Auctioneer Advanced FAQ - Last updated: 04/12/2008

Q: What happened to the ability to download the whole auction house at once? I thought that was supposed to be part of WoW 2.3.
A: It was, but there were some technical issues. We are working on a few final problems now. In the meantime, you can try it out by typing in "/aadv getall" while at the AH, but FAIR WARNING, there is currently a chance that this will disconnect you. You should also be sure to turn off BTM first, as results may be unpredictable if you don't.

Q: Auctioneer Advanced isn't saving any of my prices any more, the way Auc4 and Auc Classic did!
Q: I can't post auctions any more!
Q: I am having XXX problem posting auctions in AA...
A: The first thing to check: all posting in AA is done from the "Appraiser" tab now; Auctioneer Advanced doesn't modify the "Post Auctions" or "Auctions" tabs any more. So if the problem you are having is with either of those tabs, try using the Appraiser tab instead. We think the new look and functionality is great, but if you prefer the "classic" way of posting auctions, just hit the "Switch UI" button on the bottom.

Q: Where is the search tab? (or for you old schoolers, the bidbroker and percentless reports) http://jira.norganna.org/browse/ADV-3
Q: How do I find deals in Auc Advanced?
A: SearchUI is finally nearing completion! A first draft version is now available in current releases. It doesn't have a tab at the AH yet, but you can open it by clicking the magnifying glass icon in the SlideBar. It will almost certainly continue to evolve over the coming weeks, with changes both on the back end and in the UI.

You also have two other choices for finding deals, other than the Search UI:
1- You can run Auctioneer Classic and Auctioneer Advanced simultaneously, and use the AC search tab - simply install both the AuctioneerAdvanced and AuctioneerClassic packages (or the suite versions), available on our download page by following the "Preview Version" link, then make sure you're scanning using AC.
2- Or you can just use AA, and turn on BTM while you are running a scan. BTM will pop up deals while it scans, but this does mean you have to monitor the computer while it is scanning.

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Q: How do I update to one of the new preview releases if I was running Auctioneer 4.0 previously, or if I have an earlier preview release I want to update?
Q: When posting auctions, I see references to the old post times (2, 8, and 24 hours), not the new times (12, 24, and 48 hours).
A: Depending on the version you are moving from, different errors might crop up if you don't completely remove the previous versions of Auctioneer from your directory. If you are getting errors, the first thing you should try is to delete any and all of these folders if they currently exist in your interface/addons folder, then reinstall:

!nLog, !Swatter, Auc-Advanced, Auc-Db, Auc-Filter-Basic, Auc-Filter-Outlier, Auc-Match-BeanCount, Auc-Match-Undercut, Auc-ScanData, Auc-Stat-Classic, Auc-Stat-Debug, Auc-Stat-Purchased, Auc-Stat-Sales, Auc-Stat-Simple, Auc-Stat-StdDev, Auc-Stat-WOWEcon, Auctioneer, Auc-Util-Appraiser, Auc-Util-AskPrice, Auc-Util-AutoMagic, Auc-Util-CompactUI, Auc-Util-Mover, Auc-Util-PreceLevel, Auc-Util-ScanButton, Auc-Util-ScanFinish, Auc-Util-ScanProgress, Auc-Util-SearchUI, Auc-Util-VendMarkup, Babylonian, BeanCounter, BtmScan, Configator, Constructor, DebugLib, Enchantrix, Enchantrix-Barker, EnhTooltip, Informant, LibTooltip, SlideBar, Stubby

Once those files are gone, install the latest preview release from the download site.

Q: What are all these different versions of Auctioneer??
A: "Auctioneer" or Auc4 refers to the old Auctioneer 4.0 branch of code. The 4.0 line has been decommissioned and will no longer be available for download or support here on this site.

"Auctioneer Classic" or AC was based on this same "Auctioneer 4.0" tool, but it has been ported to use the 5.0 versions of several of the shared libraries it needs to run. This version is currently in alpha status, though it should provide primarily the same functionality as Auc 4.0. If you're looking to upgrade to something that looks like Auc 4.0, this is the one you want. Please note, though, that this version of the tool will probably only ever receive bug fixes or maintenance updates going forward, but few new features.

