Auctioneer/FAQ
From Norganna's AddOns
4.0.x Specific FAQs
Q1a: What versions of Auctioneer are compatible with WoW 4.0.x?
A: You must use a 5.9 or higher version of Auctioneer now that WoW 4.0 has been released. This 5.9 version is now available at our download site, as well as from WoWI and Curse.
Q2a: Can you turn off that new confirmation prompt?
A: Nope, it's a new Blizzard requirement. All auction postings and cancellations now require a separate hardware event. (You can post multiple identical auctions of the same item and the same stack size with a single click.) You can macro the command and then keybind it, if you like; nice easy one, too. /click AuctioneerPostPromptYes
Q3a: When I go to the Auction House, all the different frames are overlapping each other!
A: You have an old version of Auctioneer installed. Please update to a 5.9 version. It is highly recommended that you first remove all old Auctioneer Addon code, since there have been some significant changes made. Instructions are in Q2 below.
Q4a: I see several items that aren't stacking right in the posting frames (or in my bags), especially gems and other consumables.
A: As part of the upgrade to WoW 4.0.1, Blizzard made changes to a number of items. In some cases, they created new items with the exact same names, and in some cases with the exact same stats, but they have given them new Item IDs. Unfortunately, Auctioneer treats these items with different Item IDs as being different items, and tracks them separately. (It is worth nothing that the default Blizzard UI does the same thing.)
The bad news is that there isn't much we can do about this problem. The good news is that it should become less and less an issue over time, as the older items get used up, and only the newer items continue to be created in-game.
Q5a: My GetAll scans and slow scans are timing out and not working. Or they are getting interrupted and not scanning everything.
A: Scanning has gotten a lot more erratic in 4.0.1 (probably as a result of the changes that now allow for streaming game data in the background). We are currently testing some scanning improvements that will work around the new Blizzard issues. Expect to see them in the 5.10 release. Note that even with these upcoming changes, that there are some rather large issues that need to be resolved on Blizzard's end for realm/factions with over 50K auctions. For those, there is nothing we can do, other than to suggest that folks use the slow scan. The issue is detailed, at length, on http://forums.norganna.org/index.php?p=/discussion/12297/auctioneer-scanning-woes-and-what-were-doing-to-minimize-them./p1 .
Q6a: Glypher and/or GlypherPost are not working.
A: We know. We've updated them to not throw errors on load, but they have not yet been updated to actually work properly in WoW 4.0.1. Unfortunately, the primary developer for these tools has quit WoW, so these tools may be on the back burner for a bit.
Q7a: A bunch of my equipment can't be auctioned, Auctioneer seems not to even be able to see it!
A: Blizzard "normalized" the durability on all non-plate gear with 4.0.1. You probably just need to repair the item first.
Q8a: Auctioneer is causing a CancelUnitBuff() taint which prevents me from canceling buffs!
A: This is a known issue, caused by two separate Blizzard bugs. First, they have accidentally tainted the Buff Frame (by accidentally leaking a global variable). We can hope this will be fixed in a future release. Second, there is a bit of a design issue with the default Blizzard DropDown control, which Auctioneer uses extensively. This allows the taint to accidentally get attached to us (or randomly to any number of other addons who also use the control), even though we had nothing to do with it.
For the moment, we do not intend to do anything about this issue, and hope that Blizzard will address it in a future release. If this doesn't happen, we will eventually look into building our own DropDown control UI and use it instead, but we are hoping never to have to do this.
Q9a: Auctioneer causes this error when I log in...
A: In a number of cases, other AddOns you have installed have not been updated to work with 4.0.1, and these AddOns cause a multitude of errors, some of which may even (eventually) cause Auctioneer to error out as well. So first, make sure your other AddOns have been updated to work with WoW 4.0.1.
If you've done this and still get errors, try temporarily disabling all your non-auctioneer AddOns, and see if the problem persists. If not, start slowly adding back a few addons at a time, until you discover which AddOn is causing conflicts with Auctioneer. This will greatly help us in tracking down and resolving the conflict.
General Questions and Answers
Q1: What versions of Auctioneer are available for my use?
