AucAdvanced/FAQ

From Norganna's AddOns

Q1: How do I update to one of the new preview releases if I was running Auctioneer 4.0 previously, or if I have an earlier preview release I want to update? A: Depending on the version you are moving from, different errors might crop up if you don't completely remove the previous versions of Auctioneer from your directory. (This is probably our fault, but it's a problem we were willing to accept in order to allow for multiple versions to be in place simultaneously.) You must delete any and all of these folders if they currently exist in your interface/addons folder:

• !Swatter
• Auc-Advanced
• Auc-Filter-Basic
• Auc-ScanData
• Auc-Stat-Purchased
• Auc-Stat-Simple
• Auc-Stat-StdDev
• Auc-Filter-Outlier
• Auc-Match-Undercut
• Auc-Stat-WOWEcon
• Auc-Util-Appraiser
• Auc-Util-AskPrice
• Auc-Util-CompactUI
• Auc-Util-PriceLevel
• Auc-Util-ScanButton
• Auc-Util-ScanFinish
• Auc-Util-ScanProgress
• Auc-Util-VendMarkup
• Auc-<Any_Value>
• SlideBar
• Babylonian
• DebugLib
• Configator
• Auctioneer
• BeanCounter
• BtmScan
• Enchantrix
• Enchantrix-Barker
• EnhTooltip
• Informant
• Stubby

The main point is to remove all Auctioneer-related files before upgrading. Once all such files are removed, install the latest "Preview" release of your choosing from the download site.

Q2: Auctioneer Advanced isn't saving any of my prices any more, the way Auc4 and Auc Classic did!

A: Auctioneer Advanced doesn't modify the Post or Auction tabs any more. All the posting/pricing should now be done from the "Appraiser" tab. We think the new look and functionality is great, but if you prefer the "Classic Style" of posting auctions, simply press the "Simple" or "SwitchUI" button found along the top of the Appraiser Tab to use a simplified, "Classic Style" interface.

Q3: All of my beloved slash commands are not working, does this mean there is no way to change any options in Auctioneer Advanced?

A: In order to view and set the options for Auctioneer Advanced, there are very few "slash commands", instead we use the graphical user interface provided by the Configator library.

To open the configuration options simply click the "coin stack" icon on the SlideBar menu. The SlideBar menu is installed by default just below the minimap along the right side of the screen. When at the Auction House, you can also access the settings by left-clicking the "Configure" button, found along the top of the "Appraiser Frame".

Auctioneer Advanced provides numerous configuration options, including supporting profiles. When newly installed, each character will use the "Default" configuration. You can set a single profile for each character or use a number of profiles with each character, if you so choose.

Q4: What are all these different versions of Auctioneer??

A: "Auctioneer" or auc4 refers to the old Auctioneer 4.0 branch of code. 4.0.5 is likely the last version of this branch which will ever be released - there will be no bug fixes or new functionality in this branch. Note that this version works unreliably at best with WoW 2.3 - you will want to move to one of our preview releases to regain functionality and stability.

"Auctioneer Classic" or AC was based on this same "Auctioneer 4.0" tool, but it has been ported to use the 5.0 versions of several of the shared libraries it needs to run. This version is currently in preview/alpha status, though it should provide primarily the same functionality as Auc 4.0. If you're looking to upgrade to something that looks like Auc 4.0, this is the one you want. Please note, though, that this version of the tool will probably only ever receive bug fixes or maintenance updates going forward, but few new features.

"Auctioneer Advanced" is a complete overhaul of the Auctioneer addon, designed to provide more features, flexibility, and profit for you. We refer to it as Auctioneer Advanced, AucAdvanced, AAdv, or just AA.

A brief introduction to Auctioneer Advanced can be found here. It can be downloaded from our main download page. Please note that it is in alpha status, meaning you could well run into bugs or find some features to be incomplete.

Q5: Where is the search tab? (or for you old schoolers, the bidbroker and percentless reports)

A: You open the new, revamped search, the SearchUI module, by clicking on the "Magnifying Glass" icon on the SlideBar Menu, installed by default just below the minimap.

Q6: I have noticed an item where the statistics reported are well beyond reason, often known as "poisoning". How do I reset the statistics for a single item, without losing all of my scan data?

