[Feedback Thread] Auction House Bot.

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Roel
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[Feedback Thread] Auction House Bot.

#1 » Post by Roel » 21 May 2020 13:46

AHbot is currently at the PTR realm for testing, we would appreciate some feedback before putting it on the live realm.

It puts a lot of auctions on the Auction House to simulate the economy of a highly populated server. Prices are meant to be on the expensive side but still at realistic values if nobody else is selling something. Data from real player auctions has been used to determine values so it should be a lot more accurate than any AHbot we had in the past. This includes volumes so popular goods should have more auctions and in convenient stack sizes. While it only sells item, we are also looking into buyer functionality for underpriced items (selling to players would still be better).

It's currently only for TrueWoW as a lot of items need to be removed for PrimalWoW.

-----
Edit: Now disabled on PTR and Live on Both TW and PW.

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Axis
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Re: [Feedback Thread] Auction House Bot - PTR

#2 » Post by Axis » 21 May 2020 14:03

You may access the PTR by going to your forum account -> Account -> Account Manager -> Click the "Unlock" button on your game account. Then log in to the game, go to the character selection screen, click Change Realm on the top right corner and select the Public Testing Realm from the Test Server tab at the bottom.

To unlock access to the Public Testing Realm, the requesting account must hold a level 80 character on TrueWoW realm or a level 60 character on PrimalWoW realm.
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theprinz2
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Re: [Feedback Thread] Auction House Bot - PTR

#3 » Post by theprinz2 » 21 May 2020 20:27

Hooray, it seems to be working =)

The variety of items is perfect. It had everything i was looking for. Even Armor and Weapons of grey and white quality were on there, which doesn't bother me.
About the prices: I have never been on TrueWoW, only playing on Primal. If the prices on the PTR AH Bot reflect TW's economy, prices there seem to be completely different to PW (not taking into account Muxa's partially still way overpriced auctions, although he has lowered a lot of his prices already :D). I have taken out some examples and here reflect my Primal point of view on the prices (see below). I'm judging with the idea, that the AH should allow new low level players to buy low level gear for reasonable prices and should provide progression guilds with materials to craft gear for their raiders.
I have also bought all of the Ahbot's Fel Lotusses and Living Essences to see if it does automatically react and if it does, how :D


Dreamfoil - way too expensive
Living Essence - mildly underpriced
Rugged Leather - about 3x overpriced
Mountain Silversage, Icecap - way too overpriced
Wintersbite - almost reasonable :D
Heart of Fire - fair
Essence of Fire - oof. still fair i guess
Light Leather - way too expensive
Low Level Armor and Weapons (range 1-30) - 5 to 20 times too expensive
Iron Bars, Copper Ore, Peacebloom, Silverleaf, Earthroot, Blindweed, Mithril - too expensive

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paroliak
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Re: [Feedback Thread] Auction House Bot - PTR

#4 » Post by paroliak » 21 May 2020 21:22

I think it is a great start, as mentioned above I could find pretty much everything. However also as mentioned above, some items were overpriced, which could be both plus and a minus as the items I noticed high priced being used more often in a PVP scenario. It is a great way in the sense that it might promote demand for it and maybe people might make it and compete with the prices of the bot. Therefore, simulating the economy.

The only thing I would add is that to not have this bot keep posting stuff 24x7. Maybe have it posted every other week or twice a month so that people won't be entirely dependent on the bot to have but might actually ask around in the world if someone has it. Which again seeing the demand will incentivize people to go and farm and make stuff to sell. Another point I noticed it really had everything on the AH, which made AH kind of a shop rather than a competitive market (in my mind latter is the idea of having one), maybe circulating some items and keeping major items only 24x7? I could be wrong and other players might have a better opinion on it, but it is a good step in the direction, we can improve it for sure and looking forward to it.

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Re: [Feedback Thread] Auction House Bot - PTR

#5 » Post by MerelyASetback » 22 May 2020 01:51

I only took a very brief look.

I would stay away from adding very rare (farm-able) drops to the bot.

I do believe the AH bot should just be a bridge to supply the market with high velocity crafting materials for people levelling their professions or lower level items that have no value or impact but just are tedious to get outside of raids and instances.

Some items just don't have a place in a finalised Wrath server. (E.g huge supply of Blade of Wizardry at 10k vs a Teebu at 30k), in my opinion these items should still be very rare and only brought into the economy by (lucky) players. It also hurt to see the dirge chops recipe on there :( )

It's also weird seeing a lot of vanity pets in there (purple parrot and Argent Crusade pets really stood out as being unnecessary). Shadowmourne quest rewards were also out of place I think, it still is endgame content sort of, right?

