Auctioneer - Search, Pricing, and Posting Tools
The most powerful, obvious, and useful function of Auctioneer is the ability to scan, store, and analyze auctionhouse price data. This can be time-consuming, especially on a large server and/or a slow connection. Typically, scanning the Alliance AH on Alextrasza-US, a heavily populated server, takes me about half an hour.
This is what you see when you open the auction window and run a search (in this case, a wide search for all epic weapons). Obviously, there are some pretty stark differences from the standard Blizzard interface here. Let's look at the actual item data first.
In your list of items, you can see several column headings by which the data can be sorted. These include quantity (#), minimum character level for item use (Min), Item level (iLvl), the name of the person selling the item (Owner), Price, and Percent (Pct). At the bottom of the item list, you can see the typical paging buttons, as well as a checkbox that allows you to view stack prices as per-unit, rather than per-stack. This can come in handy for those of us who are a little slow with the math who also don't have a great deal of data to work with.
The real 'big deal' here though is the Percent (Pct) column. This shows you how the price of this particular item matches up against the historical price average - i.e., how good a deal this price is for this item. For instance, we can see that the Gyro-Balanced Khorium Destroyer is priced at 1250g, which is 95% of the historical average value for this item, on this server, in the database. Probably not the best deal you'll ever find on it, but it's not a ripoff either (based on the server price average). On the other hand, you see Brain Hacker priced at 385 gold, which our database says is 132% of the average price - one third higher. This means it's a ripoff, someone has drastically overpriced the item and you shouldn't buy it.
The percentage colors are a handy visual quick-aid to pricing, and you can set the thresholds for them in the options dialogue. By default, the most overpriced items are red (more than 130% of average), then orange (115-130%), then yellow (95-115%) is the 'average price' range, followed by good deals (60-95%) in green and 'holy crap that's cheap' (<60%) in blue. The colors are not editable, but the price ranges are.
In the above screenshot, the items with no % information are those that have not been seen often enough to determine an accurate average.
Scanning the AH
Below the item list to the left, you can see a new button labeled 'Scan.' To collect your AH data, you simply click this button and go make a sandwich. You have to be at the AH to scan. You'll also notice the new check-boxes next to the item categories. By default, they are all selected, but if you're short on time or are playing on a very busy server, you can un-check them to scan only part of the at any one time. When I don't feel like waiting 30 minutes for the AH to scan, I'll often just scan Weapons, Armor, and Containers; Consumables, Trade Goods, Projectiles, and Quivers; or Recipes, Gems, Miscellaneous, and Quest items. These groupings tend to get you about a third of the AH at once, which obviously cuts your scan time down for the moment.
Of course, how often you scan depends on how often you play. If you're fortunate enough to be independently wealthy and can play 6-8 hours a day, then scanning every day isn't unrealistic. For most of us, however, once or twice a week is a more likely situation. I would strongly recommend a full AH scan at least once a week. I would also avoid, if possible, scanning constantly on the same day and time - prices tend to fluctuate during high/low traffic periods, and chances are if you scan every week on Saturday afternoon, you're going to get a data set that really doesn't reflect the overall price patterns on the server.
I also recommend that you reset your auction data by deleting the [wow install]\WTF\[account name]\Saved Variables\Auc-ScanData.lua and Auc-ScanData.lua.bak files at the very least twice a year. Seasonal events like Winter Veil and one-time events such as the opening of An'Qiraj can dramatically impact the prices of certain items. For instance, there are several seasonal food items and quests during Winter Veil that require Small Egg, and the price of these - typically around 8-12 silver normally on my server - will go up to 1g each, or higher, during WV. This causes an anomaly in your data that results in you having inaccurate information from which to set your prices.
Posting Items - The Appraiser
Another incredibly useful tool in Auctioneer is the Appraiser, which can be found under the tab with that name in the AH interface.
The Appraiser interface makes posting and pricing items ridiculously simple. You just click the item in the left-hand list and it prepares you to post the item If the item is stackable, you can set the stack size (up to the game-restricted masimum, e.g. 20 for leathers and scale), and the number of stacks you want to sell (the default setting is 'All,' which will sell not only all complete stacks but also any leftovers as a separate stack). The bid/buy prices are auto-filled if you have enough data to work with, and there are several 'pricing models' you can use - 'Market,' which by default sets the price to 95% of the server average, 'Vendor Markup,' which by default sets the item to 300% of the price you would get for selling it to a vendor, and a few other, more complex choices as well. The bottom slider on the left sets the auction duration (you can set the default in the addon configuration screen). While this is merely convenient for posting one item at a time, it'll save you at least several minutes when you decide to dump those 900 stacks of Runecloth you've been sitting on.
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