A: Auctioneer can be downloaded from our official download site, where all supported versions of Auctioneer are always available for download. We generally have a release version (known to be stable) and a preview (i.e. beta) version, which includes more features but a greater chance of unresolved issues. Our preview versions are generally quite stable, however, and we have no qualms about suggesting that even very new users try out the preview versions in order to get the benefit of our latest features.
In addition to our own site, we currently maintain official versions on WoWInterface and Curse.
In this documentation, you may find occasional references to "Auctioneer Classic". This was an earlier incarnation of Auctioneer, which has been decommissioned by the development team since 2008 and is no longer available for download or supported here.
Q2: How do I update to the latest preview or release build if I was previously running an earlier preview release of Auctioneer?
A: In many cases you can update by simply installing the new files over top of your existing installation. However, some updates require a more thorough installation procedure. In these cases, different errors might crop up if you don't completely remove the previous versions of Auctioneer from your directory prior to installing a new version. If you are experiencing errors after updating, or if you just like being thorough, please follow the instructions below:
Delete any and all of the following folders if they currently exist in your interface/AddOns folder:
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The main point is to remove all Auctioneer-related files before upgrading. Once all such files are removed, install the latest preview or release build of your choosing from the download site.
Q3: What is the deal with the new GetAll, fast-scanning functionality? Does it really work that fast?
A: Yes, GetAll is fast. Really fast. Yes, we are getting all the auctions, we're not skipping anything. The GetAll scanning process should take about 1-3 minutes, if you have a reasonable connection and CPU, as compared to ~8-10 minutes or more using a regular scan on a typically-sized Auction House. We can do this now because Blizzard provided new functionality that lets us download the whole AH in one big chunk, rather than having to page through 200+ pages of 50 auctions at a time.
There are some trade-offs and caveats, though:
- You can only do one GetAll scan per 15 minutes, unless you logout and back in. This shouldn't be much of an issue, since why would you want to do two complete rescans so quickly?
- GetAll may cause you to disconnect. This appears to be an issue on Blizzard's side which we cannot do much about. We have, at best, anecdotal suggestions about how you can minimize the chances of this happening: have a reasonably recent computer and CPU; do not try to scan when the server itself is behaving sluggishly, or when you have high latency ping times; do not attempt when there are lots of people using the AH; do not attempt when a lot of people are physically nearby. Basically, try using GetAll at off hours and at the less-populated AH's (e.g., Silvermoon City for Horde, and Exodar or Darnassus for Alliance) if you have trouble getting disconnected while using GetAll.
- GetAll will sometimes get interrupted in the middle of downloading or processing; the post-scan summary will indicate that there was an interruption, and your snapshot may contain many fewer items than you would expect. This most often happens soon after a server restart, whenever the server cache is cleared (i.e., after patches or major maintenance). Running a page-by-page scan first will frequently make it so that GetAll scans are once again functional for you.
- GetAll will not have seller info for most auctions. This is caused by a Blizzard limitation in how quickly we can request seller names for auctions. We have adjusted our code so that most of our Auctioneering functionality is not affected, but this will affect any seller filters you have in place (as you won't be able to filter them out if we don't know who the seller is when the scan is processing). If you want to get seller information, your only option is to use the regular, page-by-page scan (possibly in conjunction with a GetAll scan).
- When using GetAll, we no longer have to worry about items slipping between pages while scanning, so any items missing from the GetAll scan are immediately removed from the snapshot (as opposed to needing to be missing from two successive scans, as we require during regular scans).
Q4: I have noticed an item where the statistics reported are well beyond reason, often known as "poisoning". How do I reset the statistics for a single item, without losing all of my scan data?
A: At the chat prompt, enter "/auc clear [ItemLink]". Do not enter the quotes; the [ItemLink] should be the item's shift-click link.
Q5: Actually, most of my statistics for most items are now out of whack, and I'm thinking about getting rid of them all and starting over. Should I do this? How?
A: It's a decision that only you can make for yourself, but many of our expert users now feel that old data can really hurt some of your price statistics, particularly right after a new version of WoW is released and many new items are added and old items become more or less in demand.
If you do want to start fresh, you can now do this from in-game. Simply type "/auc cleardata ALL" to clear all data from all servers and factions. Replace "ALL" with "server" or "faction" to clear data only for the current server or faction, instead.
You should find that all your price data is gone and you can start fresh with new scans. We recommend a week or two of daily scans before you begin to use your new price data for anything, and as always, Auctioneer is just a tool, you have to be the brain behind the tool whenever you think about whether to buy something. Caveat emptor.
