Introduction
One of the addons I've used for World of Warcraft almost since I started playing is the Auctioneer suite. This versatile, powerful tool is one of the major tools that can make the difference between success and failure.
The Auctioneer suite consistes of three major tools:
- Auctioneer - a tool that tracks and analyzes auctionhouse prices, along with providing vendor buyout and other valuable information in an item tooltip
- Enchantrix - a tool that allows you to see what various items will disenchant to, as well as features that can automate pricing and sales messaging by using the price information stored by Auctioneer
- Gatherer - a tool that keeps track of the herb, ore, chests, fishing pools, and various other lootables throughout the game, making it easier to look in the 'right place' when you're out farming mats (for craft or profit).
There are several other sub-tools involved here as well, and literally hundreds of different options you can play with. As the intent of this article is to be a review, rather than a comprehensive guide, I'm not going to cover every little option in detail. What I will do, however, is give you an overview of the main features of the tool, and information about where to get it (the link at the top of this page, noob! 
).
Auctioneer Suite: Key Features
Auctioneer has grown considerably from it's early days as a simple auction analysis and posting tool. It now includes two other major tools, Enchantrix and Gatherer, and the functionality and options have been expanded far beyond the original tool.
Auctioneer is highly customizable, with far too many options and variables to list here comprehensively. You can get started with them by finding a very thin yellow tab on the right side of your screen in-game and hovering over it:
The various icons on this tab, and the associated tool tips (like the one for Enchantrix in the graphic there) will help you start discovering the wide variety of customizable tools, tweaks, and parameters so that you can adjust all of the suite's tools to fit your needs and playing style.
A quick overview of what these tools do and what they're for:
- Auctioneer - allows scanning of auctionhouse data, analysis of price trends, quick posting and batch-posting of your items for auction, and much, much more (see the section below on one of my favorite hidden features!)
- Enchantrix - Allows you to automate advertising your enchanting services in /trade, as well as helping you set pricing for enchantments applied with your materials based on the value of those materials on your server.
- Gatherer - Keeps track of the various nodes of ore, herbs, treasure chests, and quest items that you harvest in-game, so you can find them again later for faster, more efficient material gathering.
All of these tools, and more, will be added to your game when you download the full suite from the link at the top of this page. Auctioneer is a 'legal' addon (meaning Blizzard won't sanction you for using it), and in no way involves cheating or exploiting the game; it simply helps increase the speed at which you can perform repetitive, time-consuming tasks, so that you can spend more of your valuable game time doing things that are more productive, like killing boars.
The Secret Feature: AskPrice
This is one of my favorite features of Auctioneer, and most people - even those who are using this addon - don't realize it exists. This feature is called "AskPrice," and it allows you to share your Auction data with guild members and friends by responding to specially formatted messages. These messages can be triggered in two different ways. The easiest is by sending a tell in whisper or guild chat that consists of a question mark and an item link:
When you do this, the following response is sent automatically to the person who asked:
Of course in this graphic it shows up twice because I'm talking to myself, but you get the idea. You can even do it with item stacks:
You can also set AskPrice to respond to natural language questions, using two trigger words. By default, these are 'what' and 'worth.' So if someone in your guild says "What is [item link] worth," if you have AskPrice turned on and you are the guild member currently online with the most sightings of that item (or the question is send to you directly in a tell), it will respond with the same information.
It can be problematic if people overdo it - there's nothing quite so annoying as getting lagged out by someone flooding you with price checks when you've got Kael-Thas at 3%! - but you can easily toggle the feature off in the configuration interface, and when you're NOT in the middle of an epic fight, it can really help cut down on those annoying "OMG PRICE CHECK [Runecloth]" messages in guild chat!
If you are playing World of Warcraft without Auctioneer, you simply are not playing as effectively as you could be. There are tons of other features, including a tool that will scan for items priced below what you can sell them to a vendor for - free money! Over the next three pages we'll take a closer look at the features and functionality of the major components of this must-have addon.
Next: Auctioneer - Auctionhouse Search, Pricing Data, and Posting Tools
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