User:Ensturp

This page is intended to answer a series of "Frequently Asked Questions" about my auction house character, Ensturp, on Earthern-Ring, a European RP Realm.

I got bored of giving out the long story so here are some basic and commonly asked questions about this character and its business.

Who is your main?
Not telling. I don't want the publicity on my main character, it is reasonably well known for its own achivements and I really dont want the "spam" I get on my auction house character to spill over on to it. Nor do I want a bunch of new "friends" who have only become my friend because of my notoriously famous and rich alt. People who know my main sometimes get to find out about the identity of this character (its not a well kept secret, but still classified as a secret). If you only know my AH char I am far more 'wary' of trusting and so forth than if I know you via my main characters, for fairly obvious reasons. (I'm not seeking "friends" because of my wealth!)

Sorry, it's just safer for me to keep this approach towards the two sides of my game to avoid me getting abused in various ways.

How much gold do you have?
I hit the gold cap (214748 gold 36 silver 47 copper) on 21st January 2009. At this point I threw 100K gold into the guild bank I use and carried on earning.

The number changes a lot and can include the values of my stock (which is another 50-100k on top of the actual liquid gold I have).

Can I have gold?
No.

Gief gold! Lol joke!
Not funny, you're the 1000th person to make that joke, it got kinda boring back in 2007.

What mods do you use?

 * Auctioneer is used to provide my base 'statistics' from the auction house.
 * I use "BulkMail" to automatically mail certain items off to be disenchanted (and to mail the returned materials)
 * I use "ArkInventory" to keep some vague organisation to my stocks.
 * I use a custom written mod (i.e. a mod I wrote) called "Stocker" to manage various aspects of my business (see below)

What does "Stocker" do?
Many things
 * It opens all my mail for me
 * It keeps track of how many of certain items I have in stock
 * It makes decisions on wether to purchase items, based off auctioneer's resale/disenchant valuation, scaled down if I have a large ammount in stock (every item I stock has an 'optimal' and 'maximum' stock level, once I have over the optimal I pay less and less for the item until I pay 0 for it once I exceed the max, a linear decline)
 * It decides if things are worth listing on the auction hosue (using data from auctioneer's scans)
 * It moves items from my inventory into the bank and guild bank if they're not worth listing, and from the banks into my inventory if they need listing.
 * It lists my auctions, it's configured to list a certain ammount of 'single' units, some stacks of 5 and 10, and some 'stacksize' stacks. The numbers vary by item and also by deposit cost (I recently stopped listing 'whole' stacks of WOTLK blue gems for example because they cost about 40g for a 48hr deposit, instead i list 4 singles and a stack or two of 5's)
 * It provides various statistics on my stock, estimates the value of them if I could "sell them all", keeps expected sales prices noted for items, tots up my total gold, ammount spent on bids, various things like that, which I graph, more for amusement than actual practical value.
 * An external perl script downloads the savedvariables from stocker hourly and plots a graph (which goes back to april 2008) of my gold, gold in bids, stock value listed at auction, and stock value that isn't listed. Another perl script also reads out the 'sale' values of the items and plots a graph of those (as of about October 2008) giving me an idea of how the prices vary over time.

Where can I get "Stocker"?
Sorry you can't. Thats not because I don't have any interest in releasing it and want to keep it secret, by its self its just a cunning little mod that handles some basic moving of items around really, it simply doesn't have any user interface, any manual, or any obvious ways to use it. Unless you know exactly what slash commands to type, in what order, and where, it won't do anything for you. The code is hideous too, it is the first proper "mod" I wrote and for the coders out there it resembles exactly what you'd expect for a "hastily written" prototype program that had no design in mind, no user interface planned, has been bodged to high hell and back over the last 2 years and is basically the my first program over 10 lines long in LUA. Its awful code, quite embarassing really. It needs a rewrite but I'm just not motivated to do so.

So short answer, you're out of luck. Sorry, just too lazy to rewrite it and polish it up.

But I found "Stocker" on Curse/Somewhere
Not my Stocker, I've never uploaded it, seems someone used the name before me, hardly surprising.

How do you write mods?
You need to learn how to program generally (understand variables, procedural programming, scope, usual things), learn the syntax of LUA (very easy if you've programmed any typical C/Java/etc style language) and reference the WOW API on wowwiki a lot to actually get things done.