Q6: What is the snapshot and/or Auc-ScanData, and how and why would I clear it?
A: The snapshot (aka Auc-ScanData) is where we store the list of all auctions currently up on the AH. When you run a getall or page-by-page scan, the snapshot is updated with the auctions we saw. All Auctioneer searches are made against this snapshot, so the snapshot must be up to date in order for your searches to be useful.
Every once in a while, the snapshot can get corrupted. In these cases, you might hear one of the Auctioneer staff suggest you clear your snapshot. Doing so will NOT make you lose your statistics data (it is all stored in separate places). Doing so may have some minor impacts on some statistics that rely on the snapshot, such as Auc-Stat-Purchased, so for this reason we do not suggest clearing your snapshot frequently. But doing so once in a while when you are having other issues is a fairly minor impact.
To clear your snapshot, type in the following "/auc clearscan ALL"
Q7: What are all the different prices I see on the tooltips and in the Appraiser options?
A: Here are descriptions of the currently available Statistic Modules for Auctioneer:
- Market: This is not a stat module in and of itself, but rather a confidence-weighted average of all of the reporting stats modules. Since this calculation is rather complex, it has its own page: Market Price
- Simple: 3-, 7-, and 14-day exponential moving averages, or EMA. An EMA buckets all your prices into days, gets an average value for each day, then averages those values together in a complicated non-linear way (see the previous link if you want more info). The 3-day EMA is the one used to calculate market price.
- Histogram: Returns Median and IQR values, based upon a Histogram of pricing data. Essentially, a median value, based upon all prices ever seen; no data are ever discarded.
- iLevel: A standard-deviation statistics module that bases the suggested price on the item type, quality, and iLevel rather than specific names or other criteria. Note: This could cause sales prices to be displayed for BOP items; these values can be seen as another way to evaluate the item or ignored.
- StdDev: A price obtained by filtering out data falling too far away from the mean value, in an attempt to remove outliers/scam data. This is reported as the Normalized price in the tooltip, and is what is used to calculate market price.
- Purchased: 3-, 7-, and 14-day EMA of inferred sales prices. Be very careful with this stat - it does not record only actual sales made. Instead, if you scan multiple times in a day, you sometimes see items disappear from the listings before the earliest possible time they might have expired. The purchased stat module sees this happen and infers that they might have been sold at their buyout price, and then calculates an average of all such inferred sales prices. Note that this stat can be skewed high, because some such disappeared auctions haven't necessarily been bought out; they may have just been canceled (for legitimate or scam reasons). The 3-day EMA is the price used for the market calculation.
- Sales: Works on the principle that if you have sold something for a certain price in the past, you can likely do so again. To this end, it uses the BeanCounter historical database, that is, your previous sales history, to enable you to use that as your new sales price, too. Since Sales is already working with the BeanCounter historical data, it includes a breakdown of your purchasing history so that you can roughly judge your long-term profits in specific markets.
- WOWEcon: Only functions if you have WOWEcon installed. This displays the price WOWEcon reports for your server and/or all servers; it is the median price for which an item has previously sold. You should see the WOWEcon site for more details, but essentially these are actual sale prices (successful auctions) on your server-faction (and/or all servers (global)). The key drawback is that the amount of data per realm/faction appears to vary greatly, making these data somewhat less valuable; however it shows the number of sales used to determine the recommendation in parentheses, next to the price. If your server usually has average prices relative to other servers, you can use the global price with confidence, since it usually has hundreds of sales for an item.
Please note that all scan data will first be filtered by the "Outlier" filter, if you have it enabled. This means that data which appear to be outliers (i.e., very far away from the mean value, which to us indicates that it is probably scam data meant to corrupt our Auctioneer statistics) will be discarded outright and will not affect any of the above stats calculations.
Note also that there is a different category of modules called Utility modules. These Utility or Util modules may also provide various specialized prices for items (along with lots of other functionality), but they are not directly used to calculate statistics. Util Modules are primarily used to provide various functionality throughout the application. A technical description of the differences between these two may be found here.
Q8: Is there any way to skip the confirmation pop-up when buying from SearchUI? Other AddOns let me do it!
A: The short answer is no.
