Can we do something about 24/7 cancel scanners?

Community General Discussion
1

Look man, I get it, some players just want to make gold, a massive amount of gold, and they set up multiple accounts and multibox farm and all that other snazzy stuff that is completely allowed within the T’s & C’s. No hate to the players.

But when it reaches the point that they have an account dedicated to just sitting at the Auction House all day long cancel scanning in multiple markets it starts to become a bit of a nuisance.

It feels impossible to sell anything profitable at the moment, and I know, I know, we’re at the end of an expansion, there’s not alot of people looking to buy, but hey maybe if I could have an auction listed for more than 60 seconds before being undercut by the same guy every single time, I might be able to actually sell something?

I think we should focus on allowing other players to at least have a chance to compete in markets vs these guys with 16 accounts raking in the gold and probably not even paying sub because they make so much gold they can just fund their accounts via tokens.

Here’s what I propose: A cooldown is placed on an item if you cancel and relist it too many times in quick succession, meaning you will be unable to list it for some time (perhaps 30 mins?). A player is always allowed to cancel their auction (in case they accidentally list at the wrong price or whatever) - the cooldown is on actually listing the item on the Auction House.

I would love to hear alternate solutions. I just want to sell some bags. Thanks.

6 Likes
2

I’m not entirely sure if i understood the problem 100% correctly, i wasn’t aware of the term cancel-scanning, but i’m fairly certain i understand what you ment by it through context. And while i can think of quite a few changes to the AH-system that would improve various things in my mind, among them the negative experience you describe (to some degree), i think the current system already has a solution for this problem: Lower your prices.

I get that it is annoying, you’re listing something cheaper than all the current listings, and you’re immediately getting undercut, but it’s because you (and many of the sellers) are likely operating with a mindset, that may be considered common sense, but just isnt always the right approach.

I’ll illustrate with an example.

You’re arriving at the AH with an item, lets say for example it’s a Haste Ring Enchant. You can see the prices of the current listings for that item, there’s dozens of them and the prices range from 240g to 350g.

Now, if you are anything like the common seller, some of the things that go through your mind are:

  1. I want to make sure it sells (and it doesn’t expire after 12+ hours), and being the cheapest offer increases the chance of that happening.
  2. I want it to sell fast (i like sale notifications in chat asap), and being the cheapest offer, for a while atleast, increases the chance of that happening.
  3. 240g (minus a little) is a favorable (or atleast acceptable) price.

Now thoughts #1 and #2 aren’t incorrect (though they’re also not as clear cut and absolute as many people assume), but these aren’t really the source of your problem.

The problem lies with thought #3. You see 240g is the current cheapest buyout price, so in your mind what you stand to make is:
Current cheapest price minus tiny bit for undercutting, minus AH fee/cut, probably something along the lines of 235g.

The undercut amount can be anything, 1 silver, 1 gold, 3 gold, whatever. That’s not what this story is about. Let’s go with a 1 gold undercut for simplicity sake, so you list your item 239g. Now, shortly after that, your nemesis notices, and he lists his competing item(s) for 238g each.

Some of the main mistakes made here are:

Just because the cheapest price when you arrived at the AH happened to be 240g, and because that isn’t way lower than your expectation, you’ve made the determination that that’s somehow a good price. It isn’t, it is a meaningless value.

Let’s take a step back, there’s a certain minimum amount you would want, for selling the item. You can decide on the details, but it may involve things like :

  • how much gold/mats did i invest in creating this
  • how much time/effort did i put in
  • how exclusive is it
  • the vendor price

Clearly, you generally don’t want to sell things for less than whatever that minimum is, let’s say that in this case, we def wouldn’t want to sell it for less than 180g.

The 239g price you arrived at earlier, the way you calculated that was fine, but that’s the maximum within our constraints. Now, just because maximizing profit can be a good idea, doesn’t mean it’s the only factor to consider.

The 240g listing you saw on arrival to the AH, created a bias in you, a bias that would make listing/selling your item for 200g feel like a 40g loss, instead of a 20g win.

You could have priced your item at any value between 180g and 240g. The reason you were undercut so quickly wasn’t just because your nemesis is so active (though of course that factors in), that’s out of your control anyway so who cares. No the more important reason was, that that guy was perfectly content with selling the item for 238g. So price yours 220g, or 200g, or hell 181g.

If the dude is really still willing to undercut you at all those prices, even when you’re selling at 181g (1g above cost or our minimum), then the enchant-market is just not a lucrative place for you to be as an ordinary seller. Ditch this item for it’s minimum or take a loss, and walk away.

But the way more likely outcome is, you undercut him big, by picking a number in between the established min and max, and he isn’t as quick to follow.