A: At the chat prompt, enter "/AAdv clear [item]". Do not enter the quotes; the [item] can be the item's "shift+click" link or the exact name of the item.

Q7: I am not quite ready to upgrade to Auctioneer Advanced alone. What can I do in the interim?

A: No problem, you can run Auctioneer Classic and Auctioneer Advanced simultaneously. Simply install the "Full Suite" from the Auctioneer Download Page by following the "Preview Version" link.

Q8: I am running both AC and AA. Do I need to scan in both?

A: Nope! Run your scans under AC. AA automatically picks up this data. Done! (If you run scans under AA , unfortunately AC will not pick up on them.) Important note: At the end of the scan, AC stats will display immediately, as expected. Unfortunately, at the moment AA does not update until you do another activity which engages the scanner, such as searching for an item.

Q9: I only see the three standard Blizzard AH tabs. I am missing Appraiser and BeanCounter!

A: Are you sure you installed the full Auctioneer Advanced SUITE? The Auctioneer Advanced standalone package doesn't come with anything but the scanner and the StdDev stat.

Q10: What are all the different prices I see on the tooltips and in the Appraiser options?

A: Here are descriptions of the various stats modules currently available:

1. - Market: This is a price computed from all of the other statistics modules (it is not a stat module in and of itself, but rather based off all of the others). This is a confidence-weighted average of all of the reporting stats modules. Since this calculation is rather complex, it has its own page: Market Price
2. - Simple: 3, 7, and 14 day exponential moving averages, or EMA. An EMA buckets all your prices into days, gets an average value for each day, then averages those values together in a complicated non-linear way (see the previous link if you want more info). The 3 day EMA is the one used to calculate market price.
3. - StdDev: A price obtained by filtering out data falling too far away from the mean value, in an attempt to remove outliers/scam data. This is reported as the "Normalized" price in the tooltip, and is what is used to calculate market price.
4. - Purchased: 3, 7, and 14 day EMA of inferred sales prices. Be very careful with this stat - it does not record only actual sales made. Instead, if you scan multiple times in a day, you sometimes see items disappear from the listings before the earliest possible time they might have expired. The purchased stat module sees this happen and infers that they might have been sold at their buyout price, and then calculates an average of all such inferred sales prices. Note that this stat can be skewed high, because some such "disappeared" auctions haven't necessarily been bought out, they may have just been canceled (for legitimate or scam reasons). The 3 day EMA is the price used for the market calculation.
5. - WOWEcon: if you have WOWEcon installed, this stat will return the average price WOWEcon reports for your server (or globally if there are no server prices). You should see the WOWEcon site for more details, but essentially these are ACTUAL sales prices on your server-faction, which are good to know. They key drawback is that some server-factions seems to have a small sample of submitted prices to work from, making this data somewhat less valuable.

Please note that all scan data will first be filtered by the "Outlier" filter if you have it enabled. This means that data which appear to be outliers (i.e. very far away from the mean value, which to us indicates that it is probably scam data meant to corrupt our auctioneer statistics) will be discarded outright and will not affect any of the above stats calculations. For that matter, they won't even show up in your snapshot/appraiser tab.

Note also that there is a different category of modules called Utility modules. These Utility or Util modules may also provide various specialized prices for items (along with lots of other functionality), but they are not directly used to calculate statistics. Util Modules are primarily used to provide various functionality throughout the application. A technical description of the difference between these two may be found here.

Q11: BTM doesn't seem to find anything for me any more.

A: Check the BTM options, especially the last three options for "IgnoreItemPrice", "IgnoreItemType", and "IgnoreTimeLeft". Try disabling them all, then re-run BTM and see if things start to pop. They can sometimes be a little restrictive, so you should really learn more about them before you re-enable them. See Tuning down BottomScanner for in depth instructions and The Bottom Scanner FAQ for more.

Q12: It's been over a day since my last scan. After I run a scan in Auctioneer Advanced, I notice fewer items reported in the DB than there are in the AH. What gives? Is Auctioneer Advanced missing some auctions?

A: Because of the way we scan, we will sometimes miss auctions that shift between pages as we are scanning. There is no easy way to fix this with the tools available to us now. With the advent of GetAll, we are able to address the issue to a point, but only for those able to use GetAll. More to come as we are able to address the issue.

