Abigail 2.30
Build Version 5.40
For WoW Version 5.40
Will work with Auctionator 3.1.5
Abigail Web Site - http://www.abigail.webeden.co.uk
17/12/2013


Abigail will not be updated with every minor patch or wow version that is released, so make sure you have the 'Load Out Of Date' option ticked on the addon screen. Updates will only be released when a major change to LUA or XML programming occurs, or the arguments of a command are changed or a bug is spotted.

I use Abigail every day, and if it stops working after a major patch or update I'll know about it and will be working to fix it. Just check with the website you downloaded it from and look for a new version number - it shouldn't take more that a day or two.

Abigail works alongside Auctionator (Version 3.1.5), but is not guaranteed to work with any other Auction House addons, and probably won't work well with many tooltip or bag addons either.

Abigail has its own website, where suggestions and comments can be made or even bugs reported. www.abigail.webeden.co.uk.


UPGRADING TO A NEW VERSION

To replace an old version of Abigail with a newer version, go to the C:\World of Warcraft\Interface\AddOns folder and delete the Abigail folder. Put the newly downloaded (and unzipped) Abigail folder in its place.

Don't worry about losing your price database that you've built up. This is stored in a different folder (C:\World of Warcraft\WTF\Account\'your account name'\SavedVariables) and is perfectly safe.

If you have been using an older version of Abigail (2.15 or earlier) this price database file will need to be deleted, and you'll have to start building up your price history records from scratch.

However, if you have been using version 2.20 and are upgrading to version 2.30, you will not have to delete this file and all your previous data will still be there.


REGULAR BACKUPS

It is recommended that you backup the price database on a regular basis, by making a copy of the file and storing it somewhere safe on the hard-drive, CD/DVD or memory stick. This file is called 'Abigail' and can be found in the folder C:\World of Warcraft\WTF\Account\'your account name'\SavedVariables. Right-click on this file and select 'copy' from the drop-down menu. Go to your backup place (another folder, CD/DVD or memory stick), right-click and select 'paste'. This will create a copy of the file.

It's possible that after a major blizzard update (or Auctionator update if you are using that addon as well) that the price database could become corrupted if some of the outside functions or variables start returning different values. If this happens, delete the current Abigail price database, replace it with your backup, and look online for a new version of the Abigail Addon that will now work with these changes.

The first couple of lines of this instruction file will always show : The Abigail Version, the World of Warcraft Version it works with, and the Auctionator version it will work alongside.


INTRODUCTION

Abigail is a simple auction house addon that takes a snapshot of the current auctions and shows you which objects are being sold below their normal value, letting you buy and re-sell them for a profit.

Download the addon, extract the Abigail folder from the zipped file and copy the folder (Abigail) to C:\World of Warcraft\Interface\Addons.


FIRST TIME USE

On running, you'll notice six more tabs have been added to the Auction House :
	Main - where you decide what you want to look for.
	Deals - where Abigail shows you what its found.
	Shop - where you set your shopping list of favourite items.
	Sell - finds all items in your bags and lets you quickly set up auctions for them.
	Adjust - you can remove 'silly' prices directly from the price history file.
	Delete - you can delete the price history records for realms/factions you no longer play.

Also, added to the top of the Auction House frame is a small frame containing your profit/loss history. This shows how much money you have spent at the AH, how much money you have made from selling items, and your profit/loss. Note, these are only updated when you take money or bought items at the mailbox.

Using the mailbox to record the items bought and sold means that any other Auction House addon could be used to purchase or sell the items, but as long as Abigail is loaded, the Money Spent and Money Earned values will be recorded correctly.


The Simple Way To Use Abigail

1) Go to the Mailbox and take any money / cash that has come in
2) At the AH, Press the Take Snapshot button on the Main Screen
3) Press the Search Bargains button
4) Go to the Deals screen and buy some items
5) Go to the mailbox and collect those items
6) Back at the AH, go to the Selling screen, press Read Bags to get all items in your bags and the current best-value auctions for the same items you have in your bags, so you can undercut them
8) Put your items up for auction
9) Leave the AH and play the game

All other options and facilities that Abigail has to offer can be explored later.



THE MAIN OPTIONS SCREEN

Two main buttons are 'Take Snapshot' and 'Search Bargains'.

Take Snapshot - Abigail will read the current Auction House, adding the buyout price for each auction to a Price Database. 

Search Bargains - Finds all the items that match your settings on this screen.

Note that Abigail stores prices as 'per unit' prices, so that a stack of 20 units for sale at 250 gold would be stored as 1 auction for 12 gold and 50 silver.

The sliders we'll get to in a moment, but for the first week I'd recommend leaving all these at zero.


Item Classes:

Put a tick in all the boxes to start with, so you'll not miss any bargains. You can always de-select some of these classes later, when you get an idea what items offer the best bargains in general.


ToolTip Options:

This just lets you decide what information will be added to the standard WoW item tooltip, including the highest and lowest prices you have bought and sold objects at, along with the current average price and the price history, with the most common prices highlighted to make them easier to see.

Also displayed are the most recent bought and sold prices and a selling ratio showing the number of times you have sucessfully auctioned an item and the number of times you have put this item up for auction. The number in brackets is the (approximate) number of days since you last bought or sold this item.

Added in version 2.20 is the Last Seen number, showing the number of days since this item was seen during a Take Snapshot scan of the auction house.

If an items stack size is greater than 1, holding the Shift-key down will display all prices in the tooltip as if they were the same as the stack size of the item.

For example, a stack of 15 Bolt of Silk Cloth would be shown with either:

	without the Shift-key - all prices being displayed at their normal 'per unit' value.
	or with the Shift-Key - all the prices being multiplied by 15.


Duration Button:

Clicking on this button will toggle through the range of auction items to search for. Either Buyouts (all items with a buyout price), Bids under 30 mins, Bids under 2 hrs, Bids under 12 hrs or All Bids, Undercuts or My Profits.

If you selected 'Undercuts', Abigail will search your auctions and check if any other auction is undercutting it. The Deals screen will then show all your auctions that are being undercut, along with your buyout price, the undercutting price and the duration of the undercutting auction. You can cancel any of your auctions, collect them from the mailbox and then re-auction them, this time undercutting your competitors. Do be aware, that cancelling an auction will lose any deposit you have paid.

The My Profits option will search the AH for all items with a buyout price that is cheaper than the lowest price that you have sucessfully sold them for at the Auction House. This takes into account the Percent Profit slider, so that if the slider is set to 100, the Sold-Lo price would have to be at least 100% greater than the current auctions buyout price, so giving you a potential 100% profit on your outlay.

Buyout:

If you have selected one of the Bid options, you can also tick the Buyout box. This forces the Bid search to compare the Bid Price against the objects Buyout Price rather than the price history. This means a search can be done for items whose bids are much lower than their buyouts.


Quick Get All Scan / Page-by-Page Scan

Lets you choose how to scan the Auction House - a Get All scan is much quicker, but can only be done once every 15 mins. The page-by-page scan does exactly that, it reads each page one at a time, taking about 8-9 mins for an average auction house of 30000 items. Note, a Get All scan is limited to just over 42000 items, so if you are on a server with more auctions than this, using the page-by-page option will ensure a complete read of the auction house.


Current / Full Price History:

Full Price History - compares the items in the AH against the full history of prices that your previous scans has built-up

Current Prices - compares items only against other similar items currently up for auction.

Just because an items price history shows its average is around 25 gold, the current auctions for it may be a lot different - ie 100 gold, meaning you could possibly sell it for more than the standard 25.


The Sliders:

These options help you fine-tune the bargain and bid searches for only those objects and prices you are interested in.

Minimum Spend (0-250) Fairly obviously this is the minimum amount you wish to spend per auction.

Maximum Spend (0-current gold) Again obvious - the maximum you want to spend per auction.

Percent Profit (0-500) The minimum profit level you are looking for. Try setting to 100% if you want to search for those auctions that will at least double your money. 

Gold Profit (0-500) Again fairly obvious - will only find those auctions that give you a minimum amount of profit.

Max Deviation (0-100) This one is a little tricky. For simplicitys sake, just leave at zero for the first two weeks then set it at about 30 percent. Then, once a week, do a 'Take Snapshot' with this set at zero, then set it back to 30 again. If more than 7 days have passed since you last did a scan with this slider set at zero, Abigail will now remind you of that with a popup alert. This alert will also appear if you are running Abigail for the very first time.

What happens with the auction house is that you spend time building up an accurate(ish) index of all the recent prices, only for some burke to auction a stack of Peacebloom for 2500gold (hoping someone will click on it by mistake while buying out a load of other Peacebloom autions). This now causes your database to think the average price for peacebloom to be 25-100 gold, instead of the 3-5 gold that it should be, and every Peacebloom auction will now be listed as a bargain.

Alternatively, the record for an object normally selling at about 100 gold may become corrupted if someone sells it for 10 gold to make a quick sale. This could make Abigail miss potential bargains because the 'average' price may have been reduced to around only 40 gold.

Setting the Max Deviation value to say 30 percent, means that Abigail will not update the Price Index database for any objects whose buyout prices are:

	a) 30 percent higher than the highest price currently in the database
or	b) 30 percent lower than the lowest price currently in the database.

Abigail will still recognise cheap objects as being bargains however, and list them on the deals screen, allowing you to buy them.

Max Deviation has no effect on the bargain or bid searches, just on what can be added to the price history databases.

Max Same Item (0-10) Searching through the bargains list can be a little off-putting when there are dozens (or even hundreds) of auctions of the same item. This slider lets you decide how many auctions of the same item are to be allowed into the bargains list. For example, if there are 45 auctions of Netherweave Cloth, you can set the slider to 5, which will only allow 5 of those auctions to appear in the bargains list. Abigail will automatically select those auctions that will give the greatest profit, so you can be confident that the best bargains will still be found. I usually set this figure to 5.


Important Note

Leaving any of these slider values at zero will inform Abigail that this option is not to be considered when searching for a bargain.

Whenever you close the auction house, all the main settings are saved for next time, so that you can configure Abigail to your taste and not have to reset all the values each time.


Preset Values:

At the top right of the screen you will see six buttons, numbered 1 to 6. This allows you to have upto 6 preset search settings saved, so you don't have to remember all the settings and change them when you do a search. Whenever you click on one of these buttons, the settings for the current button will be saved, and the settings for the new button will be loaded and displayed on the screen. The small edit box allows you to give each setting a name to remind you what it does.




THE DEALS OR BARGAINS SCREEN

Once the snapshot has been taken, and this snapshot has been searched for bargains (or bids) that match your options, clicking the Deals tab will display a screen of the bargains found.

The middle line of the header shows what the last search was that produced the list of items on this page. If you do a All Bids search and then change the option to Buyouts on the main options screen, without pressing Search Bargains, this screen will still be showing the results of the last search (All Bids), so this message is just a gentle reminder.

Thirteen bargains are displayed at a time and hovering the mouse over an objects name will highlight it and display its recorded price history on the mini-screen at the side. The price history in the list (if any) that the buyout value corresponds to will be highlighted red. If the 'Current Prices' option is selected on the Main Options screen, this history list will be the current prices for this item.

The bottom of this mini-screen is used to show the per-unit costs of an auction if the stack size is greater than 1.

The bottom right of the Deals Screen has two buttons, Show Best 5 and Prices per Stack.

By left-clicking an object name, that name will be copied into the Name fields on other pages. If you have Auctionator loaded, left-clicking will also send the objects name to the search field on the Buy Page of Auctionator.

Left-clicking a name will also show the five cheapest (per unit) auctions for this item, if you have changed Show 5 Best to On.

Holding down the Shift-Key while left-clicking will try to send only part of the items name to the browse fields. If the name contains the word 'of' (for example 'Ranger Belt of Intellect', only the 'Ranger Belt' part of the name will be sent.

Right-clicking an item name will 'force' that item price into the price history record. If it already exists, right-clicking will increase its 'times seen' by one. Pressing the shift key at the same time will reduce the 'times seen' by one, down to a minimum of one.

The Buyout( or Bid ), Profit ( or Difference ) and %age columns can all be sorted by clicking on the header. Click once to sort from highest to lowest, and again to sort vice-versa.

The 5 columns of information are :

Items For Sale - Displays the stack size and name of each bargain found.

Buyout or Bid Needed - The current buyout or bid price for the auction

Average or Buyout - The average auction price (or buyout price if a bid search by buyout was done) for this item at this stack size. For example, if the average auction price was 2 gold 50 silver, but this item has a stack of 15, the average price would be shown as 37 gold 50 silver.

Profit or Difference - How much you could expect to make if you bought it and then resold it at the average price. If searching for bids, this is the difference bewteen an items Bid price and its Buyout price.

%age - The profit shown as a percentage of the Buyout or Bid Needed price. For example, a Buyout of 6 gold, with an average of 30 gold gives a profit of 24 gold, and a %age of 400. This shows that your initial outlay of 6 gold will be increased by 400% if sold at 30 gold.

Next to the %age header you'll see a checkbox, which if ticked will display the price historys as if having the same stack size as the item. Right-clicking the Buy / Bid button of an item will also toggle this check box, letting you easily see the historic prices as they would compare against the same stack size as the auction.

Which neatly brings us to the Buy / Bid buttons. Pressing these will first check the auction is still available, and if so will show a confirmation box, giving you a last chance to realise your mistake before spending cash. Pressing the Cancel button will stop the purchase, whereas pressing Accept will either place a bid on the object, or buy it outright, taking the money from your account. If bought, the object will now appear in your mailbox.



THE SHOPPING SCREEN

Any item that you have sold at the Auction House can be added to a 'Shopping-List' of items, which can be used to search the Auction House for these items with buyouts under a predefined price, and put them onto the Bargains screen to be examined further or bought.

Note, the 'Shopping-List' routine ONLY works on the per-item buyout value, not bid values.

At the top right of the screen are two buttons : Empty List and Reset.

Empty List - will remove all items from your shopping list.

Reset - Sets all shopping list items to be based on 50% of the Sold-Hi price.


The screen is divided into four sections.


Top-Left : Available Items

This area shows all the items that you have sucessfully sold by Auction - initially it is blank, but pressing the Generate button will search the Item Price History for suitable items to display. Right-clicking one of these items will send it to the Shopping List (top-right area), and left-clicking will send the name to the Name fields of other screens of the AH and to Abigails Adjust screen. If you have Auctionator loaded, the name will also be sent to the Buy screen of that addon. 

When the item name is sent to the shopping list, it also sets the maximum price you want to pay for this as being the Sold-Hi price, and the percentage slider set to 50, so that doing a search will look for this item, and show you any that are a minimum of 50% lower than the highest price you have sold it for.

Any items already in your Shopping-List will not appear in this section. If you remove an item from the shopping-list and press the generate button, the item will reappear here.


Top-Right : The Shopping List

This is your 'shopping list', where you can remove items or adjust the prices.

To remove an item, right-clicking it activates the Del button, which can be used to remove it from the list. You will have to press Accept on a confirmation pop-up to finally remove it.

The shopping price can be altered in the shopping list by left-clicking the name, which will toggle through the available prices for this item (either Buy-Hi, Buy-Lo, Sold-Hi or Sold-Lo) and the maximum price setting will be a percentage of the choosen price. This percentage is set by the slider in the bottom-right area, which ranges from 5 to 500, which can be set by right-clicking an items name and moving the slider. The default value is 50 percent, which means the shopping list will look for items that are being sold for no more than half the maximum you have sold it for.

Note - the minimum value is 1 Copper. Any price setting less than this will automatically be changed to 1 copper.

To adjust the slider value for an item, right-click the item and this will activate the slider. When finished, right-click again in this part of the screen to save the new value and de-activate the slider.


Bottom Left : Price History

This section shows the item name you are currently inspecting, along with its Buying and Selling records. Also shown is the selling ratio, telling you how many times you have successfully sold that item at auction, and how many times you have auctioned it.

If your mouse is highlighting an item name in the Shopping-List area (top-right), the price-selection method used to create the maximum price will be highlighted in red.


Bottom Right : Options

The three main buttons are Generate, Search and Max On/Off with two 'options' buttons - Sort and Classes.

'Generate' will search your current price history data and find all those items that have been sucessfully auctioned by you. Any items that are not already in your shopping-list will be displayed in the top-left section of the screen, allowing you select which ones to add to the shopping list.

'Search' will search your most recent snapshot data and find those items with per-item prices less than the maximum prices you have set in the shopping list.

'Max On / Off' will let you limit the number of times an item appears in the search list to the Max Same Value slider on the main options screen.

The Sort button simply sorts the Shopping-List into alphabetical order.

The Classes button lets you concentrate on those item classes as set on the Options screen. The two options are 'Use Classes' and 'Don't Use Classes', which should be self explanitory.



THE SELLING SCREEN

This scans your bags for auctionable items giving them buyout and starting bid prices, and also finds any current auctions for identical items, letting you undercut those prices to make your auctions the most attractive. A small checkbox at the top-left of the screen, will let you auto open/close your bags when entering and leaving this screen. Note, this checkbox is saved in the preset settings on the main options screen, and so different presets could have this box checked or unchecked.

The buyout price is first calculated from the Sold High record for this item. If this doesn't exists (ie you haven't sold any of these yet), the Bought High price is used. Its possible that you haven't actually bought any of these through the AH yet (either made them, found them or had them sent from an another player), so in that case the lowest Price History value is used instead.

If you are currently auctioning an identical item, the buyout price is taken from the per-item value of this auction.

Note - if none of these would give a result, a default vaule of 1 gold is used. This is just so that the item can appear in the selling list, which could then be set to undercut other similar auctions.


The new five columns of information are : Item Name, Start Bid, Buyout '?' and Snapshot.

Item Name - shows the name and stack size of the item.

Start Bid - shows the starting bid price for an auction.

Buyout - shows the buyout of the auction.

'?' - shows how a buyout price was calculated. S = the Sold High price was used, B the Bought High price was used, L = the lowest Price History value was used (or the default value of 1 gold), U = the price is undercutting an existing auction, M = matches a current price for this item that you are auctioning, A = the Average price for this item, 7 = the Recent (within 7 days) lowest price seen  and P is the Simple Profit value.

Snapshot - shows the current lowest price in the snapshot for this item

Clicking the Buyout header will 'round' the prices to the nearest 10 silver, making the auction look more like it was set up by a player rather than an automatic undercutting addon. If the value is under 10 silver, it will be rounded-up to the next full silver value, ie 7 silver and 25 copper would become 8 silver.


Six buttons are Read Bags, 48 Hrs, Reset, Per Unit/Per Stack, Simple Profit, Recent Prices and P.

Read Bags - this will scan your bags for all auctionable items, and list them on the screen with suggested starting and buyout prices. This list will exclude all items that are soulbound, account bound, in need of repair, lootable or protected from being sold. Pressing this button will also record any current auctions for these items, so you can undercut them.

48 Hrs - sets the duration of the auctions. This can be changed to be 12 hrs or 24 hrs.

Reset - puts all the options and slider values back to their default settings. Clicking on the text below each slider will also set that slider back to its default value.

Per Unit / Per Stack - lets you choose wether to split a stack into separate auctions, or to sell as a stack. The prices on screen will be adjusted to show the new starting and buyout prices.

Simple Profit allows you to quickly generate selling prices for items that you have purchased through the AH. It takes the amount you paid for an item, adds to this its deposit required at the AH and doubles the total to give a final Buyout value. This can be tweeked using the Buyout Price Adustment slider if you so wish. All items that have had their prices created using this method will have the letter P in the ? column. This can be reset back to the original prices shown by simply pressing the Read Bags button again.

7-Day Low Price will let you set the buyout price to the lowest price seen for each item in the last 7 days, adjusted by the Buyout Price Adjustment slider.

Three sliders are Start Bid Prices, Buyout Price Adjustment and Undercut Percentage.

Whatever method is used, once a Buyout price is calculated, it can be changed using the Buyout Price Adjustment slider, ranging from -90% to 500%

Start Bid Prices sets the Starting Bid price to this percent lower than the Buyout price. This ranges from 1% to 50%. Note, the Start Bid price Will never be greater than the Buyout Price.

Undercut Percentage - this slider will set by how much the price will be undercut if you press the Cut button. Again this ranges from 1% to 50%.

Pressing the Cut button will set the buyout price to the lowest snapshot price - then reducing it by Undercut Percentage and then the Buyout Price Adjustment sliders.

The Sell button creates the auction for this item at the bid, buyout and duration you have set on this screen. Be warned, there is no confirmation option. This screen was added to speed-up the auction creation process, so pressing Sell will do just that. If you do make a mistake, go to the Auctions screen to list your auctions and cancel it. You will lose your deposit, but this is a small price to pay to get something back.

If the Per Unit / Per Stack button is set to Per Unit, any stack of items will be turned into several auctions at the set prices. For instance, a stack of 5 Iron Bars will be turned into 5 auctions of 1 bar, each with the displayed Starting Bid and Buyout price.

If the button is set to Per Stack, one auction of 5 bars would be created, again at the displayed Bid and Buyout prices.

If clicking Sell would result in 10-20 auctions being created, you will be given a warning and will have to click Yes to continue making the auctions. This is to stop you (and me) from selling a stack of items individually by mistake. Also, Abigail will prevent you from making more than 20 auctions of an item in one go.

Right-Clicking an items name will display the tooltip for that item, and Right-Clicking will turn it off again.

Near the bottom-right of the screen is a small button, marked 'p'. This will only become active once you have clicked the Read Bags button. Clicking this 'P' button will bring up a small screen, where you can protect any item from being sold. This allows your character to keep trade items for example (herbs, flasks, minerals etc) without them appearing on the selling screen.

When you open the Protection Screen, the first items will be any previously protected items, followed by all the items (unless protected, lootable, soulbound, account bound or in need of repair) that are in your bags. You can then put a tick next to any of these to stop them appearing on the selling screen. Or, if it is already ticked, unticking it will allow it to be sold again. Note, you can only protect an item from being sold if it is currently in one of your bags, so if you untick an item that was protected a while ago, but isn't currently in a bag, you wont be able to protect it again until you have it in one of your bags.



THE ADJUSTING SCREEN

After a short while, you'll notice that certain items keep cropping up as potential bargains, that in reality are not. For example, if someone auctions a stack of linen cloth for 1500 gold, all other normal priced stacks (between 5 and 10 gold on my server) would appear to be cheap bargains. On the Adjusting screen you can search your price history data for these items, and select which actual price records to remove.

First, left-click on the Get Prices button. This reads your price history file and shows each item along with its highest and lowest recorded prices. This list is sorted by the difference between highest and lowest prices, so items with wildly differing price ranges are listed first. Only items with a price difference of at least 1 gold are shown.

A button at the top of the screen lets you choose By Value or By Percent:

By Value -  the items will be listed according to the 'actual monetary' value differences between the high and lowest prices for that item.

By Percent - the items will be listed according to the 'percentage' difference between the high and lowest prices for that item.

For example, and item with highest value of 5 gold and a lowest value of 25 Silver will only have a 'monetary' difference of 4 gold and 75 silver, and will so probably appear near the end of the list if By Value was selected. On the other hand, this also represents a difference of 2000 percent, which would now list the item nearer the top of the list, letting you spot it more easily. I recommend doing a Get Prices search twice, once for each setting : By Value and By Percent.

Note - right-clicking the Get Prices button will also read your price history file, but this time will only search for seriously silly price differences, either By Value or By Percent according to your selection.

Highlighting any of these items with the mouse will show the (upto) 15 prices records, along with a check box for each, and the number of times that price has been recorded.

Right-clicking an item will let you move to the actual prices and select those to delete. The 'Delete' button will not become active until you have selected at least one price to remove. However, you cannot remove ALL the prices for an item, at least one must be remain.

Left-Clicking on a High / Low price on the main screen will also let you quickly delete this price. THIS CANNOT BE UNDONE - only use with care. Again, at least one price must still be present, so you cannot delete the only price record for an item, even if it is obviously silly.

A button at the top of the screen 'Auto-Adjust' will open a secondary frame, with a slider and two buttons. The slider can be set from 20 to 100, and pressing the GO button will then search all price records, looking for where the highest price for an item is greater than (2nd highest price x the slider value), and will remove the highest price from the record. For example, if the highest price for an item is 150 gold and the second highest is 5 gold, having the slider set at 25 and pressing GO will result in 150 being greater than 5x25 (125), and so the record of 150 gold would be removed. I usually have this set to around 35 which is enough to weed-out most silly prices, without upsetting my price history records too much.

Entering an items name in the search text field and pressing the Search button, will bring that items details to the top of the screen so you can easily find it. For example, if on the Bargains screen you see something that needed adjusting, Left-Clicking will send the name to the Adjust page text field, so that pressing Get Prices and then the Search button will let you quickly edit this items price details.

Please do not just 'play' with this screen. Deleting prices is a permanent thing and cannot be un-done. Only use this screen to adjust items that are causing problems. If in any doubt, make a backup of the price history file so you can put things back if it all goes wrong. The price history file is usually at C:\World of Warcraft\WTF\Account\'your account name'\Saved Variables\Abigail.lua.

Using Abigail correctly, you should do one scan per day, with at least one per week with the Max Deviation slider set to zero. The Adjusting Screen can then be used to filter out any silly prices that come through. For example, if an item suddenly becomes rarer (maybe because a herb or mineral used to make it is a less frequent drop), its price may shoot up. With the Max Deviation slider always set at 30, you wouldn't necessarily notice this change, but doing scans with it set to zero every now and then will show these pricing changes.

A new button added in version 2.30 is the Price Historys button. Pressing this will search all price historys (for all realms and factions, not just the current one), and will look for any prices that are within 15% of each other. Any found, will be combined into one price. For instance, if an item has the two price records of 10000 (1 gold) seen 15 times, and 8700 (87 silver) seen 10 times, these will be combined into one price of 9350 (93 silver, 50 copper - the average of the two starting prices) and a times-seen value of 25.

Using this button will reduce the amount of memory that Abigail needs to store your price historys.



THE DELETING SCREEN

This helps reduce the amount of memory that Abigail will take up.

Warning! Making changes or deleting records on this screen cannot be undone. It is recommended that you backup the file C:\World of Warcraft\WTF\Account\'your account name'\Saved Variables\Abigail.lua before doing anything.

This screen allows you to delete pricing records for either :
	a) Those realms or factions you no longer play,
	b) Items that have not been seen at the AH for a long time, and have no buying or selling details recorded.

You may also reset the Spent, Earned and Profit/Loss values displayed at the top of the screen. Clicking the Reset button will change all these values back to zero. There is no warning pop-up message for this button, and it cannot be undone.

Entering this screen will show a breakdown of all the prices historys you have currently stored. This includes the realm, the faction, the last character to do a scan on that realm/faction, howmany days it has been since the last scan was performed and the total number of item records available for that realm/faction.

You can delete any (or even all) of these by pressing the Delete button at the side of each record. This will give a pop-up confirmation box, and pressing Accept will remove the selected records. Note, this cannot be undone.

If you delete the records for the current realm/faction that you are playing, you will have to take another snapshot of the AH before you can search for bargains, use the shopping list or sell items from your bags.

At the bottom of this screen is a slider and two buttons. Here you can look for items that have not been seen at the AH for over 30, 60, 90 or 120 days, and have no buying or selling details. You can remove these with one simple button press, but be warned, it will perform this deletion for all realms and factions, and again it cannot be undone.




THE NEW MAILBOX FUNCTIONS

On opening the mailbox, at the Inbox tab, a new frame will appear with 4 buttons, which can be used to take all items (or cash) without having to click on each individually.

The Take Purchased, Take Failed and Take Everything Else button have a text message showing the number of free slots that will be needed to take all the items. Note, if you have bought 2 or more similar items (ie a stack of 5 gold bars, and a stack of 10 gold bars), when taken these will often be restacked as 15 gold bars and only take up one slot in your bags, but the number of free slots needed will still be shown as 2. 

Take Cash - This will take all the cash from successful auctions. The available cash to take is shown alongside this button.

Take Purchased - This will take all the items you have purchased through the Auction House. Note, it is up to you to make sure there is enough room in your bags to do this. If the bags become full, no more items will be taken, but their purchasing details will be read and updated into the Abigail database files. This will cause their icons in the mailbox to become greyed-out, showing that it has been read.

Take Failed - This will recover all items that you failed to sell at the Auction House. Once again it is up to you to make sure there is enough room in your bags to take them.

Take Everything Else - All items and cash from any other source will be taken, providing there is enough room in your bags. None of these items will update records in the database, as they were not purchased or sold through the Auction House. 

Underneath these four buttons are a small description of each bag, with its name and the number of free slots and the number of total slots in that bag.



HOW DOES THE AUTHOR USE ABIGAIL?

I have one character per realm that lives in the Auction House and travels to the nearest mailbox when needed. All my other characters send their auctionable objects to this one.

Open the Auction House screen, select Main screen and press Take Snapshot and wait until it has finished.

Go to the Shop screen, search for any of my favourite profit-making items and buy them from the Deals screen.

Back to the Main screen and search for Bids under 30 mins and go to the Deals screen

Click the %age header until the objects are sorted by highest to lowest percent figure, and look at those auctions offering a high percent profit, placing a bid on those that look like making a nice profit.

Next sort by either the Profit column or the Buyout column to look for other bargains that are offering a high cash profit that may not be a large percentage profit. For instance, an auction at 250 gold with an average of 350 gold gives 100 gold profit, but this is only 40 percent profit which could be missed if you searched by 'percent profit' alone.

Again, Bid on those auctions I'm interested in.

Back to the Main screen again, but this select Buyouts instead of Bids. Search for Bargains and on the Deals screen buyout those with the potential to make profit.

Go to the mailbox - get any money from successful auctions and any of my auctions that didn't sell.
Also get any objects i've just bought-out or won.

Send money and goods to any of my other characters that need them.

Back to the Auction House and re-auction my new objects. Once you made a bit of cash (100+ gold) try to have between 50-100 auctions on the go at any one time. Most wont sell, but I sell enough to be making 200 gold per day from those that do. I'm only taking it easy, and rarely buy anything for more than 50 gold, with a resale of about 100-120 max. If you start working on items worth 200 gold or more, you'll easily be making 200-500 gold per day, or even more. 

Manage my shopping-list, including any new items that I've just sold.

Log out of this character until tomorrow, and start playing the game with my main.



HINTS

When putting an object up for auction, make your Bid Price just a little below the Buyout Price. For example, a bid of 9 gold and 50 silver, with a buyout of 10 gold, will usually entice the player to pay the buyout price because 50 silver is a small amount to guarantee winning the auction.

As long as you make a profit, thats the main point. Lots of little profits can still see your cash grow day by day. In other words, buy lots and lots of objects and sell them for a small profit each. Getting 5 x 20 gold profit each day is easier than waiting for 1 x 100 gold profit.

And don't be afraid to hold onto items - if the market is suddenly flooded with them at prices below what you want to sell at, just wait until those auctions are finished (2 days at most) and then try selling. And if your objects aren't selling after 3 or so auctions, try auctioning them at just over what you paid to make your money back and move on to something else more profitable.

I tested Abigail on a new level 1 character, and by level 10 I had enough money to start playing the Auction House and making some decent cash. Easiest professions are Herbalism and Mining. While levelling to 10, gather as many herbs and copper/tin ore as you can, and sell each stack at the auction house. Use the money you make to search for other auctions and bid or buyout these to start getting the money coming in. By level 10 I had 15 gold in cash, and over 20 auctions on the go with the potential to make another 50 gold profit. At this point, things start to take off and the serious money starts coming in.



USING WITH AUCTIONATOR

(Abigail is currently up to date to work with Auctionator 3.1.5)

Abigail was intended as a stand alone addon, designed to get away from the complicated use of existing addons. One of the first requests I received was to allow the Auctionator tabs to work at the same time. Having both addons (and you don't have to if you don't want to) will show all the tabs at the bottom of the standard Auction House frame.

Doing a full scan in Auctionator, will set the timer in Abigail, counting down from 15 mins, until you are allowed to do another full scan. Once Auctionator has finished doing its scan, pressing the Done button will make Abigail take a snapshot of this same data, so that Bargain Searches can be performed in Abigail as well.

It also works the other way, so that taking a snapshot in Abigail will start the 15 min cooldown timers in Auctionator. This is the only addon that Abigail will do this for, and if you are using another addon its up to you to take that little bit of extra care.

Please make sure you press the Done button after the Auctionator scan has finished, otherwise the Abigail 15 min timer will be activated, but the snapshot not taken, so you'll have to wait 15 mins before searching for any bargains.

Right-clicking an objects name on the Deals screen (to copy the name to the Name Field on the main AH Browse page), will also send a copy of the name to the search field on the Buy Page of Auctionator.

A problem I've noticed with Auctionator is if you do a Full Scan after a previous Full Scan (or Abigail Snapshot), even after waiting 15 mins so the Next Scan Allowed field says Now, it sometimes won't get past the Processing Stage and the Done button will not be activated. This happens even without Abigail loaded so there is possibly a bug in Auctionator that needs looking at. 

My recommendation if you want to use both addons is to do a first Full Scan using Auctionator (to update its database) as this will cause Abigail to take the same Snapshot, and then use Abigail for any further scans (Snapshots). To be honest, once a scan has been performed, there should be no reason to do another as you'll have all the data you want to do bargain / bid searches. I'm only mentioning it here in case you thought Abigail was causing the problem.

Note : This occurred in version 3.1.2 of Auctionator, and this problem may be corrected in any later version.

IMPORTANT - Abigail does not accept data from Auctionator if you use the new Auctionator Slow-Scan method. Abigail now has its own Slow-Scan option.