3

Then keep undercutting them till they’re cheap, and buy up their stock and flip it. :wink:

2 Likes
4

honestly, i tried this and a goblin threatned me with “ah war”. he dropped the prices for 2 months straight for flasks. 90g for pots, 100g for flasks from like 400g. if i would have went as low, he would have just bought it up.

didnt sell any pots or flasks for 2 whole months. everytime i put something in i was a) immediately undercut or b) if he saw it was me he crashed the prices, again. auto cancel scanners are most definitely a problem and lowering prices is not the solution from my experience.

5

To be honest it isn’t necessarily using multiple accounts. While I was farming the longboi, I spent 3 days farming while canceling every 12 hours and then I spent a while day just undercutting. From dusk to dawn. Rince and repeat and now I have my boi. Buy yeah there are several peeps who have a whole account set up just for AH. Accept it and move onto a more profitable realm.

6

Thanks for the input guys. I don’t think undercutting is the solution though. Go look at the deep sea bags on Arathor on TUJ. When I tried to get into the market they were going for 750g each, Me and this guy got into an undercut war and they are now down to 350g buyout. That’s not even profitable. It’s not even breaking even. It’s selling at a loss (at least for me). We’re just going to end up doing this to any market we’re both involved in and let’s face it, there aren’t that many profitable ones to begin with at the moment.

Nothing against the other guy personally, he’s not breaking any rules, but I think blizz could do something here to improve player experience. I can’t spend 12 hours a day constantly relisting items. I have a job. And I doubt he gets much enjoyment out of it either.

1 Like
7

If people are going below your minimum then, as an ordinary player, it’s just not an interesting market to sell in, period. Same as when there is a drastically tiny amount of potentially interested buyers.

If some guy is so skilled or decked out, that he can kill and skin mobs so much faster than you, that his minimum sell price for leather-goods is a lot lower than yours, then more power to him. Or maybe he’s found a spot with a better droprate of the needed materials. Either way, you’re being outperformed in one way or another.
(Botting/Exploiting are exception of course, with similar outcomes, but that’s besides the point)

You’re right of course that there’s goblins out there that live on the AH, and that have a large warchest of gold. They can decide it’s worth selling under cost (or under their minimum) for a while, just to drive every other seller out the market.

In that case you do what every mom and pop store does, when Amazon takes them on, you close up shop.

Yea that sounds very aggressive, but if that price is below cost then players would likely be buying it even more than usual, his listings would be bought up, making your (more expensive ones) the cheapest left.

The only alternative(s) to that are if he is able to craft more than the playerbase actually wants to buy.

  • either due to low interest from players, or
  • because that dude is just creating so much of it

In both cases, supply dwarfs demand, which means the prices should be tanking, likely even more than they already had.

For reference, theres thousands of those bags for 120g each on my realm (Draenor), and that’s still decently above the material cost.

Both the cloth types used sells for under 2g each (so 75g total) on the AH, and the thread is about 7g total at the vendor.

That’s a 40g crafting fee, which seems substancial, so i assume the recipe has a daily or multi-day lockout on it (i don’t really use my tailor).

Very true, but that has more to do with the poor shape Professions have been in, the last 2~3 Expansions.

1 Like
8

normally i d agree with you but he was a goblin. he had literally tons of mats and flasks/pots. he said he could keep this going for ages and wouldnt make a dent in his earnings.

if something got sold he immediately replaced it. he was literally there day and night. i had the pleasure of conversing with him/her at the beginning.
straight up utter garbage person. :woman_shrugging:

9

Hehe, yea i can totally understand you weren’t pleased.

But if he can meet the demand of the players with his supply like you say (or he said), then it is indeed a case where there is vastly more of these Potions around, than players want to buy (at that price).

And since you can’t improve the product (you can’t make your potions give a better buzz than his), the only way you can compete is on price, by going even lower than him. It wouldn’t really be him driving it, as much as “market forces”.

1 Like
10

yeah…but i dont have limitless supplies, i cant crash the prices forever, especially when i am operating at a huge loss. :woman_shrugging: i just wanted to sell some potions and flasks i had surplus of and didnt need right now.

atm selling flasks isnt worth it on my realm anyways. i only gather zins now and sell it straight to the ah.

11

Yea, tbh it sounds like you’re doing exactly the right things.

I managed to find a pretty nice equilibrium, at some point during Legion (and ever since), where aside from 1 minute a day (restarting my mains mission table), i don’t spend any time at all doing anything just for gold/profit. And i spend just about all my time on my main character, as i like it, aside from a couple mounts i try to farm on alts as well.

I make just enough flat/vendor gold from doing content i either enjoy, or want some collectible from. So i farm a bunch of old raids for mounts i’m missing (minimal amount of bosses), do some emissaries and 8.3 dailies for the paragon rep rewards i’m missing, do the assaults for the missing vision/memento rewards, things like that, and of course the usual dungeons (for fun/gear) and islands (mounts) and the like.

