6 ms·

How did you determine what was under-priced?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
andenacitelli 3y ago
Spent some time with this kind of system in WoW, TradeSkillMaster. Figuring out an accurate valuation was difficult and one of the biggest differentiators of how successful you were. This would vary by item, but was most commonly some combination of recent minimum buyouts (usually over the last two weeks) historically value (several months), and much more. Common items would usually be mostly recent value driven, whereas lower-supply items might have a larger component of historical weighed in, as there might be quite a bit of fluctuation day to day and you care much more just about the general trend. All sorts of nuance to it. You can do more complex stuff like only doing your price estimations off items that actually sold, set values based on a percentage of any other value, and much, much more. It gets really complex but is really cool at scale.
- hinkley 3y ago
  Ingredients were always pretty stable. I think a lot of sales came down to people trading time for money. I just hit a critical level and I want some cheap blues to power level faster and got shitty drops. Or Buddy wants to play and he’s laughing at my gear, oh there’s a reasonable purple. I found a lot less stress looking for cheap blues and greens to disenchant for ingredients. That could suck up an hour a day easy. Which is why people just dumped them. Not worth their time.
  - Grimblewald 3y ago
    Ingrediants can be stable but are still subject to manipulation. I made a killing by having a lot on hand, pushing bids down during busier periods, which would work synergistically with the lil goblins on during this time who list everything they sell at an undercut. This can cause the ass to fall out of pricing. You then buy up the cheap mats as fast as you can, but also alchemists will start making potions for cheap looking to undercut other potion makers with their zero time investment potion making for cheap. You buy those as well when they get cheap. Then you delist the series of sales you made that pushed prices down and buy the undercuts that helped get you there. Suddenly theres a big rift between current price and the bulk of items and most sellers stop undercutting and cheap supply runs out. relist regular small batches at 1s under market and make bank.
    - DeathArrow 3y ago
      Just like in real world. But you have to own at least half of the market to pull that. Or some else can short you.
      - Grimblewald 3y ago
        Much like real world, but unlike real world - Ok in a game. It's totally cool to murder in a game, but morally and ethically deplorable to do IRL.
      - hinkley 3y ago
        WoW was fully sharded at the time, so you had to control a fraction of a fraction in order to use these strategies. And you generally became expert in one or two and ignored the rest except for slow days. Probably more like a third, or the plurality instead of a simple majority. The price most players saw was slightly above what the market would bear. During peak times everything else would disappear.
- DeathArrow 3y ago
  You can learn more about economy from these threads than following a course at Stanford.
- leoff 3y ago
  I've also spent some time playing with TSM. I would login to WoW multiple times a day only to play on the AH. I don't quite recall where from, but I had some price data, where I filtered the top X products that made the most volume (price * amount sold). I then simply did something like "if the price is lower than Y% of the average, buy it. Don't sell the product for less than you bought it for." Surprisingly this simple formula works very well and I made more gold than I've ever had. It was more than enough to pay for the monthly subscription and I even bought Overwatch using the I credits I got from it.
Vvector 3y ago
After playing the AH manually for a long time, I'd know that a stack of ore would sell for 20g. I was manually buying when under 20g and relisting. My script just reduced the tedium. I'd manually add in checks for each high-volume item. It was super-hacky, but so effective, I didn't need to improve it. One script would iterate over every item in my inventory. If it matched a hard-coded list, it would auto-list it at the hard-coded price. Another script would scan every item on the AH, and if matched another hard coded list, it would buy them. Another story, pre-script. WOW had the inscription update incoming, which used flowers to make glyphs. I correctly assumed the demand for Peacebloom (tier 1 ingredient) would skyrocket once the patch hit. I spent three weeks buying everything on the AH, using multiple characters to store it all. The night before the update, I listed it all for 20x the normal price. The next morning, everything sold out completely. I remember it being 200 stacks @ 5g each, sold for 100g each.
- hinkley 3y ago
  I recall when Pandaria hit there was some resource where you could get only like one a day but they could be sold. The power gamers and the server first people were buying all they could to craft gear to ratchet up the Raid ladder ASAP. I convinced a couple of my friends to sell all theirs at the prevailing price, which was just stupid high, and on about the day we would have been able to craft our first item, the price had crashed so much we bought them back at a lower price. If you waited a few more days, you could buy enough for two items. Getting 70% of the way to a goal has 0 value. You can often sell your patience to other people in that game.
  - eru 3y ago
    > Getting 70% of the way to a goal has 0 value. Well, apart from the fun of playing the game?
    - pests 3y ago
      No, games are only fun if you get all the achivements and 100% the game and buy every item ever relased in the shop and complete all battle pass levels because FOMO because gaming is not about having fun anymore, its about reaching artificially set goals and collecting cosmetics.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Spent some time with this kind of system in WoW, TradeSkillMaster. Figuring out an accurate valuation was difficult and one of the biggest differentiators of how successful you were. This would vary by item, but was most commonly some combination of recent minimum buyouts (usually over the last two weeks) historically value (several months), and much more. Common items would usually be mostly recent value driven, whereas lower-supply items might have a larger component of historical weighed in, as there might be quite a bit of fluctuation day to day and you care much more just about the general trend. All sorts of nuance to it. You can do more complex stuff like only doing your price estimations off items that actually sold, set values based on a percentage of any other value, and much, much more. It gets really complex but is really cool at scale.

