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I wrote an AH script. It would scan every auction, buy under-priced items, and relist. If someone undercut me, it could cancel and relist just below them. I

I wrote an AH script. It would scan every auction, buy under-priced items, and relist. If someone undercut me, it could cancel and relist just below them. I basically had unlimited gold.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago
This is basically what high frequency trading is in real life.
- eru 3y ago
  Only with a lot more regulation, and the competition is very sharp.
Jaygles 3y ago
How did you determine what was under-priced?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- andenacitelli 3y ago
  Spent some time with this kind of system in WoW, TradeSkillMaster. Figuring out an accurate valuation was difficult and one of the biggest differentiators of how successful you were. This would vary by item, but was most commonly some combination of recent minimum buyouts (usually over the last two weeks) historically value (several months), and much more. Common items would usually be mostly recent value driven, whereas lower-supply items might have a larger component of historical weighed in, as there might be quite a bit of fluctuation day to day and you care much more just about the general trend. All sorts of nuance to it. You can do more complex stuff like only doing your price estimations off items that actually sold, set values based on a percentage of any other value, and much, much more. It gets really complex but is really cool at scale.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    Ingredients were always pretty stable. I think a lot of sales came down to people trading time for money. I just hit a critical level and I want some cheap blues to power level faster and got shitty drops. Or Buddy wants to play and he’s laughing at my gear, oh there’s a reasonable purple. I found a lot less stress looking for cheap blues and greens to disenchant for ingredients. That could suck up an hour a day easy. Which is why people just dumped them. Not worth their time.
    - Grimblewald 3y ago
      Ingrediants can be stable but are still subject to manipulation. I made a killing by having a lot on hand, pushing bids down during busier periods, which would work synergistically with the lil goblins on during this time who list everything they sell at an undercut. This can cause the ass to fall out of pricing. You then buy up the cheap mats as fast as you can, but also alchemists will start making potions for cheap looking to undercut other potion makers with their zero time investment potion making for cheap. You buy those as well when they get cheap. Then you delist the series of sales you made that pushed prices down and buy the undercuts that helped get you there. Suddenly theres a big rift between current price and the bulk of items and most sellers stop undercutting and cheap supply runs out. relist regular small batches at 1s under market and make bank.
      - DeathArrow 3y ago
        Just like in real world. But you have to own at least half of the market to pull that. Or some else can short you.
        Grimblewald 3y ago
        Much like real world, but unlike real world - Ok in a game. It's totally cool to murder in a game, but morally and ethically deplorable to do IRL.
        hinkley 3y ago
        WoW was fully sharded at the time, so you had to control a fraction of a fraction in order to use these strategies. And you generally became expert in one or two and ignored the rest except for slow days. Probably more like a third, or the plurality instead of a simple majority. The price most players saw was slightly above what the market would bear. During peak times everything else would disappear.
- Vvector 3y ago
  After playing the AH manually for a long time, I'd know that a stack of ore would sell for 20g. I was manually buying when under 20g and relisting. My script just reduced the tedium. I'd manually add in checks for each high-volume item. It was super-hacky, but so effective, I didn't need to improve it. One script would iterate over every item in my inventory. If it matched a hard-coded list, it would auto-list it at the hard-coded price. Another script would scan every item on the AH, and if matched another hard coded list, it would buy them. Another story, pre-script. WOW had the inscription update incoming, which used flowers to make glyphs. I correctly assumed the demand for Peacebloom (tier 1 ingredient) would skyrocket once the patch hit. I spent three weeks buying everything on the AH, using multiple characters to store it all. The night before the update, I listed it all for 20x the normal price. The next morning, everything sold out completely. I remember it being 200 stacks @ 5g each, sold for 100g each.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    I recall when Pandaria hit there was some resource where you could get only like one a day but they could be sold. The power gamers and the server first people were buying all they could to craft gear to ratchet up the Raid ladder ASAP. I convinced a couple of my friends to sell all theirs at the prevailing price, which was just stupid high, and on about the day we would have been able to craft our first item, the price had crashed so much we bought them back at a lower price. If you waited a few more days, you could buy enough for two items. Getting 70% of the way to a goal has 0 value. You can often sell your patience to other people in that game.
    - eru 3y ago
      > Getting 70% of the way to a goal has 0 value. Well, apart from the fun of playing the game?
      - pests 3y ago
        No, games are only fun if you get all the achivements and 100% the game and buy every item ever relased in the shop and complete all battle pass levels because FOMO because gaming is not about having fun anymore, its about reaching artificially set goals and collecting cosmetics.
SeanAnderson 3y ago
Wait, did you write Auctioneer? or was this something similar to Auctioneer but you decided to not use the "industry standard" tooling?
- bimguy 3y ago
  I very much doubt it. There's a lot more functionality to Auctioneer then what was mentioned. Also, there are other popular auction add-ons, I think they would have just said it if they created Auctioneer.
- Vvector 3y ago
  I used Auctioneer, found it very helpful. But it couldn't (at the time) do the things I wanted to do. My scripts didn't have any UI or fancy graphics, just outputting text to the console.
Thaxll 3y ago
Except that there is a deposit fee in WoW AH.
- hinkley 3y ago
  The deposits mostly just stop people from overloading the system, and put a tiny bit of friction into the economy. I always made the most money when I half heartedly farmed on one or two characters and traded about five times as much material as I brought in. It’s a commodities market. Figure out what the weekly and daily average is, try to anticipate drop off in demand (eg, post launch), if anyone undercuts you by too big a margin, buy them out and relist. If a little, either drop your price or wait.
- anonymoushn 3y ago
  This is correct, but I think for a lot of items the non-refundable listing fee is a trivial amount of currency that you're happy to pay in exchange for faster execution, because it's based on the vendor sale price.
  - Grimblewald 3y ago
    Its a multiple of vendor price. So for a few items it is quite hefty. For pets, its always 1s flat so pet pricing can be quite volatile.
tapland 3y ago
A lot of us have been using Auctioneer, which has this functionality, since Vanilla. How was the experience of writing your own?
- Vvector 3y ago
  I used Auctioneer. But it couldn't do what I needed at the time, or maybe I didn't investigate enough (TBC/WoTLK timeframe). My scripts were no UI, no graphics, it would just output console commands. The Blizzard API was very easy to work with. Maybe 20 lines of LUA for iterating over every item listed on the AH.
plandis 3y ago
You’re the creator of the Auctioneer addon? That’s got to be one of the most popular WoW addons for a decade or more at this point.
benreesman 3y ago
When I explained how money works to my younger brother after having it explained to me by actual drunk guys who work at Goldman (it’s basically impossible to get the truth any other way as far as I know), his reply was: “You mean to tell me that the IRS is a gold sink?!” “Well, actually that’s a pretty good analogy, the difference is… well… that’s a pretty good analogy!”
- wodenokoto 3y ago
  Maybe I don't understand what a gold sink is well enough, but I don't see how IRS can be considered a gold sink. Gold spend with NPCs are not returned to the economy. Taxes are returned to the economy.
  - pests 3y ago
    > Taxes are returned to the economy. I hope we don't start dropping bombs on our own cities....
    - Doxin 3y ago
      The money isn't stuffed inside the bombs. The money is still returned to the economy for the most part even if the bombs are "spent" elsewhere.
      - pests 3y ago
        > The money isn't stuffed inside the bombs. I thought that was the only explanation for their prices.
    - wodenokoto 3y ago
      Paying for the construction of a bomb, is participating in the economy (as opposed to outright burning the money)
      - taneq 3y ago
        Kind of a broken window fallacy (the bomb isn’t necessary in the first place) but also kind of not (the tech developed for military hardware does eventually get used for good).

