Suggestion: Gold Guide

[fallenafar]

I just wanted to put this out there, as someone who loves to trade in things like EVE online and other pretty meaty games, I would love to see somewhere that would display a nice graph to show best times to buy items from the AH and then when to Sell them.

I am pretty sure there will be data out there that shows that on X day more potions are bought and on Y day the price drops as this is the low point in them being sold and their are more on the market.

I see the daily AVG sold is on the tool tips and the movement is in your Inventory any chance we could get a separate UI showing this data?

[voltec]

This never got a reply but as a person that enjoys the 'game within the game' that the auction house provides, an aggregated historical price at each hour or 30 min increment or even 'generally lowest 3-6am EST, highest at 7-9pm EST' would be cool. We get to know that raid items generally are higher on Fri and Sat evenings (raid nights) but with number crunching, it would probably show other trends.

Although it would be great to have this server specific, it's obvious that this isn't practical since each server is only loaded every few days (based on the historical data is xx hours old' line when we sign in). And actually, that brings up another question. Is loading server data every few days giving us a fairly accurate picture of what items truly sell for and the approx demand? I've seen several 'red herrings' - items that the guide shows are true bargains - something that sells for hundreds of gold and currently on sale for 1-2g each - only to look closer and see it's a common vendor item - obviously something that people were using to shift money. (selling a cheap item for 1000g is used to launder gold from one account to another. If you pay attention, you'll see them from time to time).

[ZG Support 1]

As for the original suggestion, I'm not sure if we'll get any kind of graphs into it like that. I know the team are re-working some things with the Gold guide but I'm not sure if they're adding anything big like this. I will say that they definitely have seen this thread and seen the suggestion.

Having the data updated every few days should be fine. The data is a rolling 30 day historical averaging of the items so a couple of days should not make a big difference in that averaging. Now for the demand, Blizzard doesn't tell us how many auctions were sold vs. expired/cancelled so we have to make our best guess on which got sold vs. which were re-listed so the demand will always be just an estimate. And since we don't know which auctions were actually sales we don't know actual sale prices so we have to use the listings as the item values. We of course look for auctions that are way under or way over the standard deviation and remove those from the historical data.