The technical explanation: to prevent automated purchasing bots, Blizzard requires a hardware event (i.e. mouseclick or keypress) associated with each purchase, which must occur while the item you want to buy is currently shown on the browse screen. SearchUI is designed to search against the entire snapshot, not just whatever 50 items are currently being shown; indeed, this is the whole point of the SearchUI. As a result, when you click the "purchase" button on the SearchUI screen, we first have to do a search to find the specified auction (this is why it can take a couple seconds, if there are multiple pages of results for a given item, we can only search through it one page per second). Once we locate the auction, we then put up the confirmation dialog. Clicking "yes" here is the actual hardware event which allows the item to be purchased.
Just to be complete, if you are looking at an item on the Browse screen, our EasyBuyout utility AddOn will also allow you to buy the auction with a single click.
Q9: SearchUI is not finding any items for me anymore. What could be wrong?
A: Check the SearchUI options, especially the options for "IgnoreItemPrice", "IgnoreItemType", and "IgnoreTimeLeft". Try disabling them all, then re-run the search and see if any items are discovered. They can sometimes be a little restrictive, so you should really learn more about them before you re-enable them. See the SearchUI Basics page or the main SearchUI wiki page for more.
Also check the reserve amount you have selected, as well as the maximum price you have selected (both in the global options, and for the particular searcher you are using). These are often found to be the culprit by folks having trouble with no search results returning.
If you're still having trouble, go to the Search tab, and select "Global Settings" from the left hand list, then enable the "Show debug line in tooltip for auctions" option. Be sure to also enable the searches you regularly do just below. Now go to the browse tab, and manually search for some auctions that you think your searches should be returning in the results list. Mouse over the auction, and now the tooltip should have a new "SearchUI" section added which indicates the reason why the auction did not meet the criteria for being returned by Search.
Q10a: When I open up the mailbox, all my mail gets instantly flagged as read and changes color.
A: This is BeanCounter, which has to read your AH mail in order to process it. You can fix the problem by going to the BeanCounter options (BeanCounter tab, Configure) and changing the Mail Re-Color Method to suit your taste.
Q10b: Wait a minute, I just noticed that BeanCounter is not reading all my AH mail after all. Some items are not showing up in the BeanCounter search!
A: As mentioned above, BeanCounter has to read the AH mail in order to process it. Do you have another AddOn that interferes with mail handling? If so, it may be reading the mail before BeanCounter gets a chance to do so, preventing us from recording it. In particular, Altaholic can cause these issues. In Altaholic's "Datastore Mail" option, make sure the the "read mail body" option is not checked.
Q11: My chat window is inundated with scan statistics after even the most simple search.
A: This is the intended behavior. For those who cannot stand having some extra information, Auctioneer allows you to either suspend this output altogether (Option1) or to direct the output to the Chat Frame of your choice (Option2).
- Open the Auctioneer options and select the General subsection.
- The options are accessed via the Configure button at the top of the Appraiser frame or by clicking the "coin stack" icon on the SlideBar, installed by default just below the minimap along the right edge of the screen.
- Option1: To completely disable the display of this data:
- Uncheck the "Enable the display of the Post Scan Summary" check box.
- Option2: To divert the Post Scan Summary to another chat frame:
- Create a new chat frame by right-clicking your General chat tab, and select "Create New Window".
- Give this new chat frame a cool name, perhaps "Auctioneer" or "Sales Stuff".
- Look further down in the General subsection and find the drop-down box named "Preferred Output Frame".
- Set the drop-down to the setting of your choice; that will direct the Post Scan Summary and other Auctioneer-initiated messages to that frame.
Note: Some Auction House messages may be displayed in other channels as they are system messages and are not generated by Auctioneer.
Q12: Where is the Scan button?
A: The Simple posting interface (Auc-Util-SimpleAuction) has an option to enable the big red Scan button (Browse/Post/Appraiser tab, Configure, Util Modules, Simple Auction, Scan button, check "Show big red scan button at bottom of browse window"). Otherwise, Auctioneer uses the play-type button at the top of the Browse tab or the fast-forward-type button to start a GetAll.
Q13: I like to scan only certain Auction House categories. How do I accomplish this?
A: You can select specific categories to scan on the Browse tab / CompactUI by Ctrl-clicking each category you wish to include in the scan, and then clicking the play-type button at the top of the Browse frame to start the scan.
