A tiny DLL for World of Warcraft 1.12.1 that makes auction-house searches fast. Vanilla forces a fixed 5-second wait between AH searches; this lets the next one fire the moment the server answers — so paging through the auction house runs at round-trip speed (a fraction of a second on a healthy connection).
It does exactly one thing: it never blocks a query longer than the server takes to answer the previous one. It works with the default auction UI and with any scanning addon; no companion addon is required.
Download the prebuilt AuctionQueryThrottle.dll from the
latest release
(or build it yourself). It's loaded with
VanillaFixes:
- Install VanillaFixes if it isn't already.
- Copy
AuctionQueryThrottle.dllinto your game directory (next toWoW.exe). - Add
AuctionQueryThrottle.dlltodlls.txt. - Launch the game with
VanillaFixes.exe.
The 1.12 client rate-limits the browse query through a single timer word: on each search it refuses to send another for 5000 ms. That floor is what makes stock AH browsing feel sluggish — it waits the full 5 s even though the server has usually replied in a fraction of that.
This DLL hooks the SMSG_AUCTION_LIST_RESULT network handler and clears that
floor the instant a result packet arrives (before the client dispatches
AUCTION_ITEM_LIST_UPDATE). The engine's own re-arm on send stays in place as
the in-flight lock and dropped-packet fallback, so:
- each query re-arms the floor (no second query can leave while one is pending);
- each response clears it (the next query is allowed exactly then).
There is no fixed interval and nothing to tune — pacing falls out of the round trip. This matches a mangos server, which accepts one list query per session at a time and clears its in-flight lock at the same instant it sends the result, so a query sent right after a response is always accepted.
The reverse-engineered offsets and the full rationale (including why the packet
handler is hooked rather than the item-cache resolution callback) are documented
in the comments of src/Offsets.h and
src/DllMain.cpp.
Requires CMake (3.10+) and an MSVC toolchain that can target 32-bit Windows.
WoW.exe is x86, so the DLL must be built as Win32; an x64 build will not
load.
git submodule update --init --recursive # fetches MinHook
cmake -B build -A Win32
cmake --build build --config ReleaseThe output is build/Release/AuctionQueryThrottle.dll.
GPL v3 or later (a derivative of ClassicAPI). See LICENSE for the full notice.