Monday, October 18, 2010

Semi-AuctionMatic



My biggest worry with working the guild wars 2 AH is the lack of addons. There were none in the first nor were any macros and there hasn't been any word about adding them into the second. Considering what a huge thing this would be and the lack of announcements for it makes me believe there will not be any. The question here is one of efficiency. How fast will we be able to post how many auctions? Considering the fact that it won't be automated, it will have to be fairly easy to post a decent number without it turning into a different form of a grind.

As we all know, efficiency is key to a successful business and automation is your friend. But when automation fails, finding smarter and faster ways to do things becomes the order of the day. Time is money, friend. We once again have an important question that decides the fate of this AH baron. There will always be simply and small things that increase the rate of posted auctions by a lot, but when you have a thousand to list, not much is going to help that isn't plain automated.

But with every game there's always going to be a small amount of built in time saving. Something like hitting a "repair all" button to fix your gear instead of selecting each piece one at a time and repairing them individually. Or the new AH functions built into WoW. Things like right click to add it into the window, simple ways of pricing and splitting etc etc.

However if we assume that it isn't practical to list a ton of auctions by hand and that there isn't and noticeable form of automation present we'll have to drastically change our approach. Instead of trying to conquer every market you rest your eyes on, you'll gave to work smarter instead of spending all day just plain working. Instead of owning the entire gem market, you'll have to carve out your own niche markets.

For example, when I lessened my AH exploits after hitting a million gold, I focused on the easier niche markets that I liked. Things like spell threads and epic ToC gear. Good returns, good rate of sales, and can easily be done completely by hand. After all, it's not that difficult to list 20 auctions in around 2 minutes.

So should there be a lack of automation built into the game niche markets will be the go to tactic of an AH player in guild wars 2. But if there is an automation mechanism of some form it will be quite easy to do what we all strive to do: treat the entire auction house as our personal goblin bank.


Thanks for stopping by!

2 comments:

  1. Well, I've only recently started using Auctioneer, which was maybe an exercise in futility as the patch dropped soon enough, breaking it. Anyway, my point is, previously I used AuctionLite for my AH needs, as I like to think I'm not dumb enough to need ever piece of data spoon fed and automated for me, which means I'm kinda used to posting by hand. I believe this will be a good skill to have while the addons are mostly broken. That is, of course, if I can download the patch. 3 days and counting.

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  2. @ Anon
    Oh don't get me wrong, it's not the need fro every bit of info you can get that I love AH addons. It's the speed and automation that they allow. It was nice being able to have auctions being listed while going through my morning routine or getting ready for bed.

    But if you had to manually split stacks, drag into the AH window, type in the prices, confirm the post, etc... that'd be insane to do that with so many things to sell. If you had to go through that much I bet you'd see a lot less AH barons around.

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