Flippin' an' floppin'

In addition to my freakish addon habits, I have been as crazed over the AH in WoW for quite a long time. Before I started to look for addons to do this and that I was already buying trade goods for cheap and selling it on market price: mind you, I have never been greedy, just taking my share of the wealth.

And then I made my first encounter with Auctioneer.

When I came to the EU server I made it my aim to have 1000g before my main hits 40, that is, the level when you could purchase your mount originally. However, with the aid of Auctioneer and BottomScanner I was able to accomplish that way before that. The Auctioneer scans began to take more and more time with each subsequent version, though, and that started to hinder my playing otherwise. A married man with work, kids and dogs -plus actively working with them- equals minimal time to leisure (read: games), and thus every single minute is precious.

And Auctioneer started to steal that time.

Now as I have returned to the habit of scanning, flipping and posting for the guild, I'm becoming more and more frustrated with the scanning and data processing phase of Auctioneer. Granted, it's a great tool for a AH nerd like me, but I'd rather not resort to pen and paper again. As there is an addon which takes care of the data collecting and sorting, I will use that instead. But the time it takes...

It's normal to have a scan take some 12-15 minutes. That's what it took earlier, too. But the darned data processing (Three stages) takes another 15 minutes, if I'm lucky! Then, when I finally get to the searching and deal finding, the first data collected is over 15 minutes old, leaving most of the bids having less than 30 minutes (short in WoW terms) left out of my grasp: they have either expired or purchased. As are the really interesting deals where people who really don't know the value of their stuff just sell them off in redicilous prices. Like Pattern: Robe of the Archmage (Allakhazam: 136g) in sale for 7g...

I have to dig into this. Most probably there is nothing I can do about it, except reinstall the Auctioneer Suite and hope for the best.

Never the less, I have flipped quite succesfully lately. Yesterday, when I checked my post, AH and reposted the expired ones, I saw that I had made almost 700g profit during the last 7 days. And I haven't even touched the materials market, yet. The server I'm in is very competed, mostly because it's one of the EU first generation servers and filled with long term players. I'm really a newbie in that troupe, but I'm doing my best to serve my Guild.

I was just wondering, what would it be if there was no Auctioneer? Would there be less understanding for the pricing? Would there be only hardcore data crunchers running the markets?

I think we'll never know. And I hope they could tweak the Auctioneer a bit faster for the matter.