Setting up QA3

Quick Auctions 3 is a relatively complicated addon, but it's absolutely essential to the smooth operation of a glypherologist. A lot of these settings are up to you. I've listed what values I use, but feel free to adjust them to respond to your own local economy.

Once you've installed the addon, hit /qa config and open the config pane.

First things first: create a Glyph item group. Do this by hitting the Item Groups pane and create a new item group using the text box. It helps if you do this step while you have most of your glyphing inventory actually in your bag, as you can only add items to this group that you have in inventory.

Next open up the Glyphs item group (you might have to press the + button on the item groups thing to see it). Tab over to "Add Items" and add all the glyphs you have in your bag. Use the mass add function by typing "Glyph" in the text box and hitting enter. That's the easy part.

I fiddle with the options under the Glyph item group, I don't think I changed any of the default options (on the General pane) from factory settings other than "auto recheck mail".

Change the post time to 24 hours- you're probably going to cancel your auctions anyway, why pay extra deposit. You can change this to 12 hours if you feel like you'll be online a LOT. Note that this one setting may also need to be changed in the General pane, for some reason I couldn't get it to override the default settings when I first configured it. This bug might be fixed in later versions, I haven't checked.

Set your post cap to some large number. Generally, you won't be crafting your entire post cap. I set mine to 10. Set Per Auction to 1. That's the easy stuff.

Pick an undercut amount. Sadly, QA3 doesn't have the actual feature I want: "Undercut by 10%". Such is life. If you pick a small number, and everyone else you compete with does too, you'll end up getting more gold per glyph, but competition is likely to be high. If you pick a large undercut, you'll race to the bottom and maybe some people will leave the market. Your call there.

Set your threshold price. Below this price, you'll not post anything (or you will post your glyphs at your "Fallback" price, depending on settings). I set mine to 1g usually, which is the actual hard baseline of break-even for me on average (50s per ink, 50s per parchment, counting profits from snowfall derivatives). I only craft glyphs that are worth more than 5g, but prices fluctuate enough that I don't always get 5g for the ones I sell. If your threshold price is higher, you'll usually end up stockpiling glyphs in your bags as prices trend downward in their larger cycles. You can either hold them in stock against a day when prices spike (usually when all your competitors suddenly let their auctions expire), or you can occasionally have "fire sales", lowering your threshold to 1s (the vendor price) instead. I do both.

Set a price gap. This is the percentage in value allowable between the lowest posting and the second-lowest posting before which you'll instead post your glyph undercutting the second-lowest instead of the lowest. Consider the big example: There's ten glyphs up for 50g each, and somebody posts one at 1g. Would you rather post yours at 49g or 90s? I set my price gap to 40%.

Decide on auto-fallback. When the lowest price for an auction is below your threshold, should you post at your fallback price (which is high) or not at all? If you want to post at your fallback price, just in case everything below you sells out (or to exert a subtle upward price pressure on people who valuate glyphs with auctioneer), enable auto fallback.

Set a fallback price. This is the baseline value for your glyphs. If there are no glyphs posted, or if the lowest price is below your threshold, things will post at this price. I set mine to 50g. Steep for a glyph, but people will still pay that much for something important to their spec and performance. I rarely get to list at 50g, though.

As a side note, many people having trouble in the enchanting market don't set their fallback prices properly- if you leave it at default (which is like 3g in the factory settings, I think), it will post all your enchant scrolls at ridiculously low prices.

Set a maximum price as well. If the lowest price of an auction is more than max_price * fallback, it will instead post at your fallback price. Consider: the only glyph of felguard is listed at 2,000g. Should you list yours at 1,999g or at 50g? I set mine to 150%, so it will price-match up to 75g.

After that, it's just a matter of remembering to add new glyphs you make to the "glyphs" item group you created in QA3. Once you've done that for a week or so, it should be smooth like butter. I also have created separate item groups with their own settings for: Other Inscription Stuff (runescrolls and vellum), Flasks, Potions (sometimes haste and wild magic potions sell like hotcakes), Fancy Ink (snowfall et al), and Enchant Scrolls. Works the same, but with different threshold and fallback values for the most part.

Updated Glyph Procedure

After optimizing my glyph procedures, here's where things stand these days. This process really only requires Quick Auctions 3 to run, although I also use the other addons I've talked about for other things (like AuctionLite to buyout masses of herbs, etc).

Note that some processes need to be set up properly. Specifically, you cannot post glyphs until you've set up item groups in QA3. So, the first time you do this, skip the Cancel-repost step (since you don't have anything to cancel) and shoot straight for "Examine the state of the AH". Carry out the setup instructions the first time, and then after that you just have to remember to add any novel glyphs to the glyph item group.

I will cover my QA3 posting settings in a later post.

Cancel and repost all my standing auctions

• Open the auction interface, go to the Auctions tab. Hit the "cancel" button, wait for QA3 to scan all my auctions
• Hit the "cancel undercut" button when the scan is complete
• Wait for all the auctions to cancel (this locks certain UI interactions, which is pretty annoying - don't do it while you're queued for a random)
• Head to the mailbox, and use QA3's "open all" button to get all the mail. With "Auto Recheck Mail" selected in the QA options, it will refresh your mailbox every 60 seconds and continue checking.
• Catch up on my internets. You get 50 mail per cycle, so if there's 1000 auctions canceled, that's 20 minutes of AFK. Good time to watch Rocketboom or chat or whatever.