"Auctioneer Advanced" is a complete overhaul of the Auctioneer addon, designed to provide more features, flexibility, and profit for you. We refer to it as Auctioneer Advanced, or AA. A brief introduction to Auctioneer Advanced can be found here. It can be downloaded from our main download page. Please note that it is in alpha status (meaning you should expect to see some bugs still). It now includes a stat (Auc-Stat-Classic) which uses/imports your Auc Classic scan data for use as an Auc Advanced statistic, so you can install AA at any time, run them side-by-side if you want, or switch completely to AA at your leisure without losing access to the scan data you've built up in AC.

Q: I am running both AC and AA. Do I need to scan in both?
A: Nope! Run your scans under AC. AA automatically picks up this data. Done! (If you run scans under AA , unfortunately AC will not pick up on them.)
Important note: At the end of the scan, AC stats will display immediately, as expected. Unfortunately, at the moment AA does not update until you do another activity which engages the scanner, such as searching for an item.

Q: I like the features of AA, but I trust my AC statistics more. Can I use the one with the other?
Q: Can I import my AC data into AA?
A: Yes! First of all, AA has a module which will read and use your AC statistics on a "live" basis. It's called Auc-Stat-Classic, and it should get downloaded with any Auc Advanced bundle. Make sure it is enabled for your toon, and set the options appropriately, and you should be able to select it as a pricing statistic in appraiser, and see its tooltip information. Note that if you go this route, the prices are only guaranteed available and up-to-date if AC is also enabled and loaded (though we do do some caching, so some items may have priced even if you later disable AC), and they will only get updated if you also continue to do AC scans, which will update both AC and AA.

A second option is to import your AC statistics into AA (or specifically, into Auc-Stat-Classic). Folks usually do this when they decide to switch to AA full time, but they don't yet have their AA scans as far along as they would like, so they want to keep their AC price data available for some period of time. To do this, make sure AC and AA are both loaded, then type "/aadv stat classic import". There will be some processing, then the import will complete. Once this is done, you can turn off AC and never turn it on again. Your AC stats will remain, but they won't get updated any more. You would simply scan in AA from that point on.

Q: What are all the different prices I see on the tooltips and in the Appraiser options?
A: Here are descriptions of the various stats modules currently available:
1 - Market: This is a weighted average of the other stats module prices you have installed (i.e. the ones listed below). The weights come from the "confidence" of each stat. More on this in the next Q&A.
2 - 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.
3 - 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.
4 - 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.
5 - Wowecon: if you have Wowecon installed, this stat will return the average price wowecon reports for your server (or globally if there are no server prices). You should see the Wowecon site for more details, but essentially these are ACTUAL sales prices on your server-faction, which are good to know. They key drawback is that some server-factions seems to have a small sample of submitted prices to work from, making this data somewhat less valuable.
6 - Classic: If you have Auc Classic installed, this statistic will summarize your Auc Classic median statistics.
7 - Sales: if you have BeanCounter installed, this stat will give you the 3- and 7-day average ACTUAL purchase and sales prices for items, along with an overall historical number. Please note that these are prices you actually paid or received for items at the AH, as opposed to the "Purchased" stat above, which inferrs these things based on scan data.

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. For that matter, they won't even show up in your snapshot/appraiser tab.

Note also that there is a different category of modules called Utility modules. Util modules may also provide various specialized prices for items (along with lots of other functionality), but they are not used directly to calculate statistics as the above stats modules do. We mainly use them to provide various functionality throughout the application. A technical description of the difference between these two may be found here.

Q: What are the confidences used by the pricing stats?
A: Confidence is a statistical concept which we've corrupted here in order to give some numerical calculation for "how trustworthy we think this statistic is". Confidence for us is a value between 0 and 1 for each stat. By default, all stats have a confidence of 0.25 - this is only because we haven't quite figured out how to calculate confidence for all of our stats yet. If every stat just used the default 0.25 (or any value really, as long as they were all identical), then the final market price (above) would just be a simple average of all the stats.

But two stats do currently have their own implementation of confidence now:
3 - StdDev: Measures the confidence that the true value is within +/- 10% of our estimated value, using some statistics.
6 - Classic: Starts at 1-(e^(-seen/30)), which is halved for every week it has been since the last sighting. As approximations, if you've seen it today, and 30 times before, it's a confidence of .63; 60 times is .86.
All other stats currently just use the base 0.25 confidence.