The actual mechanics of writing a mod come down to creating a folder (inside interface\addons) and writing a couple of text files in there. All my development work has been done in notepad. You can open up pretty much any mod and load its TOC, LUA and XML files into notepad (some work better in wordpad for technical reasons to do with non standardisation of linebreak chars between operating systems), its just a bunch of 'human readable text'. Wether you can understand it is where the programming experience/knowledge comes in. Stocker uses no XML files because, as earlier mentioned, it has no "conventional" user interface (heck half of it doesn't even have slash commands, various bits are run directly with "/run Stocker_Function" macros. like I said, hideous stuff)

What do you trade in?
Mainly trade goods. I avoid armor/weapons apart from disenchant value. Dont deal in darkmoon cards or various other 'low demand' items. I'm not going to list them all, if you cant work it out from guessing supply/demand on the item you're not going to make a very good trader anyway so even if I was to tell you the whole list you wouldn't really get the gist of it. Work it out, I did.

Do you want to buy xxx?
Maybe, depends on the item again, as per "What do you trade in". Whisper me, suggest a price, I'll need to see the items in a trade window to get an idea of the value. If you're expecting me to buy for anywhere near sale value tho you're going to be disappointed, look around the 60-75% of market value mark (because I have to pay deposit costs, 5% auction house cut on sale, and still make a profit that is worth the storage space - which is seriously limited even with guild banks).

Have you got any xxx?
Maybe, again, ask me, but dont expect me to sell you items cheap. I'll charge you 100% market value based on my statistics from auctioneer. Its a fair price in my opinion.

You are a rip off
Sure, if you wish to think so. My sales window is 90%-125% of market value, I'll undercut but not /that/ much, and i'll mark prices up, but only by 25% (in contrast many resellers will mark up 200% or more). I like to think the prices are reasonable, and I've had many complimentary whispers on my business practises that seem to back this up. In terms of irate whispers, I actually get more people saying "dude, hike the price on xxxx!" than "xxx is overpriced"

You control the market
No, actually I don't. My auctioneer is set to accumulate statistics like anyone elses, most people use it to list auctions. My auctioneer is also set to ignore my own listings. That means my prices are entirely dictated by everyone elses listings (I had an issue where I was the only seller of an item, it listed for 125%, then when I scanned it saw my listing and thought that was a new normal price, so next time listed 125% of that, and so on, hiking prices stupidly, so I turned on this 'ignore my own auctions' features - this means my prices are actually entirely dictated by anyone but me).

But you control the prices
Still, not really, as per the previous point. Actually I do have a 'stabalising' effect on the prices, if people try crash the market by flooding it, I hold the price steady by buying up cheap stuff, if people try ramp the price I hold the price steady by listing at the market average value. Other people can still buy out all my listings and carry on cornering a market, being a monopoly etc, but thats a game I don't play. My style is more a vast and varied portfolio of hundreds of items, some I will lose out on, most I will make a profit on, and overall I make my fair share of money.

What do you do with all the gold?
Not much, hoard it mainly. I'm going for the gold cap (217K approx), and will carry on after that, it has become an interesting sub-game for me to play, tuning my mod, playing the markets, trying to make intelligent investments and see what returns I can make, I enjoy the challenge and the coding aspects and thus continue to do what I do even if I no longer really have any need for more gold. Its nice too to be able to afford silly things like 20k vendor-mammoths when they turn up without batting an eyelid at the cost.

Do you sell gold?
No, its obviously against the terms of service and I would jeapordise my account doing so, which would be a shame. But I'm not just saying that because its illegal, I don't do it because its not allowed and I dont want to risk my account, and I don't have the need for the real life cash either (I'm not rich in real life, but I'm well enough off that I don't need to do desparate things to survive comfortably).

How did you start all this?
Back in 2006, a few months before TBC launched, I spent a lot of time farming in Plaguelands, sold a lot of runecloth from the scourge fields there.

One day, after a few hours in the fields, I went to list my runecloth and found someone had listed about 30 or 40 stacks of runecloth at half the normal price. That annoyed the hell out of me, I'd spent hours farming this stuff and suddenly it wasn't worth half of what I'd thought. I spent a long time looking at this listings window, I wasn't rich back then, several hundred gold (which was 'well off' for pre-TBC but nothing compared to the profits I make nowadays), and with much trepidation bought out all the cheap runecloth and threw it in my bank.