I make enough gold that way, to buy flasks and such off the AH, keep my character supplied/repaired/enchanted, and pay for the sub with gold.

I just don’t buy obvious goldsink-items such as the 5M/2M mounts and 500k Argus mount and such, and high price AH purchases are very infrequent.

McLovin it

It’s hard to describe how much more enjoyable the game is, for me anyway, when you truly almost never have to think about making or saving gold. I have leveled all professions, including herbalism/skinning/mining on alts (while leveling them), but i basically haven’t touched a herb/vein since they hit 150/175.

I’ve kept this up for a couple years now, went into BfA with 600k gold or so, hovering around a million at the moment.

When i buy the token for 30days of gametime, my gold drops ~200k, and a month later i’m pretty much on the same point again. A few months i paid for gametime with regular money, gained a lot of gold overall, but then just used that as excuse to splurge so i’m going to keep avoiding that :slight_smile:

The only weakness in my system is, i got so used to not having to visit the AH, but am also naturally frugal, so i end up just mailing potentially valuable BoE’s to a bankchar, to put them on the AH “some day”.
I’ve been putting that off since the BfA pre-patch, so that bankchar is now a fleet of countless bankchars with full banks, and some of whom have their own guilds to use the guildbank to store more crap. Oh god, am i a hoarder…

12

The buyer response for price changes on most items in WoW is much smaller than you think it is.

  • The buyer won’t care if a flask is 350 or 400 gold if they go to the AH with the intention of buying a flask
  • The buyer won’t care if that super rare mog piece is 300k or 350k

Undercutting, in 99% of the cases, is a bad decision.

1 Like
13

In the case of transmogs, undercutting is the only viable decision, because Blizzard is an idiot. If you do not undercut with transmogs they will be in an alphabetical order and only “of Aurora” pieces will sell.

14

In transmogs of this price range, people don’t just look at the overview and buy the first they find.

15

few solutions

solution 1 : AH takes 5% cut when you cancel
solution 2 : when your Auction expires you get back your deposit cost but when you cancel you lost your deposit and increase deposit costs.
solution 3 : when you cancel an item you wait 2 hours till the item arrive to your mailbox

16

Can you do a server to server seminar on this topic? People seem to enjoy actively screwing themselves over. I was making a killing on inscription, the scrolls were selling instantly for months and then out of nowhere some chump comes and drops the price from 300g to 150g and I’ve been shaking my head disapprovingly ever since.

17

You know you’re replying to a (fictitious) quote in a list labeled as commonly held misconceptions right :stuck_out_tongue: ?

Not a statement by me.

That’s not true (99% is heavily overstated anyway).

It also makes a big difference if by undercutting you mean listing items at some tiny amount under the current prices, or if you also include the act of lowering prices in general.

Especially as a small player in a heavily oversaturated market, like some posts on this thread describe (where you can’t get rid of the items to save your life), cutting prices is almost certainly the right move.

True as far as it goes, but when there are 1000 of these same flasks on the AH, 500 priced at 350g and 500 priced at 400g, it is predominantly the 350g-priced ones that will sell.

So while it is technically correct, that statement almost begs to be misinterpreted.

So why didn’t you buy them ? :slight_smile:

If you knew for sure there’s a market for them, selling at 300g, then you could just buy his listings and flip them for double the price.
You’d make 150g for every couple mouseclicks, almost as good a deal as buying items that are listed for less than their vendorprice.

The only risk involved is if your idea on the state of the market wasn’t correct, in which case the other guy likely wasn’t a chump but someone who did a better job adopting to changes/reality.

18

I could but this was on a new server so I didn’t really have the gold to gamble on keeping a common recipe with no ranks attached to it at 300g at the time when the crafting cost was 50 or 60g nor do I really enjoy over saturated markets where I’m cancelling twice a minute so I just started selling other things instead :smile:

19

There’s another point of view on all this - the casual AH user, not a “trader” or aspiring gold millionaire.

Although personally I’m fine with trade wars between AH players if it means I get things cheap, but when players are clearly monopolising even part of a market, if it means I pay way over competitive prices - that means that a player is effectively taxing me, possibly resulting me having to spend more time grinding rather than enjoying what I enjoy doing in the game, just so that they can accumulate pixel wealth.
Fair enough, their enjoyment is accumulating pixel wealth - but there is a cost in enjoyable game time to me once they control the market.
I know blizz prefers a hands off, market forces kind of approach - but in real life (yeah I know we are playing dragons and elves games here) monopolies get broken because they are clearly unfair.
Pick me apart, its fine, just my 2 copper.

20

Blame big boy.