The high availability of rare items feels out of place. I do not know what staff's approach will be to the AH bot (will it spam items continuously or batch up rare items etc.) Could we get a vision from the creator/maintainer of the bot with more specifics (like how does it decide the price, amount, frequencies, inner workings etc.)? These things are not really visible on the static state of the AH on the PTR.

I am not certain on what the current state of TW is at the moment but I hope you keep in mind that it's important to keep people playing on the server i.e. farming rare things could be one of those for e.g. transmogs, pets, achievements and the like. Adding the rare things to an AH bot will encourage mindless gold farming (just farm most vendor gold / hour, which is rather high in Wrath) or just dumping all already accumulated gold (which might be good for the economy if it exists).

To shortly summarise my stance: rare items should not be sold on the AH in a regular fashion (rather in a Black Market like approach, weekly circulations of items in bidding wars), there are most likely better ways to get these into players' hands if it's really required. The AH bot should serve as an expensive alternative way to acquire the tedious, (gathering professions) gated high volume items. It should encourage players to engage competition with it, people should be able to make gold from the bot by undercutting it. It is important to keep achievement hunters, pet hunters, transmog hunters busy by playing the game and the (maybe stale) content rather than having everything immediately available (even at steep or not so steep prices). I hope the economy's issue was well defined and the goal of the bot was adjusted to that need or otherwise it might just miss it's desired effect and even backfire.

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Re: [Feedback Thread] Auction House Bot - PTR

#6 » Post by Roel » 22 May 2020 12:59

The only reason most of those rare items are not sold by players is because of our population. As said the data uses real player auctions, so the item availability is similar to what can be found on a highly populated WotLK server although with preference to high prices. The amount of auctions could be reduced if needed but I'm fairly certain that 50000 auctions was not uncommon on retail during WotLK. I understand concerns that it could make some things easier by buying the items instead of farming everything but that's how it would work in an active economy. Those items were made to be tradable, not Bind on Pickup.

It also serves as a gold sink to reduce the problem of gold inflation. Some players are sitting on a lot of gold which drives up the prices for everyone. If they are willing to pay over 10k gold for a single item then that quickly reduces the excess gold, there aren't much better ways to achieve this.

Item chance on the AHbot has the most impact for items that only have 1 or 2 auctions, they won't be instantly replaced when bought but have a chance to appear when new auctions are added. Some might appear once a day, others once a week or less. It should be similar to the rarity you expect on a server with 50000 auctions and a good percentage of players in low level areas.

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Re: [Feedback Thread] Auction House Bot - PTR

#7 » Post by m0t3k » 23 May 2020 04:47

+1
Only thing I don't like is pattern, formula, design prices. There are some very rare 0.01-0.02% drop chance, low level formulas, I saw, that were going for 5g each, and there were some 0.2% high level ones, like the icecrown resistance formulas, easy to get, going for 5k.

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Re: [Feedback Thread] Auction House Bot - PTR

#8 » Post by candre23 » 29 May 2020 02:05

the data uses real player auctions
With a population this low, that data isn't particularly reliable for some stuff.

Are you only registering prices for auctions that actually sell, or all created auctions? Because stuff like level 20-30 greens shouldn't be priced at 50-200g. Sure, somebody probably created a wildly overpriced auction for a Item Loading... for 180g, but I doubt anybody actually paid that much for it unless they've got tens of thousands of gold.

Because the AH is a ghost town, pretty much the only way to make money there is to throw stuff up for insanely inflated prices and hope that one or two eventually sells to someone with so much gold that they can afford to not care. Ask me how I know.

I don't know how customizable the bot is without manually modifying individual items, but I think you're going to need to do some level of curation. Is it possible to cap lower level stuff at something like 10x vendor price? Otherwise it's a real turn-off to new players trying to level up and not being able to afford even basic greens every 10 levels or so.

As a borderline off-topic aside, I've often thought very low-pop servers like this would benefit from replacing the AH with a thrift-store-type bot for less valuable items. Have a vendor that would buy any green (maybe even blue?) or trade mat for say 4x vendor price, and sell it for 6x vendor price. It would only have the items in stock that other players had sold it. Fixed pricing means prices can't get out of control, things can sit "in stock" for months or years until someone comes around who actually needs one, and it provides a slight gold sink. If you kept the AH for high-value items, you'd have to lock out the ability to auction things from the thrift store, just to keep people from buying up all the trade mats for cheap and trying to flip them for 10x the price.