Q13: After a scan of all categories, AA reports a greater number of items in the DB than there were in the scan. How is that possible?

A: The reasoning is technical. The scanning engine does not remove existing auctions from the snapshot until they have expired, even if they are "missing" (i.e. likely sold or canceled) from the current scan. This is because of the way we scan - auctions which are on the "edge" of a page can move between pages as we are scanning, causing us to miss it. We compensate by not removing auctions until we know that they have expired, or once they have been missed twice in a row, resulting in an item DB larger than the total size of the AH, especially for people who scan multiple times per day. [This may not actually be an issue now that we flag active and missed auctions - needs testing.]

Q14: My eyes; CompactUI is just too small! Is there anything you can do to help? While we are at it, we want to move the AH window around the screen and adjust the sizing. Is that possible too?

A: Indeed, it took a bit of Goblin and Gnome coordination, but finally, one of our most requested feature sets has arrived in the form of the AuctionHouse Window Control Utility. Look in the Auctioneer Advanced settings, under Utilites, and then select the AHWindowControl submenu. AHWC provides the ability to move and resize the entire AH Window, adjust the font size used to display data within the CompactUI, protect the AH Window from being accidentally closed during configurable operations, and save settings between WoW sessions.

Q15: My chat window is inundated with scan statistics after even the most simple search.

A: This is the intended behavior. For those who cannot stand having some extra information, Auctioneer Advanced allows you to either suspend this output altogether (a1) or to direct the output to the Chat Frame of your choice (a2).

• Open the Auctioneer Advanced options and select the "General" subsection
  • The options are accessed via the Configure button at the top of the Appraiser Frame or by clicking the "coin stack" icon on the SlideBar, installed by default just below the minimap along the right edge of the screen.

a1: To disable the display of this data- Uncheck the "Enable the display of the Post Scan Summary" check box.

a2: To divert the Post Scan Summary to another Chat Frame:

• Create a new chat frame by right clicking your "General" chat tab and select "Create New Window"
  • Give this new chat frame a cool name, perhaps "Auctioneer" or "Sales Stuff"
• Look further down in the General subsection and find the drop down box entitled "Preferred Output Frame"
• Set the drop down to the setting of your choice; that will direct the Post Scan Summary and other Auctioneer-initiated messages to that frame.

Note: Some Auction House messages may be displayed in other channels as they are system messages and are not generated by Auctioneer.

Q16: All the tooltips for items in my bags are gone. Help!

A: This is almost certainly caused by one of your other addons. As with all issues of such a drastic nature, we highly recommend disabling all non-Auctioneer related addons to aid in the determination of the cause.

Q17: I am ready to upgrade from Auctioneer Classic or Auctioneer Full to Auctioneer Advanced but do not want to lose all of this awesome statistical data I have built up. How can I import Auctioneer Classic data into Auctioneer Advanced?

A: The good news is that you can use your accumulated data. The steps are as follows:

• First, update to the most current version of the Auctioneer Full Suite, available form http://AuctioneerAddOn.Com/dl/.
• Install as per the Installation Instructions.
• When logging on, activate the Addon Manager, by clicking the "Addons" button in the lower left of the Character Selection Screen, and ensure that the "Auctioneer" and "Auc-Advanced" entries have gold check marks in their check boxes.
• Continue into the game as usual and visit the Auction House.
• Once you have opened the AH window, type "/AAdv stat classic import", obviously without the quotes.
• After a short while, you should see a message in the chat window informing you that the import is successful.
• Logout
• Click on the "Addons" button once more, on the Character Selection Screen.
• This time remove the checkmark from the "Auctioneer" entry and ensure that there is a gold checkmark in the Auc-Stat-Classic checkbox.
• Continue into the game and enjoy all of your tasty statistics.
  • No need to worry about the "old" files at this point, during the next update, when you follow the Installation Instructions, all of the old modules will be removed.

Q18: I want to make my own Filter, Statistic, or Utility to go along with Auctioneer. This used to be rather difficult with Auctioneer Classic, and other addons, is anything different in Auctioneer Advanced?

A: Yes, indeed! Auctioneer Advanced was designed from the ground up to be modular, light weight, and extensible. For more about creating modules take a look at the Auctioneer Advanced Modules API wiki page. If you are interested in the Core API, check out the Auctioneer Advanced Core wiki page.