I wrote an AH script. It would scan every auction, buy under-priced items, and relist. If someone undercut me, it could cancel and relist just below them. I basically had unlimited gold.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

This is basically what high frequency trading is in real life.

eru 3y ago
Only with a lot more regulation, and the competition is very sharp.

Jaygles 3y ago

How did you determine what was under-priced?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
andenacitelli 3y ago
Spent some time with this kind of system in WoW, TradeSkillMaster. Figuring out an accurate valuation was difficult and one of the biggest differentiators of how successful you were. This would vary by item, but was most commonly some combination of recent minimum buyouts (usually over the last two weeks) historically value (several months), and much more. Common items would usually be mostly recent value driven, whereas lower-supply items might have a larger component of historical weighed in, as there might be quite a bit of fluctuation day to day and you care much more just about the general trend. All sorts of nuance to it. You can do more complex stuff like only doing your price estimations off items that actually sold, set values based on a percentage of any other value, and much, much more. It gets really complex but is really cool at scale.
- hinkley 3y ago
  Ingredients were always pretty stable. I think a lot of sales came down to people trading time for money. I just hit a critical level and I want some cheap blues to power level faster and got shitty drops. Or Buddy wants to play and he’s laughing at my gear, oh there’s a reasonable purple. I found a lot less stress looking for cheap blues and greens to disenchant for ingredients. That could suck up an hour a day easy. Which is why people just dumped them. Not worth their time.
  - Grimblewald 3y ago
    Ingrediants can be stable but are still subject to manipulation. I made a killing by having a lot on hand, pushing bids down during busier periods, which would work synergistically with the lil goblins on during this time who list everything they sell at an undercut. This can cause the ass to fall out of pricing. You then buy up the cheap mats as fast as you can, but also alchemists will start making potions for cheap looking to undercut other potion makers with their zero time investment potion making for cheap. You buy those as well when they get cheap. Then you delist the series of sales you made that pushed prices down and buy the undercuts that helped get you there. Suddenly theres a big rift between current price and the bulk of items and most sellers stop undercutting and cheap supply runs out. relist regular small batches at 1s under market and make bank.
    - DeathArrow 3y ago
      Just like in real world. But you have to own at least half of the market to pull that. Or some else can short you.
      - Grimblewald 3y ago
        Much like real world, but unlike real world - Ok in a game. It's totally cool to murder in a game, but morally and ethically deplorable to do IRL.
      - hinkley 3y ago
        WoW was fully sharded at the time, so you had to control a fraction of a fraction in order to use these strategies. And you generally became expert in one or two and ignored the rest except for slow days. Probably more like a third, or the plurality instead of a simple majority. The price most players saw was slightly above what the market would bear. During peak times everything else would disappear.
Vvector 3y ago
After playing the AH manually for a long time, I'd know that a stack of ore would sell for 20g. I was manually buying when under 20g and relisting. My script just reduced the tedium. I'd manually add in checks for each high-volume item. It was super-hacky, but so effective, I didn't need to improve it. One script would iterate over every item in my inventory. If it matched a hard-coded list, it would auto-list it at the hard-coded price. Another script would scan every item on the AH, and if matched another hard coded list, it would buy them. Another story, pre-script. WOW had the inscription update incoming, which used flowers to make glyphs. I correctly assumed the demand for Peacebloom (tier 1 ingredient) would skyrocket once the patch hit. I spent three weeks buying everything on the AH, using multiple characters to store it all. The night before the update, I listed it all for 20x the normal price. The next morning, everything sold out completely. I remember it being 200 stacks @ 5g each, sold for 100g each.
- hinkley 3y ago
  I recall when Pandaria hit there was some resource where you could get only like one a day but they could be sold. The power gamers and the server first people were buying all they could to craft gear to ratchet up the Raid ladder ASAP. I convinced a couple of my friends to sell all theirs at the prevailing price, which was just stupid high, and on about the day we would have been able to craft our first item, the price had crashed so much we bought them back at a lower price. If you waited a few more days, you could buy enough for two items. Getting 70% of the way to a goal has 0 value. You can often sell your patience to other people in that game.
  - eru 3y ago
    > Getting 70% of the way to a goal has 0 value. Well, apart from the fun of playing the game?
    - pests 3y ago
      No, games are only fun if you get all the achivements and 100% the game and buy every item ever relased in the shop and complete all battle pass levels because FOMO because gaming is not about having fun anymore, its about reaching artificially set goals and collecting cosmetics.