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Re: [Feedback Thread] Auction House Bot - PTR

#9 » Post by paroliak » 04 Jun 2020 19:12

It also serves as a gold sink to reduce the problem of gold inflation. Some players are sitting on a lot of gold which drives up the prices for everyone. If they are willing to pay over 10k gold for a single item then that quickly reduces the excess gold, there aren't much better ways to achieve this.

--- I agree Roel a lot of people are sitting on alot of gold, but as Candre said this might be especially tough on new players. In TW, I have seen and helped many (pretty much all I have met) of new people with my stuff and sometimes gold. But not everyone does it and the high-end gold people are a select few who are 'always on' and most are on when raiding or xmoging.
Again, just one person's perspective...

In general the idea of AH bot is good and we wont know its pros and cons until implemented and make changes if necessary as we go along.

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Axis
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Re: [Feedback Thread] Auction House Bot.

#10 » Post by Axis » 08 Jun 2020 13:47

The AH Bot is now live on TW realm.
PW realm's AH Bot is still a work-in-progress on account of many WotLK items pending removal from it.

Keep the feedback coming.
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Re: [Feedback Thread] Auction House Bot.

#11 » Post by candre23 » 08 Jun 2020 15:17

As I said above, using the historic pricing data from a long-since broken economy really screws newer players. Take a look at prices for low-level gear vs wotlk gear:

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I fully understand the need to not have the bot undercut actual players, but prices for <70 gear and mats are bonkers. It's tempting to just say "pick up a gathering prof and take advantage of those high prices", except very little is actually selling at those prices. Stacks of low level bars and leather sells for quite a bit when it sells, but it doesn't sell often. There's very little demand from real players - at least there's very little demand from players who can afford the inflated costs. Who knows how many players would be buying if the prices weren't astronomical.

As it is, the bot will obviously be a boon to the established players with five-figure gold piles. Any time they want to level a new prof of kit out an alt, there's plenty of stuff to buy. It'll cost a fortune, but they have a fortune and won't have to wait around for something to get listed.

But everybody else is still left in the lurch. Unlimited availability doesn't help those who can't afford the high prices, and it doesn't help those trying to make enough to afford the high prices when there's still nobody buying. Either prices have to be normalized for <70 gear and mats, or the auto-buyer feature needs to be turned on so leveling players can take advantage of the crazy prices on the server.

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Re: [Feedback Thread] Auction House Bot.

#12 » Post by paroliak » 09 Jun 2020 02:02

How soon is the AH bot replacing the soldout or the items more in demand? Thanks for making it live on TW. I am using it for good... is it possible to track how much revenue did the BOT made in one day? Would nice to see/track it success in terms of months/days.

Thanks.

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Axis
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Re: [Feedback Thread] Auction House Bot.

#13 » Post by Axis » 09 Jun 2020 02:06

paroliak wrote:
The Auction House Bot's sell-orders are refreshed every 20 seconds.
However, that is not a guarantee that the item (which was just sold out) will be immediately re-listed for sale upon the next refresh.
Your desired out-of-stock item may re-appear anytime between 20 seconds to 20 days, for all you know.

The bot's job is to simply keep the Auction House stocked at 50,000 sell-orders.
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Re: [Feedback Thread] Auction House Bot.

#14 » Post by candre23 » 24 Jun 2020 04:05

As I anticipated when the bot went live, it's been both a blessing and a curse. It's great that boe gear and mats are now readily available, but selling has become virtually impossible. Before I was making at least a couple hundred g per week. Since the bot, I'm lucky if it's 50g per week. Stuff is piling up on my bank alt, and so much stuff isn't selling that I'm overflowing the mail hard limit.

Other people in my guild were kvetching about it on discord today. Everybody's noticing the same thing - nothing has been selling since the bot was activated. Our most active member was making at least 1k per week before, and now makes next to nothing. I know we're all fairly new here and not your "core" users, but that means we're also not sitting on mountains of gold, so this hits us harder.

Please reconsider enabling the auto-buyer feature. We really need it.

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Roel
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Re: [Feedback Thread] Auction House Bot.

#15 » Post by Roel » 24 Jun 2020 10:02

I wanted to add a buying feature but it's complicated and requires time to be in an acceptable state, time I no longer have at the moment so I don't know when that will be possible.

However I believe most people will buy the cheapest auctions so I don't understand how this can be such a big problem as long as you undercut the high ahbot prices. Except for maybe the most common items that have many pages, they might be too lazy to check all of them. Of course this requires relisting auctions so they are actually available when someone comes to buy.

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