Auctipus
Auctipus is an addon that simplifies searching, buying, listing and scanning the auction house. The user interface should feel mostly familiar to WoW players who have used the default Blizzard interface while at the same time removing many of the limitations and annoyances that came with it. Auctipus runs with the philosophy that "nobody cares about bidding on stuff" - when was the last time you did anything other than buyout an auction? At the same time, Auctipus also runs with the philosophy that "everybody cares about the unit price" - how much each item costs when buying a stack of more than one item. Search results are sorted by unit buyout price and bid prices are not even displayed; no more falling into the trap of that scammer posting an auction with a bid of 10c and a buyout of 811g since it would be sorted way at the end of the list. To go even further in the war against scammers, you can right-click on a victim auction and choose to ignore all auctions listed by that seller in any future search results, making it impossible to accidentally buy an 811g stack of linen!
Searching and Buying
Searching and buying items is done in the first tab. Enter a search term and select any filters (level range, rarity, categories and usability) and then start the search. You may also optionally shift-click an item in your inventory to immediately search for it. Auctipus will find all auctions that match your search and then group them in the left-hand table according to each matching item, sorted by item quality and name. Enchanted items will get a separate entry in the result list from their unenchanted counterpart. Clicking on a result will list all available auctions for that item in the right-hand table. You may select one auction or shift-select many auctions from the right-hand list - a summary on the bottom of the screen displays the total number and cost of the auctions you have selected. Finally, you may click the "Buy" button to purchase individual auctions; when you have multiple auctions selected then the "Buy" button will buy the first selected item and repeatedly clicking it will allow you to buy each subsequently-selected item. As you purchase items, a summary of the total number of items and total gold spent updates as well. If you wish to start a new search, use the convenient "Reset Filters" button at the top of the categories menu to clear all your current selections if desired.
To ignore a scammer, simply right-click on their auction and select the "Ignore Seller" menu item. If for some reason in the future you wish to enable that seller again, simply right-click on one of their disabled auctions and select the "Stop Ignoring Seller" menu item.
Listing
Listing an item is done in the second tab. This tab allows you to create single or multiple auctions of the same item by specifying the stack size and number of stacks to sell. Start by right-clicking an item from your inventory or dragging an item to the item icon in the tab. When you do this, Auctipus will then immediately do a quick single-page 50-item scan of the auction house to find comparable auctions currently listed in the auction house and display them for reference in the right-hand list. A default price will be filled in at 1 copper less than the current lowest buyout. Select the number of items per stack and the number of stacks that you wish to sell. Set the duration of the auction and then change the minimum bid and the buyout prices if desired. While Auctipus runs with the philosophy of "bid prices don't matter", unfortunately they do matter for people using the default Blizzard interface or other auction house addon. The minimum bid price affects the sort order of items in the Blizzard interface, so select a strategic value for your auctions to show first! To help with creating auctions more intuitively, you may check the button to enter prices by unit instead of by stack and the auction price will then track the number of items in your stack as you increment or decrement it. Finally, when you are ready to post your auctions click the "Create Auction" button and Auctipus will automatically post all of the auctions you have configured.
Cancelling an Auction
Viewing your currently-listed auctions and cancelling an auction is done in the third tab. A list of your auctions will appear here, including any that have a buyer but haven't closed or haven't had the funds delivered to your in-game mailbox yet (there is a delay between when an auction sells and when Blizzard sends you your hard-earned gold). To cancel an auction that hasn't closed yet, simply select the auction and then click the "Cancel" button.
Note: Sometimes when posting multiple auctions they don't all show up if you switch to the listings tab right away. Simply close the auction house and reopen and your auctions will be visible.
Auction House Scans
Auctipus can also do scans of all auctions in the auction house to help track the lowest buyout prices over time. This functionality is present in the fourth tab. Simply click the "Scan" button to initiate a full scan of the auction house and then wait for it to complete in 10-20 seconds or so. Using the search box you can enter the name of an item (or shift-click an inventory item to enter it automatically) and then view its historical lowest buyout prices for the last 28 days in the graph on the right. Over the course of a day the lowest buyout price may fluctuate as auctions are sold and as new auctions are listed; if you have done multiple scans in a single day, Auctipus will display a vertical bar showing the range of observed lowest buyouts. This strictly graphs the lowest possible buyout at the time of the scan and does not include any distribution or information about items whose buyouts were not the lowest. Since many/most items in the auction house have scam entries for the highest buyouts we probably wouldn't want to include that data in the graph anyways.
Viewing auction house history is possible even when you are out in the world; simply use the following slash command to open the scan page in read-only mode:
/auctipus
Perhaps some day Auctipus will also support a minimap icon to open the scan interface. And perhaps not; the minimap is pretty crowded these days...
Missing Features
Since this is the first release of Auctipus, there are still some known issues and incomplete features. Issues and bugs are tracked on the GitHub issues page that you can reach from the "Issues" link at the top of this page. Please post bug reports there! As for missing features, these are the main ones:
- The listing tab only displays the first 50 auctions that you have posted.
- When posting a bunch of stacks using the multi-sell feature, they are posted very quickly and don't always all show up in the listing tab if you then click over to it. This is cosmetic and closing and then re-opening the auction house fixes this.
- No effort is made to automatically exclude the scam entries in the auction house, so while they are sorted to the end please still exercise caution when buying and make use of the ignore feature to avoid accidentally buying one (and blacklisting that scammer for the future).
- The column headers aren't clickable and don't allow you to change the sort order.