Over the next few days I managed to sell all my cloth, and the stuff I'd bought at the normal value. That's where I started to pay more attention to the auction house.

TBC came along, and I reset my auctioneer database (as I have done with WOTLK too), prices shift too much and re-learning the market was the best plan. I signed up a trial account with the intention of sitting it in the auction house and running several scans a day while my mains were off leveling in outland, I would eventually move the databases it grew over to my main and that was meant to be that.

Once the trial account expired however, I realised I really enjoyed having the character there, watching the markets (not buying anything tho) and turned it into a subscription. Thus Ensturp was granted life.

Over the next few weeks I started learning how to use auctioneer (well worth the time invested) and started trading in disenchanted materials. Back then there were no guild banks, space was seriously limited and I was basically only dealing in good with zero listing costs, so throwing the whole lot on the auction house was easy and had no drawbacks.

Early 2007 I created my own guild (to remain nameless) to avoid having irritating little level 14s throwing their guild charter in my face without even a whisper before hand.

Some time in 2007 I joined a guild called "Azeroth Trading Co.", some guy from Alliance (RoughJ) was looking to set up a trader coalition, and I was mildly interested in the idea, and joined the guild. Nothing ever came of it, RoughJ disappeared (rumour was he got banned for selling gold, thats just rumour tho) and I sat in the guild purely because it saved me from the charter spam.

Over the course of 2007 I started to diversify my products, listed a few select end-game herbs and materials that were in high demand, and learnt how to use BottomScanner in auctioneer. I earned myself several thousand gold, and managed to buy my epic fliers pretty early on in TBC.

Then guild banks were released. This was a huge step forward, previously my dealings were heavily limited by the 96 or so slot bank we all have. The guild bank stores almost 600 more slots when fully purchased and aquiring one of these was a major step forward for my work.

So I typed /gquit, intending to return to my own guild and start a guild bank. And got told the guild leader couldn't quit the guild. I was quite surprised and had never realised I had become guild leader. I decided to stay with the guild (rather than disband it) and bought up the guild bank tabs.

This was all "pre-stocker", I was manually moving items around, listing stuff, and so on. Early on in 2007 I realised that various things could be done through mods and started to read up on the API available on wowwiki, and started writing stuff to move items around between inventories and banks. Over the course of 2008 the mod gained functionality as I grew ideas for it, doing the auctions for me, valuating my stock, compacting stacks of items, then on to opening mail, deleting the irritating "Auction sold:" mails that filled the inbox, functions for cancelling items I'd listed, increasing my listings for when I went on vacations, buying stuff, later came the "optimal/maximum" limitations on buying after I accidentally filled a bank tab with eternium rods (doh! - all sold eventually tho), it gained more statistical functions and automatic price analysis features which it reports, and the level of operation I currently run on the realm started really in early 2008.

In parallel, late 2007 I started an alliance character, leveled it to level 6 and got it about 80silver in quest rewards, which I spent buying items that could be vendored for profit, over the course of a few months I made about 250gold this way. Once 'stocker' took off as a viable alternative to manual auction management I formed a partnership (for a few months) with a friend who also contributed 250g and we quickly made about 20-30k on the alliance side. Eventually he left the realm and I "bought out" his share of the business, leaving me with a horde and alliance character which have resulted in the profits listed at the top of this document.

Then along came inscription, I bought lots of herbs (too many, tho again they all sold eventually), and then of course came the WOTLK. I stopped trading in many specialist TBC markets about 2-3 months before release, backing out of epic gems, elemental drops, and many other trade goods that I knew would suddenly have a spike in supply (everyone emptying their banks) and a huge drop in demand (no-one was going to waste money or time on these things when it would all be replaced in a few months).

WOTLK hit, I sat back and watched the market carefully for a few weeks, then reset my databases again, and a week later started buying and selling trade items from pre-TBC, expanding into WOTLK once the initial 'market crash' had come and gone (initially trade goods are sold overpriced by miles when the expansions first hit, the price comes down and stabalises eventually at something more reasonable). Once the TBC goods crash had finished I started relisting those too, the ones used to skill up professions (so not epic gems, but basic leathers, basic gems and so forth once again).

And that pretty much brings us to present day.