HOW ARE THE PRICES DETERMINED

-- Update - from 2.30, 2 spare fields to hold Most Recent High Price, and Most Recent Low Price

Since 2.20, the price record for an object is made up as follows:
Item Link, Highest Bought Price, Lowest Bought Price, Highest Sold Price, Lowest Sold Price, Most Recent Sold Info, Most Recent Bought Info, Selling Ratio, Times Seen Ratio, a TimeStamp, Most Recent High Price, Most Recent Low Price,1 spare field followed by upto 15 recent buyout values, all separated by a % sign. This keeps a record of all trading figures for this object.


Using 'Bolt of Netherweave' as an example : 

["Bolt of Netherweave"] = "|cffffffff|Hitem:21840:0:0:0:0:0:0:2018615680:5:0:0|h[Bolt of Netherweave]|h|r%8500%7000%25500%8500%9500:timestamp%7500:timestamp%1:2%4:10%TimeStamp%8500%7000%x%0000106610*60,0000058500*122,0000048800*233,0000041500*104,0000037500*144,0000032000*222,0000027626*160,0000024375*204,0000020000*365,0000017400*18,0000015050*67,0000013500*27,0000011600*11,0000009500*29,0000007000*14",

For instance, the current price records show: 

The Link for this item
The highest paid = 8500 (85 silver, 0 copper)
The lowest paid = 7000 (70 silver, 0 copper)
The highest sold = 22550(2 gold, 25 silver, 50 copper)
The lowest sold = 8500 (85 silver, 0 copper)
The most recent sold price = 9500 (95 silver, 0 copper) - the timestamp is the time when it was last sold, letting Abigail display the number of days since you sold this item
The most recent bought price = 7500 (75 silver, 0 copper) -  the timestamp is the time when it was last bought, letting Abigail display the number of days since you bought this item.
Selling ratio of 1:2 - meaning you have auctioned it 2 times, and successfully sold 1 time.
Times Seen ratio of 4:10 - meaning it has been seen 4 times in this scan, and 10 times in all scans. If the first value is 0, this means the item is not present in this scan of the auction house.
TimeStamp - this is the time this item was last found during an AH scan.
Most Recent High Price = 15000 (1 gold, 50 silver, 0 copper)
Most Recent Low Price = 12000 (1 gold, 20 silver, 0 copper)
1 spare field (x%) - this is for use in any future expansions of Abigail
The next 15 are the most recent buyout prices for this object, followed by the number of times that price has been seen. For instance, the first is 0000106610*60, which represents 10 gold, 66 silver, 10 copper with the final 60 showing that this object has been seen at the auction house with this buyout price per unit (or within 10% of it) 60 times.

Note that all prices are 'per unit'
		
Everytime Abigail takes a snapshot, it reads the whole Auction House taking the stack size and buyout value for each auction in turn.
It then divides the buyout by the stack size, which gives a price per unit. This price is then compared with all current prices for this object, and if it is within 10% of an existing price the 'number of times seen' value is increased by one.

If it is not within 10% of an existing record, a new record is added to the list for that object, upto a maximum of 15 records. Once the limit of 15 records has been reached, the new record would be compared to the middle (8th) record (ie 0000024375*204). If it is lower in value, the highest price (0000106610*60) would be replaced by the new record, and vice-verse if it is higher in value than the 8th record, the lowest record (0000007000*14) would be replaced with the new one. The price history would then be sorted into descending order and stored in the record for this object.

Eventually the number of times an object has been seen at a particular price will reach fairly large numbers. Once this passes 8000, the whole price index for that object is consolodated.

What happens is that every 'number of times seen' value for this item is halfed. Because this is happening to every value for this item, the overall average prices and other calculations will not be affected, just the 'number of times seen' will be reduced.

All prices are updated only when you visit the mailbox. You'll be either retrieving an object you have sucessfully bid on, getting the cash for an object you have sold, or picking up and object you failed to sell. Either way, all the money values needed to update Abigails price history are here, and doing it this way means you can use any addon to buy or auction an item, but as long as Abigail is loaded when you visit the mailbox, the prices will be updated correctly.

To calculate an objects 'average' auction price, all the prices in the price history are multiplied by their 'number of times seen' and these results added together. The total is then divided by the sum of all the 'number of times seen' . By ticking the 'Current Prices Only' this average would be calculated using only current auctions instead of historical auctions, which can often give a better idea of current market trends.

Have fun - and any suggestions (or bug reports) can be commented on at either wowinterface.com, curseforge.com, or www.abigail.webeden.co.uk, which are the websites I upload Abigail to. Abigail may appear at other addon websites, but these will be uploaded by other people and not me. Nothing wrong with that, and I'm happy for Abigail to be spread around, but the most recent versions and updates will appear at the three webs sites mentioned above first and i'll only be responding to comments and suggestions at these sites.

Note that all prices are stored on a realm-basis, so that the price history you build up on one realm will not be applied to another realm. If you have characters on different realms, each will use the price history for the realm it is on.