Q: BTM doesn't seem to find anything for me any more.
A: Walk through our BottomScanner Debugging Checklist.

Q: I only see the three standard Blizzard AH tabs. I am missing Appraiser and BeanCounter!
A: Are you sure you installed the full Auctioneer Advanced SUITE? The Auc Advanced standalone package doesn't come with anything but the scanner and the StdDev stat.

Q: Can Auctioneer or BottomScanner automatically bid for me? I could swear old versions used to do this!
A: Nope, Blizzard removed the ability of Addons to automatically bid on auctions quite some time ago (in WoW 2.0 or thereabouts). Bids must now be triggered by a "hardware event" (i.e. either a keypress or a mouse click).

Q: I just ran a scan, and read the output in the chat log. Should I be worried that there are a huge number of auctions listed as missing? If I scan again, that number goes way down. What happened?
Q: The first time I do an AH scan isn't removing defunct auctions! But the second one is. Is something broken?
A: Nope, nothing to be worried about. "Missing" auctions are auctions which were in the last scan, but not in the current one (and which aren't so old that we know they must have expired by now). One of four things happened to them: they expired, they were purchased, they were canceled, or they were actually just missed (by moving between scan pages while we scanned). If you do another scan and they are still missing, we assume they either expired or were purchased/canceled (because it is unlikely they would slip through the scan pages twice in a row) and remove them from our image. This is why a second scan generally show dramatically reduced "missing" numbers (and a corresponding increase in expired and purchased/canceled).

Q: My eyes! CompactUI is too small! Is there any way for me to make it bigger?
A: Sorta. You can scale the whole AH window using the command: "/run AuctionFrame:SetScale(1.0)", sticking in some larger number than 1.0 (might I suggest 1.1 to start with, and see if you like it). We may also continue to make tweaks to the formatting and layout of the rows, and may add the ability to scale the row size in the options at some point in the future. No guarantees though.

Q: What is this swatter thing? It is causing me lots of errors!
A: Swatter is an improved error catching addon. Rather than popping up the big red box on your screen when addons break or do bad things, swatter pops up a nice dialog box that includes not just the error, but also lots of helpful debugging information (called the stack trace). If you're seeing the swatter dialog, it usually means SOME OTHER addon is causing an error, not that swatter is. Try to read the beginning of the swatter data for a familiar name to get some idea of what addon is causing the problem. If it looks like an auctioneer file, you can try clicking into the dialog, which should highlight the whole text of the error message, then copying (with ctrl-c) the data and posting it here in the forums, and we'll try to take a look at it. It's even better if you can duplicate the problem with just auctioneer addons loaded, by the way. Depending on the error, that may be one of the first things we ask you to do before spending any time trying to figure out what happened.

Q: So where is the documentation for this new version?
A: There really isn't much, at the moment. There is some background history for it at the above link. Here is a wiki for it, but it's still being filled in. There is some technical documentation there too, for those interesting in writing new Auctioneer modules.

Q: Help! Blizzard just released a patch, and now Auctioneer isn't loading! What do I do?
A: Every single time blizzard downloads a new patch (i.e. every time you have to agree to the EULA again), you will have to log in, go to your character selection screen, hit the AddOns button on the bottom left, then enable the "Load Out of Date Addons" checkbox in the upper right. You have to re-enable this checkbox EVERY SINGLE TIME there is a new patch, no matter how minor it is.

Otherwise you have to wait for your favorite mods (including Auctioneer) to release a new version which is "certified" for that new version release - but fair warning, that release is never coming for those minor patches which don't break Auctioneer in any way.

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Possibly outdated FAQ entries:

Q: I'm seeing some really strange behavior, where enabling or disabling Auc Classic changes my scan speed dramatically, and I'm now scanning slower than I used to before the WoW 2.3 changes.
A: This is an issue we are currently looking into, and one which we don't really understand yet. It has been shown anecdotally that disabling the "ScanProgress" module in the Auc Advanced options will usually increase your speed dramatically, so you might try this in the interim. Installing/enabling Auc Classic may also speed things up (though it will also increase your memory usage).