Wednesday 23 July 2008

Essential Add-Ons 1: Igor's Mass Auction

Been over a week since I last posted. I've managed to write a series of articles about how to use the Auction House, however I'm pretty stumped on which order to publish them. Also I don't want them to come off too meaty, which at times they are. Hopefully I can edit them over the next few days and start to release them. In the meanwhile, I'm going to get started with one of the regular features I hope to have on the blog, this one is for the Add-Ons I use to help me make money.

At times using the auction house can be a pain, especially when you have large quantities of the same item you want to sell. Posting each one separately is time consuming and frustrating, and Igor's Mass Auction has been the answer to my prayers. It allows you to post different items, different quantities of items, and can also maintain the prices between different stacks sizes. You can post a maximum of 18 auctions at once.

This image I took from Curse should gave you a basic idea of how it works.











When i was selling lots of copper bars last year, I would use it to put up stacks of 5, 10 and 20. By setting the base price for one bar, it would calculate for me what price to sell the larger stacks. It would also work the opposite way, by setting a price for a 20 stack, it can calculate how much to sell the lower quantity stacks for. For people selling trade items on the auction house in huge quantities this is a massive time saver.

There are a number of bugs and issues you should be well aware of before you start experimenting with the add-on. The add-on itself is no longer updated, in fact its been close to a year since it last was. So you will have to activate load out of date add-ons on the Log In page to use it. Fortunately it works the same as it always did, although that does include certain bugs. In my experience it's best not to overly confuse the poor fella, so avoid putting 20 different types of item on. If you want to sell 10 stacks of light leather, this will usually do the job perfect. On the odd occasion however it will freeze, and give you an error message. When this happens I have two bits of advice. First, check that it put you auctions up at the correct price, because when it freezes, it has the habit of mispricing them (especially when you've been selling stacks of different sizes). Secondly, any time you get an error message a log out from you character will get the add-on working again. 95% of the time it works perfect, however I always check if it's listed them correctly, otherwise you could be in for an expensive mistake. It's a shame this add-on is no longer in development, because come Wrath of the Lich King we might have to do without.

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