A New Tool For AH PvP - Wowuction

I got an extremely interesting email the other evening. I often get contacts from a varied array of people talking about websites, affiliates, and a ton of other internet wow based stuffs, but this one grabbed my attention instantly. Another tool for us AH'ers. WoWuction.






I clicked on the link in the email, and I was shocked to see what the site entailed. Quite a slew of info, a bit different than TuJ, AHSpy, or WoWTrader. Each have their own strengths and weaknesses, and it's nice to see a healthy competition going around. They have all added new options here and there, and I proudly support each one of them for my (and your) auction house needs.

Sorry, I got sidetracked a bit there...

So, after a bit of contact back and forth, I was able to squeeze out a little interview, and would like to share it with ya'll:

Tell me a bit about yourself.

      WoW player since vanilla (off and on), guild master of casual guild and passionate player of other games both video and board :) 

Businessman by calling, programmer at heart. Off topic I am also a father of two loving kids and I still get to play games yey!

Why did you start this when there are multiple other AH sites out there?

     When I saw that Blizzard was releasing its API I actually didn’t look much at competition. I just had to do it. Software development is my passion and after many years I finally got some time to do it again. This was just the perfect project to do; it was software development, it was WoW, it was numbers and statistics – all so cool :)

     I do admire other tools, especially because they existed before API, when it was a lot more difficult to get auction house data, but I feel the entire niche has not reached its full potential. Why not add another site to the fray? I think WoWuction.com will be the best, but you will say that is biased :) Still, having one more site out there just tightens the competition which is good news for all AH traders!

What makes yours different?

     If I had to simplify it, I’d say ‘Fast’ and ‘Easy to use’. There is much more to it however. So far you have seen profession analysis and advice, as well as global market volumes, but there are many new ideas in queue for implementation. 

     For example realm specific and global daily news which is probably next in line. While deep number mining and crunching is only for very small percentage of AH traders, there are aspects of AH information that is interesting to much wider audience. At this moment they are neglected and WoWuction.com will reach them as well.

     Having seen much software development in my career, I subscribe to agile development philosophy, which means I’m willing to change and improve anything and everything very quickly if it proves viable. For this, user feedback is essential, so I’d like to invite everyone to freely comment anything they like/dislike.

Tell me a little about Quick Advice and Advisor Score..

    Advised quantity is just a part of the whole ‘quick advice’ system. It advises how many items you should put on auction and it’s based on daily sold estimates for the item. 

More important value is ‘advisor score’, which is bread and butter of advice system. 

     It’s a heuristics that takes into account many aspects of profession product and its mats, giving the final evaluation of how viable it is to produce and sell that product. While you should never blindly follow what the system advises, it can be excellent for quick detection of neglected profession products.

What are the Demand numbers all about?

     Demand is roughly a ratio of daily sold /available on AH. So a 100% demand would mean that all items which have been posted are also estimated sold. Likewise a 0% demand means there are no estimated sales for the item. 

     Personally I use demand the most. It’s a great indicator how saturated a certain product is. You will almost never want to commit in product which has for example 5% demand. It means there are always 20 times more available on AH than will be sold. This also means that the prices are likely to be very low and profit margins close to none.

     Whole system uses ‘estimated sold’ numbers which are not completely accurate. As you may or may not know, it’s not possible to exactly tell whether a certain auction has been sold or not. Blizzard just doesn’t give out that info and probably never will. So we give a rough estimates based on a few tricks. 

     There has been some talk among community members whether such estimates should be used at all. I think that they certainly should. While they may be terribly wrong in some specific cases and auctions, their overall statistical accuracy is just too useful to be ignored.

Okay, now onto Broker.....

     There is one more important feature of WoWuction.com: Broker. It’s a system for item alerts. It allows you to specify certain rules for items you’re interested in and then get emailed or check on site whether those rules are met. 

     For example if you would like to know when there are at least 10 Living Embers available with price below 100g a piece, you can create such rule and get emailed when this happens on your AH, so you can log on and snatch those. Also you might want to watch when there are no Brilliant Inferno Ruby cheaper than 200g. You get emailed when this happens so you can hop on and put some up for sale. System has an average delay of one hour from the real AH, as this is how Blizzards API works.

Well there you go folks! I hope you have a little insight on this new AH page that is available for our full use. Try it out, and give some feedback! I will be toying around with it as much as I can to work on getting full usage of this upcoming site.

Twitter: @Wowuctioneer

Facebook: Wowuction

Website: http://www.wowuction.com/