indicates a varying price for these item, but still fair. When the difference between the average and the median is high, this indicates a market that is unstable, unsure of it's pricing point.
  5. The last median (historical median) shows the median value of up to the last 35 items, whereas the scanned median (snapshot median) shows the median buyout of only those items currently for sale on the auction house. The difference between these two values indicate a temporary market shift. The historical data being higher than the snapshot data means that the market is in a low for this item (buyers market) and conversely the snapshot being higher than the historical indicates the market booming for this item (sellers market)
  6. The other points are explained already in the previous section.

Selecting the prices to sell for:

If Auctioneer has enough data, when you try to put an auction up for sale, it will attempt to provide you with intelligent pricing points based upon the market data it has accumulated through scanning.

When you drag your item from your inventory window into the Create Auction item slot, Auctioneer will set a minimum price, a buyout price and display relevant data about it's decision making process underneath in the market analysis pane, as well as telling you how it arrived at it's prices.

An example auction 1

Based upon the Auction-tab description: (for more information see Interface Usage)

An example auction 2

Based upon the Post Auction-tab description: (for more information see Interface Usage)

What's all this mean then?

OK, well the starting and buyout prices, duration and the deposit are all self explanitory. The rest of the data means this: (Explanation based upon auction example 1)

What are the available pricing models?

The pricing algorithm may select one of: