Why Gevlon is wrong about QA2

I was going to publish my article about my enchanting business today, however Gevlon @Greedy Goblin wrote another post about the superiority of Auctioneer and the ‘n00bz’ that use QA2 and I’d like to share my thoughts on the issue.

First a bit about my vs his settings.
Here are mine:


And here are his:

Gevlon said:

“PS2: There are some clueless who claim that since they don't undercut by 1c, they are different from other QA2 wizards. The defining characteristic is the undercut-fallback cycle. If a QA2 wizard finds the market empty, he posts on an arbitrary high fallback price, while I post on old median +25%. He welcomes undercutters back, I don't.”

Let’s take a look at these numbers and do the math. Let’s assume the median price for a glyph is 18g. If there are no other glyphs on the auction house or someone is posting glyphs for more than 25% markup he will post the 18g glyph at 22.5g. With my settings I will post the same situation at 25g. How exactly is 22g/glyph any less inviting to a undercutter than 25g? It isn’t. All glyphs cost exactly the same gold to make since they use the same amount of raw materials to make. I ran a little experiment for about two weeks where I posted every glyph at a fixed price of 3.5g. By the second week I was selling about 6 glyphs a day total(people caught on to my fixed price and were simply undercutting me by 1s). So, undercutters will ALWAYS come, regardless of my arbitrary fallback or his ‘meaningful’ median price.

We covered fallbacks, now let’s look at thresholds using the same example. Auctioneer will not post an 18g glyph for less than 10.8g My cost of the Ink of the Sea is 3g/ink if I ignore Snowfalls and -5g if I count snowfall sales(18g/stack of herbs|23g/snowfall). Personally I consider 2.5g to be my cost of Inks even though I already have 7 thousand inks paid for with snowfall sales. Ok, let’s move on further. As I said before, his settings wont post a 18g glyph for less than 10.8g. If I skipped on those sales I’d be losing a 7g potential profit (10-3g). I’m not sure about Gevlon, but I’m not going to skip out on a 7g profit no matter what I’m selling.

Median price is meaningless when you talk about glyphs.

Glyph of Nourish sells pretty well, at least on my server. The median price for the glyph is less than 6g, and I believe Gevlon actually ignores glyphs that have a low median price and doesn’t craft them. Because glyphs go up and down many times a day, the median price of a glyph is no less arbitrary than my fallbacks. Again, Gevlon is wrong.

Now that we covered how using a median price for selling glyphs is not very important let’s talk about why QA2 is actually superior, and you’re not a noob if you use it. The main reason to use QA is that it’s fast and flexible. Gevlon posts 5-6 of each glyph I believe, that’s at least 1500 glyphs total. Batch posting 1500 items is going to take a long time. Posting 1500 items with QA is going to take less than 10 minutes. QA is flexible. If I feel like I have a lot of time to craft I can drop my threshold and fallback lower and sell a larger volume. All I need to modify is two numbers and I’m back in business. Same if I want to go back to my old settings. Just change those numbers back.

Finally QA has an awesome cancel function.
Clicking the cancel button will cancel all the auctions you’ve been undercut on.
/qa cancelall will cancel everything you have on the auction house
/qa cancelall 2 (or 12, or 24) will cancel everything under a certain with less than 2,12,12 hour remaining. Very useful if there’s 2 hours left and you know you wont be able to be online for when they expire.

My last point might be a bit of a flamebait, but I don’t think Gevlon actually installed QA2 and gave it a fair chance (about a week). He just read what his commenters were saying and decided QA2 was a bad tool.

PS: The main reason Gevlon's post struck me the wrong way is not that he thinks Auctioneer is superior, but that he referred to people who use QA as 'n00bz' and 'drones'. That's like saying people who use iTunes are all idiots and the people who use foobar2k are actually somehow a lot smarter.