Q14: I'm having trouble posting auctions... / How do I get this thing to remember my prices?
A: Auctioneer no longer modifies the default Blizzard Auctions tab in any way. All the posting/pricing is now done via the Appraiser or Post tab.
The Appraiser tab is our advanced posting interface, containing lots of options for power sellers. The Post tab is the simple posting interface, and is a throwback to the old Auctioneer Classic posting interface. It is designed to be simple and straightforward, with very few configuration options.
Q15: All my 48-hour auctions are showing up as 24-hour auctions, reporting "Very Long" / "Greater than 12 hrs". Help!
A: Blizzard only has 4 statuses for time left. On the Auction tab, they are: Short (less than 30 minutes), Medium (30 min to 2 hours), Long (2 hours to 12 hours), and Very Long (greater than 12 hours). On the Browse tab using CompactUI they are displayed as "30m", "2h", "12h", and "48h".
This means that both 24 and 48 hour auctions both show up as being Very Long when you first post them, so there is no way to know for sure which of the two they are. After approximately 12 hours, 24-hour auctions should start to show as Long (unless they have had a lot of bid activity - each bid increases the auction length by ~5 minutes), so that is the first time they will begin to report differently.
Q16: My scans just started reporting that they will take hours to finish! What is going on?
A: If it is a patch day, a maintenance day, or you are experiencing lag in and around the AH, more than likely the servers are just being pokey. Try again at an off-peak time and see if your problem resolves itself.
If it isn't that, are you minimizing your WoW client while the scan is going on, so that you can surf the web or do something else while you wait? Unfortunately, as of WoW 3.3, the game client puts itself into "suspension" when you minimize its window, meaning that the scan gets paused when you minimize the game. Alas, there is nothing we can do to change this, you simply cannot minimize the WoW window while scanning any longer. There is a workaround, however; if you switch to playing in windowed mode, and maximize the window, you can alt-tab out, and WoW will continue scanning for you in the background.
Q17: I just did a slow scan, or tried to refresh an item from the posting interface. Why does Auctioneer search still show a bunch of items which are actually no longer available on the AH?
A: The reasoning is technical. The scanning engine does not remove existing auctions from the snapshot until they have (1) expired, (2) been missed twice in a row on a multi-page scan, or (3) been missed on a single-page scan (e.g. an item refresh which returns fewer than 50 results). We require missing the item twice in a row for multi-page scans because auctions which are on the edge of a page can move between pages as we are scanning, causing us to possibly miss it even if is still on the AH. We compensate by not removing auctions until they have been missed twice in a row in this situation.
If you can, we suggest using GetAll scans, which do not suffer from this same behavior, since the whole auction house is given to us on a single page.
Q18: I want to make my own Filter, Statistic, or Utility to go along with Auctioneer. Is this possible?
A: Yes, indeed! Auctioneer was designed from the ground up to be modular, lightweight, and extensible. For more about creating modules, take a look at the Auctioneer Modules API wiki page. If you are interested in the Core API, check out the Auctioneer Core wiki page.
The modular nature of Auctioneer extends to the internal functions of each module where appropriate. For help with the creation of customized Searchers and/or Filters specifically for use in SearchUI, The SearchUI technical details provides a great starting point.
Q19: I would like to use my auctioneer prices in a spreadsheet or some such. Is there some way to export the data so that I can use it?
A: No WoW AddOn has any ability to perform file i/o, so we cannot export our data at all. The only option would be to create a separate program which parses our saved variables files. The was done a number of years ago, but our AddOn and data structures have changed significantly since then, so it no longer functions. If someone wants to create such a program, they are welcome to do so, but no current developers have expressed any interest in taking on this project. Please note that we also have no control over the actual layout or sorting in the saved variables file; this, too, is controlled entirely by the WoW client.
A: There is no easy way to accomplish this, but if the accounts are both for the same server and faction, or your two computers are on the same network, and if you do not play both accounts at the same time, then there are workarounds which you may be inclined to try out. More details can be found here.
Note that sharing data across two accounts / toons which are on different factions or different servers is explicitly not suggested and not supported. Prices vary considerably across factions and servers, you are doing yourself a disservice if you try to share across them, rather than just taking a week to start a new scanning database.
