Purpose
Market Watcher is an addon that scans the auction house and records data for specified items and assists in daily auction house shopping in general. When the addon is set to record, a price history can be displayed to assist in determining a value for items of interest.
What makes Market Watcher unique from other auction house addons is that it records multiple scans instead of just the most recent. This obviously uses a great deal of memory, so only scans of items specified by the user will be recorded. The saving of multiple scans allows for a more accurate determination of value, and allows the addon to deduce if some auctions were actually sold, so you can see which auctions are actually selling as opposed to basing a value off the prices of auctions that may not be selling at all.
The number Market Watcher cares about the most is price per unit - particularly buyout price per unit. Lists are sorted by and comparisons are made by this price. For example, you might have the addon set to scan for abyss crystals, but not display the result in the scan summary unless the price is below a set value. If there are crystals for sale below that value, then the lists generated by the addon will order the auctions by price per unit regardless of stack size. The price history graphs use the lowest, average, and highest price per unit.
How to Use Market Watcher
Adding Items
Once you have installed Market Watcher, visit an auction house NPC and bring up the auction house window.
You will notice two new tabs: History, and Scan.
First, you need to specify which items you wish to "watch." Click the History tab, then click Add.
The Add Item window appears. Enter the name of an item you wish the addon to track, or the item id of an item. This addon needs specific information about the items it scans to function correctly, so it will need to get this information by checking the auction house for it, your inventory, your trade skills, or by silently asking the server to bring up tooltip information about an item id. The item id can be obtained by visiting a WoW database website. Simply search for the item in question and get the number in the URL, i.e. "http://www.wowhead.com/?item=34057"
Once you have added your item, the edit item window appears. From here you can instruct the addon to record the scans of the item, how long to keep the scans, and whether to only record full stacks. Also, you may configure the addon to not display the scan results of items that do not meet certain criteria, such as if the item is too expensive (or cheap), or whether there are none for sale or not. This speeds daily shopping and allows you to easily notice when there are undervalued auctions, or if a market is ripe for your own auctions, or to hide uninteresting markets.
Scanning
Once you have input all the items you want to watch for, click the Scan tab, then click the Scan button. If you do not want to record this scan, then uncheck the "Record Scans" check box. There are a couple of reasons you may not wish to record a particular scan.
First, scans can use up a lot of memory. In fact there is currently no limit to the memory usage of this addon - it is possible to configure this addon to use as much memory as you tell it to, so you must pay some attention to this if you record scans for many items. The memory used by the addon is prominently displayed on the History tab. To give you a rough idea of how much memory scans might use, 500 or so individual item scans uses up about two megabytes of memory. If you configured the addon to record 50 items, then hitting the scan button with record scans checked will use roughly two megabytes of ram after 10 clicks of the scan button. It is also important to note, however, that some items will use far more memory than others. Frostweave cloth or Infinite Dust scans will use much, much more memory than say, Nobles Deck scans.
Secondly, the more uniform your scans are, the more accurate some of the addon estimates and calculations will be. Specifically the price change indicators in the scan summary and the technical analysis indicators.
Once the scan is complete, the scan summary is displayed. Here you can see at a glance how many units are for sale and the cheapest price per unit. If you input a threshold value when setting an item's options, the price text will either be green or red depending if the item's unit price is below or above that threshold value. If an item has scans saved, a percentile indicating the price change from the last week and the last month is displayed. This allows you to quickly determine if an item is selling above or below market value.
Mouseovering an item's summary will bring up a tooltip that will list every auction of that item at the time of the scan, ordered by buyout price per unit. Clicking on an item's summary will query the auction house for that item, and bring up the results on the right side of the window. From here you can conveniently make your purchases in a compact, price per unit ordered list. Shift + right clicking a result will buy that auction out instantly. Note that the auctions listed on the right side of the window are actual auction house results, and therefore have multiple pages, so you may need to click the arrows at the bottom to find the cheapest auction as indicated in the tooltip.
Reviewing Scan Data
Now that you have a scan saved, you can bring up the scan on the History tab. Click the History tab and then click on an item you have set to record. If you have three or more scans, a price history graph is displayed, otherwise a display similar to Blizzard's auction house results page is displayed. You can switch between the two views by clicking the button at the bottom.
