Swift and Simple Undercutting in the Auction House

For some reason, the makers of the otherwise-excellent Auctioneer addon have this policy about not making it easy to cancel auctions you're being undercut on. They contend that it would lead to rampant undercut wars.

While this may be the case, I don't think undercut wars are actually a *bad* thing. Nine times out of ten, if you're sitting in the AH waiting to undercut somebody, you could instead be making gold elsewhere in a more efficient fashion. Furthermore, undercutting (while annoying to the casual seller) ends up making things cheaper to the end consumer. Everybody undercuts, it's just a matter of volume and convenience.

The glyph market is a prime example of where undercutting seems to be needed. Instead of having a small number of high-value auctions running, my glyph business usually has about 200-250 active auctions at any time. This is actually a relatively low number, compared to some of the real glyph moguls out there. It costs 60 copper to list a glyph for 24 hours, which is effectively free (although it's nonzero, so you can't just continually relist stuff every five minutes). I have found that after about twelve hours on the market, about half of my glyphs are being undercut. So, once a day or so, I'll log in and want to scan the market in order to cancel only those auctions of mine which are being undercut.

Auctioneer provides all of the tools necessary to make this happen, but they (because they're being short-sightedtly self righteous, in my opinion) don't roll that functionality into a single button. But hey, that's what third-rate extra blogs are for, right? Wait, who are you calling third-rate, punk?

Anyway, in future posts, I'll share my secrets for how I make and post glyphs. For now, here's the handy macros. All you have to do is take these two things and paste them into your macro interface. Put the button on your action bar and hey presto, it works.

DISCLAIMER: It uses the most recent price from your Auctioneer database for info. Which means: if you did a scan yesterday, it won't work properly. First, scan either the whole AH or just the section where your auctions are posted (glyphs, etc). Then open your "Auctions" tab of the auction house interface and run one or the other of these macros.

This macro will list all the auctions that are currently being undercut, and list the current-low price along with your price (those numbers are in copper pieces, so you have to do the math yourself).

/run i,k,o=1,1,"owner";while k do k=GetAuctionItemLink(o,i);if k then _,_,_,_,_,m=AucAdvanced.Modules.Util.SimpleAuction.Private.GetItems(k);n,_,c,_,_,_,_,_,b,d=GetAuctionItemInfo(o,i);if m and d<1 and b>m*c then print(k,b,m);end;end;i=i+1;end


This macro will cancel all of the auctions you currently have that are being undercut. As per usual, they'll go to your mailbox and you will lose your deposit, so use with care.

/run i,k,o=1,1,"owner";while k do k=GetAuctionItemLink(o,i);if k then _,_,_,_,_,m=AucAdvanced.Modules.Util.SimpleAuction.Private.GetItems(k);n,_,c,_,_,_,_,_,b,d=GetAuctionItemInfo(o,i);if m and d<1 and b>m*c then CancelAuction(i);end;end;i=i+1;end

Proper thanks: I got this macro from the comments on this blog post (the original post macro on that page is bugged, due to HTML conversion in the blog software)