What's In Your Auction House?

I've been using the fabulous tools from the Auctioneer team for a while now, and doing quite well with them. While I have always had visibility into where the bargains are, the competition and history of those items, these are always small slices of what's really going on in the Auction House (AH). I wanted to know what else was going on, particularly because I'm a data wonk and like stats. But I also thought it would give me a better understanding the markets that rise and fall for the realms I play.

And I knew that all that data was virtually at my fingertips. It just needed a little coaxing to come out of the shadows.

You see, when you are using Auctioneer Classic or Auctioneer Advance it stores a snapshot of the market every time it scans. The historical prices are kept in more summary form, but AC/AA has the details of your last scan. All I needed to do to get to it was dig through several thousand lines of LUA code, traverse scores of objects, open many files and rely on virtually zero documentation.

Compared to forming a PUG that won't wipe halfway through an instance, I was thinking this had to be a piece-o-cake. It was just a matter of finding the time...

Found it! Actually I found it a while ago but the danger with having this data is that it's a lot of fun to see what you can find in it. I mean who doesn't like slicing and dicing 20,000+ records? Right? You're with me...I can feel it.

Anyway, without going too much further into the details (i.e. rambling) here are a few interesting tidbits from Exodar as of the snapshot of the market from this morning....

Top 20 Sellers (and the rest of us schleps)



This first snapshot is a list of the top 20 sellers in the AH in terms the buyout value of their posted auctions. A couple of things that stood out for me:

• The top 20 accounts for nearly 22% of the buyout value of all the items in the AH (btw...this is in gold) while the other 1,500 of us make up the remaining 78%.
• It's the quality of the auctions not the quantity. These guys and gals only represent 5.75% of the auction volume. Oh, and the quanity is the number of auctions...not number of items (like two auctions that involve stacks of 20 items are counted as 2 here...not 40).
• If you wanted to buy out the Exodar, Alliance AH you'd have to have over 120K gold. That's a lot of copper tubing.

And The Most Valuable Category Is....



Trade Goods. Followed closely by Armor, Weapons, etc. You get the drift. Stuff most of us already know, but for those that don't it becomes quite clear which categories to not waste your time in: Container, Projectile and Quiver.

Weapons & Armor - Where Are The Opportunities?



Some of the bargains with the biggest potential profits come from Weapons and Armor. It can also be the riskiest (I've lost 30 gold on weapon and armor before because I misread or mistimed the market). One of the keys to the value of weapons and armor is in its rarity of the items (how often it shows up in the AH). This is somewhat true in other auctions, but moreso here.

From a quick glance it looks like that those players who are level 40-59 don't have as much to choose from in the W&A market (at least in Exodar), but it's still very profitable. Level 70 makes complete sense as the lowest number and the higest prices. Nothing too surprising here. What would have been more interesting is to see how you can make more money in W&A where the user level ends in "9." More on that in another post.

This is a very, very small sample of the types of reports I can pull. I plan on making more available and for more realms but that will take some time. Will keep you posted. Let me know if you have any suggestions or requests.