Tuesday, October 25. 2005When you look at it this way, it's slightly more interesting
World of Warcraft Auction Analysis: The first in a multi-part series on the online economy of World of Warcraft.
I found myself growing bored with World of Warcraft, so I turned to an old habit of mine for making things more interesting: analyze them to DEATH. My first report is *very* brief. I recently started keeping track of how much items sell for at auction. However, as I do further analysis, I will also be growing this dataset to show the relative value of compenents. I will also tie in vendor prices, at some point, including a record of where (and how) those prices vary (e.g., Grey Dye is almost 50 copper cheaper in Thunder Bluff than any other part of the world I've visited to date, while The Crossroads vendors pay more for Mottled Worg Hearts than do the vendors around Tarren Mill...and I think these locations may change, from time to time). For those of you who might want a deeper understanding of these places, I'll also include as a future part of this report, a tie-in to an expanded version of the site Sideshow posted yesterday that was a "tour guide" to the World of Warcraft. Other plans for the future include: The impact of inital list price and buyout price on final sell price, as well as time to sale A link to thottbot (or similar system) to details of items [I'm leaning against thottbot right now, because there seems to be a lot of garbage data there, but I haven't found anything better...] Analysis of area recovery rates for items vs. average sale price [This should be fun for picking the best areas to farm for a given item, or simply for maximum ROI] Analysis and discussion of the benefits of various classes and professions Some of these data items will take longer to collect, as Blizzard does not make it easy to track some of the information. (For example, when a given item sells at auction, I have little-to-no way of knowing which of my various instances of that item sold, so it will require painstaking one-auction-at-a-time work to identify some trends.) My question to those of you who play World of Warcraft is this: If I wrote an interface plugin that facilitated in the collection of some of this data, would you be willing to install it? What hesitations/questions/concerns would you have? Trackbacks
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Ancient Of Days on :
Clearly the most obvious data point currently available is that Copper Bars are the most valuable expenditure of collecting time.
As an aside, I currently have something like 50 items up for auction under Ogthar, so this data set could potentially grow rather quickly. Wren on :
I got as far as 'analyze to DEATH' and then nothing else made much sense. Hail to the computer geniuses, for they shall inherit the Earth!
Anonymous on :
No they won't, I believe it was gabe that proved that.
To rule "The World" they would have to go outside. "Your star burns, I require frozen treats." is the line I believe. No they will content themselves by ruling humanity with a +25 Iron Fist of Control. FYI We will be required to call it that, at all times. Ancient Of Days on :
Actually, it turns out that we already DID inherit the Earth, about 10 years ago. Unfortunately for you lot, we found we really didn't care for it very much, so we returned it to you slightly more used than we found it, and proceeded to build for ourselves one that was more to our liking.
And here you all are, paying us for the right to join... Ancient Of Days on :
Wren:
Basically, I'm looking to create a "formula for success" within World of Warcraft. Given my current (albeit limited) understanding of the game, gold is important. Therefore, I focused first on how to make lots of gold quickly. I found I can easily make at least 1 gold per hour with a dual-gather alt. in the right part of the world, as long as I focus on the items that bring the most value over time spent collecting them. Sideshow on :
One thing that also needs to be considered when evaluating vendor prices is your standing with the faction the Vendor is a part of, as the price lowers the better you are with them, and raises the lower your reputation with their faction is.
Sideshow on :
It was Giggles who posted the travel site. Just FYI
Sideshow on :
I'd be willing to run you add on so long as it didn't crash my WoW and therefore take away valuable playing time. If that were the case I just might have to make you pay for the missed time with varying degrees of torture.
Sideshow on :
Oh and you also might want to look at www.auctioneeraddon.com.
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