Winter Addon Roundup: Auctions

In this category there are very few addons worthy of mention, and none are as thorough as the Auctioneer Suite. The addon's homepage is http://auctioneeraddon.com/ and is regularly updated as the project progresses. You can download just the Auctioneer addon, or you can get it as well as Enchantrix, Informant, and SearchUI all in one go which is what I suggest, although I wouldn't generally enable Enchantrix for anyone but characters who have chosen Enchanting as one of their professions. Auctioneer does many things for you, most notably:

• Tracks what appears to be the "going rate" for items and materials
• Remembers what prices you listed things for sale the last time
• Shows you how close to the "going rate" listed auctions are
• Adds a ton of information about auctions to item tooltips
  

Once you've installed the Auctioneer addon and started WoW, proceed without delay to the nearest Auction House and open up the auctions interface. You'll note that what you have now is rather different from what you had before, and the first thing you're going to need to do is get started on populating its tracking of auction data. Up along the top edge of the auction frame are three buttons, one of which is an arrow that looks remarkably like a "play" button. Click it and wait about 20 minutes (talk to your guild, clean your room, walk the dog) while it reads all the auctions in the auction house. Once it's done reading all the auctions it still has to basically "digest" all this information and will show a progress bar along the top of the screen and WoW will be generally unusable for the next 45-180 seconds because it's doing a ton of computational work. You're going to want to do this at least once a week (or, if you're like me, every time you play) so I suggest doing it on a "trading alt" and configuring Auctioneer to log you out when it's done (yes, that's a configuration option) to minimize the hassle.

• Auctioneer Suite v 5.1.3715 (10-24-2008)

By the way, if you do Herbalism or Mining the people who make the Auctioneer Suite also make a rather incredible plugin called "Gatherer" that has a massive database of where nodes spawn and is generally considered a "must have" for anyone who does more than casual ("Oh, there's a mining node here!") gathering of raw materials.