EvalAppraiser.lua

This Evaluator uses your Appraiser settings to value items.
This means that for most items it will use whatever your default Pricing model is, but if you have fixed values for some items and different pricing models for others then it will use those instead.
The value for an item is whatever you would post it for using your current Appraiser settings. The point is that you can take the item you've bought out of the mailbox and post it in the AuctionHouse using Appraiser and not have to change anything. It is to simplify the handling of large numbers of auctions.

I recommend you use the Resale Evaluator while you are still adjusting your Appraiser settings and working out what you would like them to be, then once you have them set up how you like, turn Resale off and try this out instead.

There is little point using both this and Resale at the same time, they perform the exact same function, it's just a question of how you want to value and price things and whether you want to use different pricing scales on different items.

At a later point we will integrate the Resale and Appraiser evaluators, but for the moment they are separate (primarily to not break things that were working with things that were experimental)

The main issue with EvalAppraiser at the moment is that if you set a fixed price for something you can NOT turn it off (or change it to any other pricing plan) until you have a copy of that item in your inventory.

It works very well when you have scanned enough times to be sure of your data and have set your fixed prices very carefully. In this situation it is better than EvalResale but when you are still changing things and working out what you want to do it may have an element of risk.

Recommendation is to only enable Resale when you first start, then switch to Appraiser later on when you are more sure of your settings.
The intent is for us to combine them into a single entity in the future.

It is better if you only enable Resale or Appraiser, not both, at any one time.

Note: Both use the pricing methods in the Auctioneer Stats Modules. If someone has listed a Farmer's broom for 50g a hundred times then both of these evaluators will missreport it. You need to use your common sense as well and realise that some things don't sell well regardless of what other people try and sell them for. This is what the ignore buttons on BTMscan are for.

When I start an auctioneer on a new server, here's what I do:

First off, I never bid. The "allow bid" checkbox in btm's general settings is always unchecked. In my experience, unless you're bidding on an item about to expire, you will get outbid 9 times out of 10, which means a lot of your money can be sitting unproductive and unavailable.

Also, I never use the itemfilters.

My general settings at the start are:
>Reserve amount: 1c
>Maximum price: 100g

While I'm building up a model of the market, the only evaluator I use is vendor. There are two reasons for this.
1) it doesn't rely at all on market data, so can be used immediately
2) at low cash levels, it is very effective at multiplying the original investment quickly. 2s profit might not seem like much later, but when your total wealth is at 50c, it can really speed things up.

Later, when my merchant toon has some money (about 1g is where the returns from vendor start dwindling), I learn the enchanting profession, and turn on the resale/appraiser evaluator and the disenchant evaluator.
General settings:
>Reserve: around 50% of total wealth (basically how much I'd have if everything I had sold)
>Maximum Price: around 10% of reserve

For Resale:
>Minimum discount: 50% (My undercut settings are set to go down to 30% below marketprice, so this guarantees me at least 20% profit)
>Minimum Profit: Set to around 5% of my Maximum Price
>Minimum Seen: 20
>Quality checking: Common
>Subtract Deposit costs and AH fees: enabled (for 3.0 average listings)

For Disenchant:
>Minimum discount: 50%
>Minimum profit: about half of Resale's minimum profit (lower risk)
>Subtract AH fees from projected profit: enabled
One note with the enchanting mats: I do not undercut. I post at marketprice, as they will eventually sell, and have no deposit fee. The stack size varies on how full the market is. If it's fairly empty, i post single stacks. As the market fills up, I post stacks of 5. (Any larger, and you're only trying to sell to people trying to grind up)

Later, I turn the vendor off, as the profit it gives is negligible.

I tend to turn up my minimum profit for resale whenever my bags get full enough to make emptying my mailbox require posting some of what I'm currently carrying. This reduces the amount that I pick up, but only eliminates the least profitable ones.

You can set a Fixed Value by editing the bid or buy price in Appraiser for any item. When you do this, you will notice that your pricing method changes to display "Fixed Price" and this value will be remembered for the item.

It clicked!