Bonus: sometimes I'll use my "cancelshort" macro to cancel all my auctions that will expire in 12 hours or less. If I know this is the only time I'll do it today, it's worth canceling them too.

Sometimes, it's more than one trip between auctioneer and mailbox. It's handy to have this auction person be a level-1 alt with nothing in his bags but room for glyphs. Luckily, the 32-slot inscription bag is cheap, usually sells for less than 50g per.

Examine the state of the AH

• On the Auctions tab, hit Summary. On that window, hit Glyphs then Get data. Wait.
• Once it's all filled out (you can hit "hide uncraftable glyphs"), scroll around in the list. You can add glyphs to your QA-craft-queue by clicking on them (or right-click to subtract one). I typically shoot for 4 of each of any glyph that is currently selling at 5g or more, and if the glyph is a known fast-seller, I'll make more.
• Log out and head over to the glypher toon

Make glyphs

• If you've got skillet installed, you need to open the original skill glyphing interface by shift-clicking on the inscription skill.
• Put a lot of ink of the sea in your bags, have lots of free space too.
• Hit the QA button on the glyph interface to display your queue.
• Go talk to the ink seller in Dalaran. On the original skill interface, QA3 adds a "buy" button that will buy the inks you need to make whatever's in your queue.
• Do the same thing with the parchment vendor.
• Clicking on a glyph in your craft queue will create it. Do this a lot.

Setup to send glyphs

• In the QA config setup, go to Item Groups. Add a group called glyphs (or whatever).
• In the new glyph item group, click on the "add items" tab. Add all the glyphs you currently have in inventory, you can do this quickly by typing "glyph" in the box.
• Note- you'll need to do that over and over whenever you get a new glyph you haven't made before. QA3 will only post items you've specifically added to item groups.
• Under the Auto Mailer tab, create a new auto mailer target with your auctioneer alt's name. Don't mistype it.
• Double-check that you didn't mistype your auctioneer alt's name.
• Do it one last time.
• Under your triple-checked bank alt in Auto Mail, in the Add Items tab, click the Glyphs button to add the whole group.
• You can do a similar setup with herbs, but in reverse. I have auto-mail set up so it sends herbs all to my glypher and glyphs to my auctioneer. Any little bit helps.
  

Mail Glyphs

• Go to the mailbox and open the mail window. Click the "auto mail" check box and watch all your glyphs get mailed to your auctioneer alt.
• Once it's done, uncheck the box. I don't like leaving that active, makes me nervous.
  
• Log over to your auctioneer alt

Post New Glyphs

• Open all your mail and post your new glyphs the same way you reposted your canceled glyphs.
  
• Remember that glyphs will only post if they're added to the actual glyph item group.

Super secret bonus section: macro for canceling auctions less than 12 hours. That bolded 3, if reduced to 2 or 1, would change the time cutoff to medium or short.

/script local o="owner" p=GetNumAuctionItems(o) i=p while (i>0) do local _,_,c,_,_,_,_,_,_,b,_,_=GetAuctionItemInfo(o,i) t=GetAuctionItemTimeLeft(o,i) if((c>0)and(b==0)and(t<=3))then CancelAuction(i) end i=i-1 end

The end is Nigh!

So, Blizzard is going through with the Mobile Auction House after all. I'm sure people are happy that they can look for a battered hilt from work, or whatever. Here's what I'm worried about.

These are premature worries, because the entire armory crashed under the strain of twenty million people rushing to check out the new features. But based on what I know about the current armory and web technology, I think they're pretty reasonable worries. They stem from a simple fact: you can't trust the client software. The armory website runs javascript, XML, and a few other neat features. Even if the mobile AH were in flash, you can't trust flash (since in order to run, you have to send the client your compiled flashcode, which can be decompiled and deconstructed).

So, somewhere out there, there's a blizzard server with webservices like cancelAuction(id) and the like. I'm sure that they've got the security in place that a malicious user couldn't randomly cancel someone else's auction just by figuring out what the id is (there's probably some token-based security involved, because I don't see having to generate an authenticator key number every time I post an auction, but I digress). But there's probably no way to keep me from running a java application that looks and feels just like a web browser (since I can generate arbitrary user-agent strings in my application) to the web service.

That means, within a matter of weeks after the mobile AH launch (probably sooner), there will be applications that let you cancel all your undercut auctions and repost them. The functionality blizzard exposed to the mobile AH (including posting auctions from your mail inbox) will let this work.

There will also be automatic purchasing- you can run an application when you're at work that buys up all the Frost Lotus that drops below a certain price threshold (up to some maximum amount if you're worried about overbuying)- no more hoping you snipe those good auctions when you're logged in.

There will be automatic snatching in general: no more finding cheap deals on the AH or the weird auctions where people post something for less than its vendor price. Every realm will have a few of these not-even-l0gged-in auctionbots.

I imagine that blizzard will make the use of this software bannable. Or not, because they can't really tell if someone's using the software besides looking at behavior tracks (is that a robot, or is that guy REALLY logging in every half hour?)

But either way, this is going to be an ENORMOUS shift in the way the auction house works. I'm glad I got my gold already, I'm not sure I feel like writing this software. And I'm sure as hell not going to download somebody else's software- that's like putting a "hack me" sign on your account.