A nifty tool that is and will be useful!

This is definitely one of the coolest things I've seen on this site. Hoping to see it grow!

Yeah, I agree. The AH tracker is sexy because I work night shift I can sit here and track a bunch of items for when I get home. Very nice.

Posted by DHAdmin at 08/01/2012 04:27 PM

Posted by Cycle10s at 08/01/2012 03:25 PM

Do you have someone manually check and log all the item prices each day? Hourly updates were very nice, but the daily updates are still better than anything else out there.

Yes that's my job! I had a few people help and we did hourly updates for a while but it was far too much work to keep up with, hence we will be doing daily values for both the North America and Europe auction house. Artishir will be handling the European price updates, as I said in my previous post we are very much against bots and hence we do not wish to automate the process.

Will this work...
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Method #1:

Lets say you have 5 people in your staff. Each one updates the market tracker at certain intervals. So Staff #1 will check the price at 12;00, Staff#2 checks at 1:00, etc. This method will make the staff members check at certain intervals, 5 hours in this case.

(Number of Staff Members) x (Time Interval ex. 1 Hour) = (Each Staff Member Time Interval)
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Method #2:

What if you made the data editable to the user?

Lets say everyone that uses the tracker enters the current price and the information is saved in a database. In order to check for Troll-ers and/or people that entered the price incorrectly, the data will be compared to other users input.

So lets Item #1 cost 100,000, User #1 enters the current price, which is 150,000. The price won't change until it is confirmed that it is the correct price. Multiple users will enter the price of the item and the database will compare every price to make sure most of the prices are correct.
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I could create programmers explaining this farther if you want to see it work. Each one of these methods have there Pros and Cons but I believe Method #1 is the best.

This is a very cool tool! I have been using this for the past couple weeks to check the prices of all my commodities and its really helped. I am hoping that in the future with more time that it will start to show patterns in the pricing of all commodities.

I think this might be the best one on the internet. Definitely bookmarking it.

Very cool, thanks for creating such a great place for us!

Any chance of adding the GAH prices to your tracking?

Yes thats correct however i see these moving much faster then your tracking seems to be accounting for mainly looking at commodities and do your prices take into account the 15% that you lose?

Ah yes i can understand that thanks for the info

I think adding the ability for users to add price data would be awesome. Admins can still delete bad data of course. You could just add a button where a user can enter a price for an item at that time. The more important items will then get more updates.

@Anuiran If your looking for someone to help out, I could possibly contribute.

Posted by DHAdmin at 07/21/2012 01:15 AM

Posted by ertitoagus at 07/19/2012 06:34 AM

any possibility of EU tracking too? :)

If there is enough interest we would do it, but currently we are happy with just tracking North America and making sure everything is working well.

Please, please, please do.
Thanks

Xsoft (and all EU AH/RMAH players) ^_^

I absolutely love the market tracker and all the work you've put into it. One thing you may have realized is that you're also I directly providing the "true" real money value of Gold. Using the price of high-level gems, one can calculate the current level of Gold / USD.
Tl;dr As of yesterday, the true market value of Gold is about 700,000 Gold / USD

It's pretty straightforward to calculate the market value of Gold. I’m counting Star and above as high-level Gems since they’re each worth over $0.25. For the calculation, take the average Gold price of the sixteen high-level Gems and divide that by the average RMAH price of those same Gems.

Why does this work? Combined, they have enough sales volume to provide a relatively consistent price and they're all cost-controlled commodities. What’s a cost-controlled commodity? The majority of the cost comes from the Gold the jeweler charges to create them. The cost of the raw materials are large enough in number to smooth out the fluctuations in those prices. Surprisingly, there appears to be no premium included in prices for purchasing the high-level Gem Plans. Most importantly, they have an absolute Gold price floor given Jeweler combining costs. The average Gold market price will never consistently auction off a Gem for less than 117.5% of the Gold price to create it.

For instance, the Gold cost of creating a Flawless Star Gem is 1,600,000 from Flawless Square Amethysts. This works out to 1,872,000 Gold as the Auction House price floor. As of yesterday, the average price of a Flawless Star Amethyst was 2,022,031 which is only 150,000 (8%) more than the price floor.

As a side note, this also makes high-level gems the best Gold inflation hedge upgrade in the game. If you buy a Flawless Star Gem right now, you’re all but guaranteed to be able to sell it off at only a 20% loss. You won’t be able to say the same thing about that 20,000,000 Gold ring you just bought when the 1.04 Legendaries slash 30% of the value of all elite items overnight. Of course, if Blizzard decides to drop the Gold price of jewel combining, again, Gems will lose their value instantaneously, but I don't see that happening.

Going back to the true market price, here's an example with the current price calculation:

Flawless Start Gold Auction House via RMT:
2,026,736 - Emerald
2,022,031 - Amethyst
2,038,738 - Ruby
2,070,283 -Topaz
Average Flawless Star price = 2,039,447 Gold

Real Money Action House

Average Flawless Star price = 2.755 USD

True value of Gold as of August 8 = 740,000 Gold / USD

In this case, the Flawless Star Gems are priced unusually high. If you take the average cost of all high-level Gems, it works out to about 700,000 Gold / USD right now. I don't track the gray market Gold sellers, but I would be willing to bet they're priced a bit under 700,000 Gold / USD

In terms of the game, Blizzard is losing out on a ton of Real Money Auction House fees by keep a 400,000 Gold / USD floor. They've also created a gray market for Gold which defeats one of the major advantages for their player base of having this auction house, in the first place. Blizzard would be well served to lower their floor to at least 1,000,000 Gold / USD as soon as possible. Besides helping heir player base, they'll see more dollars rolling in their front door. Win win.

Anyway thanks for this resource!

Awesome job. Thank you!