(my brain that is)

Thanks Meridun!

Disenchant is pretty important and Snatch uses / commands so is a bit complicated. They are both in Classic so are a higher priority than the ones in Advanced.

very usefull info...thanks all :)

Posted By: thegriffgeeksWhat does the average relisting setting do, and/or what does it mean?

There you can estimate how often your auctions expire (losing your deposit) and need to be relisted. To account for this, average_reslistings * deposit is subtracted from the final valuation.

Ok thanks Nine. And Deckard, nice. I will have to try that one out. Thank you to your both for answering my questions.

have another one (since I've been playing around with Btmscan). In the ignore filter part. I see check boxes. It's not clear what checking means. Does it mean that's what's to be ignored, or the unchecked ones are to be ignored? Thanks!

I have a question about what Minimum Discount is.

I've seen in a few posts people suggesting 15-20%, 30%, or even 50% (I may have seen 80% but don't remember where). Now is this the percentage off that an item has been posted for? Like say something that usually sells for 100g and is posted at 70g therefore a 30% discount? If that option is set too high, will I miss a lot of potential deals? I pretty much understand all the other settings such as minimum profit, seen count, etc. but this one eludes me. I'll probably use a combination of the settings posted here for Min. Discount, but what would be a good one for vendor?

Thanks and keep up the awesome work :)
~ Dralnuu ~

Okay cool, thanks! Yea I wasn't sure if it did or not, don't have my laptop with me to load up WoW and check.

Hi Myrkul,
1) Advanced doesn't have an easy way to search by category yet, but if you go into the Ignore options, one of those lets you pick what item categories to ignore.
2) You turn BTM on and then do your normal scan and BTM will look at every item as it goes.

" 2) You turn BTM on and then do your normal scan and BTM will look at every item as it goes. "

This is what I had been doing.... I tried it again 3 more times and on different characters.
I click the "play" button on BTM, and then go back to the first tab and start my scan.... the scan runs through and gives me a summary when its finished.

Then it just sits there and does nothing. The only way I can get BTM to display any bargains and give me a pop-up, is for me to click the "next" arrows at the bottom of the page, and go page by page...sifting through 12000 or more scanned items.

not sure what I'm doing wrong

I'm not sure what "getall" is...but I think I got it working right now... it may be that I wasn't doing an initial scan "without" BTM running... I was starting both up right away.

This time I ran the AH scan first.. and then I started BTM up and ran the AH scan again... and that seemed to work correctly.

I was just cruising by. I've used and loved Auctioneer for a very long time; Many thanks to Norganna and crew. My wife and I have both worked pretty hard fine-tuning our Auctioneer settings and, one thing I have noticed is, different people will have very different setups that work for them.

Later, I turn the vendor off, as the profit it gives is negligible.

I debated whether I should even post this. I am a little stingy about giving up my secrets. My server is fairly low population. On a Friday/Saturday night, I can make about 15-20g of pure profit on one scan with BTM enabled, by just buying out Armor/Weapons that are selling for less than Vendor value. So if I do this, say 6 times a weekend, I can conceivably net @100g just buying out these vendor items and walking 30 paces to the merchant and selling them. Like PT Barnum said, there is a sucker born every minute.

I never bid

Here also, I bid on tons of things. Yes, it does tie up some of my flow, but, I set my threshold to only bid if there is a profit potential of greater than 2g and I have seen the item >20 times on the AH. I do often lose, but I win almost as often. And, you will find that sometimes you sneak away with something that someone put a vastly undervalued bid price on. I, personally, will wait until Monday night and bid like mad.

Not to pick on you Rockslicer, you provided a really good post. I really feel like I gain alot by seeing how other people are using the tools. I'm just throwing my 2¢ out there. And honestly, my attention span is short and other people probably said things much more eloquently than me but I couldn't make it past the 4th post without opening my big mouth. :)

Auc-Match-Undercut. Set the undercut slider to 30%.

the slider only works for Auc Advanced, and items you sell on the Appraiser tab. I don't believe the undercut slider is limited to 20%, but I'm not in front of the game to double check. I'm guessing you're doing something wrong though.