SeanAnderson 3y ago

Wait, did you write Auctioneer? or was this something similar to Auctioneer but you decided to not use the "industry standard" tooling?

bimguy 3y ago
I very much doubt it. There's a lot more functionality to Auctioneer then what was mentioned. Also, there are other popular auction add-ons, I think they would have just said it if they created Auctioneer.
Vvector 3y ago
I used Auctioneer, found it very helpful. But it couldn't (at the time) do the things I wanted to do. My scripts didn't have any UI or fancy graphics, just outputting text to the console.

Thaxll 3y ago

Except that there is a deposit fee in WoW AH.

hinkley 3y ago
The deposits mostly just stop people from overloading the system, and put a tiny bit of friction into the economy. I always made the most money when I half heartedly farmed on one or two characters and traded about five times as much material as I brought in. It’s a commodities market. Figure out what the weekly and daily average is, try to anticipate drop off in demand (eg, post launch), if anyone undercuts you by too big a margin, buy them out and relist. If a little, either drop your price or wait.
anonymoushn 3y ago
This is correct, but I think for a lot of items the non-refundable listing fee is a trivial amount of currency that you're happy to pay in exchange for faster execution, because it's based on the vendor sale price.
- Grimblewald 3y ago
  Its a multiple of vendor price. So for a few items it is quite hefty. For pets, its always 1s flat so pet pricing can be quite volatile.

tapland 3y ago

A lot of us have been using Auctioneer, which has this functionality, since Vanilla. How was the experience of writing your own?

Vvector 3y ago
I used Auctioneer. But it couldn't do what I needed at the time, or maybe I didn't investigate enough (TBC/WoTLK timeframe). My scripts were no UI, no graphics, it would just output console commands. The Blizzard API was very easy to work with. Maybe 20 lines of LUA for iterating over every item listed on the AH.

plandis 3y ago

You’re the creator of the Auctioneer addon? That’s got to be one of the most popular WoW addons for a decade or more at this point.

benreesman 3y ago

When I explained how money works to my younger brother after having it explained to me by actual drunk guys who work at Goldman (it’s basically impossible to get the truth any other way as far as I know), his reply was: “You mean to tell me that the IRS is a gold sink?!” “Well, actually that’s a pretty good analogy, the difference is… well… that’s a pretty good analogy!”

wodenokoto 3y ago
Maybe I don't understand what a gold sink is well enough, but I don't see how IRS can be considered a gold sink. Gold spend with NPCs are not returned to the economy. Taxes are returned to the economy.
- pests 3y ago
  > Taxes are returned to the economy. I hope we don't start dropping bombs on our own cities....
  - Doxin 3y ago
    The money isn't stuffed inside the bombs. The money is still returned to the economy for the most part even if the bombs are "spent" elsewhere.
    - pests 3y ago
      > The money isn't stuffed inside the bombs. I thought that was the only explanation for their prices.
  - wodenokoto 3y ago
    Paying for the construction of a bomb, is participating in the economy (as opposed to outright burning the money)
    - taneq 3y ago
      Kind of a broken window fallacy (the bomb isn’t necessary in the first place) but also kind of not (the tech developed for military hardware does eventually get used for good).