The list view will display the scan number and how long ago it was taken. To save space, auctions that are identical are merged and given a number in the # column. The number obviously being how many duplicates of this auction there were. Note that sometimes it will appear as if it did not merge every seemingly duplicate auction. That is because items have a hidden value associated with them. Blizzard uses this value to track certain details about items. (such as where they came from)
If scans are less than 12 hours apart, Market Watcher can deduce if any "Very Long" auctions have either been sold or removed by the seller. Likewise, if scans are under two hours apart, the addon can determine if a "Long" auction was sold or removed, and so on. Using some judgment, you can then determine which auctions are being bought out. If the top few auctions listed are labeled "Sold or Removed" then it's safe to say they were bought out. Auctions with bids are also indicated. You can use this knowledge to more accurately gauge an item's worth.
The graph display can visually represent an item's change in price over time. "Low" "Average" and "High" are the lowest buyout price per unit, average buyout price per unit, and highest buyout price per unit of the auctions in the scan on that date. "Actual" is the actual price. "SMA" is the Simple Moving Average, which is the average of the last 10 price points. "EMA" is the Exponential Moving Average, which works similar to the Simple Moving Average, except more weight is put on the more recent prices. "Trend" shows the overall price trend (if the price is falling, rising, or flat) of all of the scans.
Installation Guide
- Exit "World of Warcraft" completely
- Download the mod you want to install
- Make a folder on your desktop called "My Mods"
- Save the .zip/.rar files to this folder.
- If, when you try to download the file, it automatically "opens" it... you need to RIGHT click on the link and "save as..." or "Save Target As".
- Extract the file - commonly known as 'unzipping'
Do this ONE FILE AT A TIME!
- Windows
- Windows XP has a built in ZIP extractor. Double click on the file to open it, inside should be the file or folders needed. Copy these outside to the "My Mods" folder.
- WinRAR: Right click the file, select "Extract Here"
- WinZip: You MUST make sure the option to "Use Folder Names" is CHECKED or it will just extract the files and not make the proper folders how the Authors designed
- Mac Users
- StuffitExpander: Double click the archive to extract it to a folder in the current directory.
- Verify your WoW Installation Path
That is where you are running WoW from and THAT is where you need to install your mods.
- Move to the Addon folder
- Open your World of Warcraft folder. (default is C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\)
- Go into the "Interface" folder.
- Go into the "AddOns" folder.
- In a new window, open the "My Mods" folder.
- The "My Mods" folder should have the "Addonname" folder in it.
- Move the "Addonname" folder into the "AddOns" folder
- Start World of Warcraft
- Make sure AddOns are installed
- Log in
- At the Character Select screen, look in lower left corner for the "addons" button.
- If button is there: make sure all the mods you installed are listed and make sure "load out of date addons" is checked.
- If the button is NOT there: means you did not install the addons properly. Look at the above screenshots. Try repeating the steps or getting someone who knows more about computers than you do to help.
Translations
When you download a mod, please be sure that the mod is compatible with your translation of wow. Some mods only work on the US versions, while some only work on some of the various European versions. These variations are called "Localizations".
TOC Numbers (Out of Date Mods)
When Blizzard patches WoW, they change the Interface number. This means that all mods will be "out of date" unless or until the author releases a new version for that interface. Some people go into the .toc files and update the numbers themselves, but this is STRONGLY advised against as it will cause problems locating possible incompatibilities addons. When you log into WoW after a patch, you DO NOT have to delete your interface directory. All you have to do is simply tell WoW to ignore the interface numbers and load all the mods anyway. All you have to do is, while at the "character select" screen, look in the lower left corner and click on the "addons" button. A window will pop up listing all your installed mods.
If you look in the upper left corner of that window there should be a box that says "Load Out of Date AddOns". You want to CHECK this box. Now simply go into WoW normally and all your mods should load. As of the 1.9 patch, you will have to do this after EVERY patch/update that Blizzard posts! If you encounter any problems with a mod after a patch, please be sure to let the author of the mod know so they can fix it.
See also: About "Out Of Date AddOns"
Mac Support
WoW addons are not platformed based. As such, they can be used on either Mac or PC. You can extract both .zip and .rar files on a Mac using StuffitExpander.
Directory Structure
World of Warcraft
|_ Interface
|_AddOns
|_*AddonName*
|_ *AddonName*.toc
|_ *AddonName*.xml
|_ *AddonName*.lua
|_ (possibly others as well)...