"/auc pci-underlow" only works for Auc Classic, and items you sell using the Post tab.

rockslice, with that in mind, how did you have your settings in the example you gave back in november 07? did you have your "undermarket" set at -30% rather than your "undercut" at -30%?

d'oh! Yes, undermarket is the slider I meant, not undercut. My apologies for the terminology SNAFU.

First, you forgot vendor :)

Second, you've got both minprofits and undermarket at 50%. If the market price drops 10%, you could be posting at a 10% loss if you're trying to undercut. I know you want to gain gold fast, but it's often better to just hold onto the item for a few more days. (this is why those 20-slot bags or a guildvault are a great investment for a banker)
I'd set the undermarket and minprofit to at least 10% difference from each other.

You probably also want undercut to be at least 1% (or set it to 1c). 0% means you will match the competition exactly.

Posted By: archarchand specifically, what should i do with items that btm recommends for buyout from the resale evaluator, but end up being "Cannot match lowest price"?

Hold onto it. Eventually, prices will increase, or the market price will decrease, and your settings will let you post as the lowest.

because that line in the tooltip comes from AucClassic, and the GUI is AucAdvanced

i would use appraiser. it takes in to account all your adjusted pries for items when figuring the price of a item to sell. resale does the same thing but doesn't use the adjusted prices. i do believe in the future appraiser will replace resale.

i use the market matching and i also use buyout as its normally higher then the bid prices. but that's just me.

so ive been losing money this whole time? you mean i could of been making more money then i already have? *bangs head on wall* uuugghhh off to change some things around lol

with bid prices, you need to always make sure that your minimum profit is at least the % that you markdown for bid. It's no good buying something at 20g for resale and placing it at 25g if somebody can bid on it for 19g. Having the appraiser evaluator use bid prices instead of buyout prices takes care of this.

Also, never assume anything, in any situation. If there's a bid price available, somebody will eventually use it, even if only because they're 1c shy of your buyout price.

Also, I think you're a bit confused. that 1% undercut refers to how much your buyout price differs from the competition's. The bid discount is set in the appraiser options. It's quite possible for you to undercut somebody's buyout price, but still have their bid price lower then yours

rockslice, i guess separating the last two questions from the first set would have made my questions clearer. i do understand the % undercut (looks at the current market environment to decide your posting prices and whether or not to post [based on the market buyout prices, not necessarily the market bid prices]) and the % bid markdown (determines the difference between buyout and bid prices on your own postings) are separate. i agree that we shouldn't assume that no one will bid, but it seems like the default % bid markdown is in a safe range by default, and i was just wondering how far you guys deviate from that default setting (which i don't know off the top of my head since i'm not infront of the game right now).

so the default bid markdown is 10%, and from our discussion it seems that lower bid markdowns are "safer" in that there is less money to be lost when a bid on your item goes uncontested.

do you all leave it at 10%? mattbnr is at 1%.

also, is there a way to auto ignore items with a RoI of say, >300% from the appraiser evaluator? an RoI of 1500% on a stack of refreshing spring water is something i don't want to be presented with.

how high do you level up your merch (for attaining higher enchant skill ranks)? do you increase your minimum enchant skill in the evaluator as you level up enchanting, ignoring the lower level stuff?

how do you all manage inventory? do you keep 1 representative item that you haven't been able to sell en masse in your bags and the rest in the bank, so that you can at least identify a good time to bid via the appraiser tab, and run back to the bank and get the rest of your stacks for a quick posting?

any tips on the day-to-day, practical stuff?

how about a settign to ignore items with their SD more than 50% or 25% of the mean? i'm gonna turn off the appraiser evaluator and stick to DE, appraiser has been suggesting really bad deals so far, but DE has been much more useful : \

With levelling your AH mule one thing you should consider is that Blizzard will not do character restores for any character under level 10. So if you get hacked and they delete the character you won't get anything back at all which is a bad risk on your bank alt.
So I'd advise getting them to level 10.