hinkley 3y ago
Ingredients were always pretty stable. I think a lot of sales came down to people trading time for money. I just hit a critical level and I want some cheap blues to power level faster and got shitty drops. Or Buddy wants to play and he’s laughing at my gear, oh there’s a reasonable purple. I found a lot less stress looking for cheap blues and greens to disenchant for ingredients. That could suck up an hour a day easy. Which is why people just dumped them. Not worth their time.
- Grimblewald 3y ago
  Ingrediants can be stable but are still subject to manipulation. I made a killing by having a lot on hand, pushing bids down during busier periods, which would work synergistically with the lil goblins on during this time who list everything they sell at an undercut. This can cause the ass to fall out of pricing. You then buy up the cheap mats as fast as you can, but also alchemists will start making potions for cheap looking to undercut other potion makers with their zero time investment potion making for cheap. You buy those as well when they get cheap. Then you delist the series of sales you made that pushed prices down and buy the undercuts that helped get you there. Suddenly theres a big rift between current price and the bulk of items and most sellers stop undercutting and cheap supply runs out. relist regular small batches at 1s under market and make bank.
  - DeathArrow 3y ago
    Just like in real world. But you have to own at least half of the market to pull that. Or some else can short you.
    - Grimblewald 3y ago
      Much like real world, but unlike real world - Ok in a game. It's totally cool to murder in a game, but morally and ethically deplorable to do IRL.
    - hinkley 3y ago
      WoW was fully sharded at the time, so you had to control a fraction of a fraction in order to use these strategies. And you generally became expert in one or two and ignored the rest except for slow days. Probably more like a third, or the plurality instead of a simple majority. The price most players saw was slightly above what the market would bear. During peak times everything else would disappear.
DeathArrow 3y ago
You can learn more about economy from these threads than following a course at Stanford.
leoff 3y ago
I've also spent some time playing with TSM. I would login to WoW multiple times a day only to play on the AH. I don't quite recall where from, but I had some price data, where I filtered the top X products that made the most volume (price * amount sold). I then simply did something like "if the price is lower than Y% of the average, buy it. Don't sell the product for less than you bought it for." Surprisingly this simple formula works very well and I made more gold than I've ever had. It was more than enough to pay for the monthly subscription and I even bought Overwatch using the I credits I got from it.

Vvector 3y ago

After playing the AH manually for a long time, I'd know that a stack of ore would sell for 20g. I was manually buying when under 20g and relisting. My script just reduced the tedium. I'd manually add in checks for each high-volume item. It was super-hacky, but so effective, I didn't need to improve it. One script would iterate over every item in my inventory. If it matched a hard-coded list, it would auto-list it at the hard-coded price. Another script would scan every item on the AH, and if matched another hard coded list, it would buy them. Another story, pre-script. WOW had the inscription update incoming, which used flowers to make glyphs. I correctly assumed the demand for Peacebloom (tier 1 ingredient) would skyrocket once the patch hit. I spent three weeks buying everything on the AH, using multiple characters to store it all. The night before the update, I listed it all for 20x the normal price. The next morning, everything sold out completely. I remember it being 200 stacks @ 5g each, sold for 100g each.

hinkley 3y ago
I recall when Pandaria hit there was some resource where you could get only like one a day but they could be sold. The power gamers and the server first people were buying all they could to craft gear to ratchet up the Raid ladder ASAP. I convinced a couple of my friends to sell all theirs at the prevailing price, which was just stupid high, and on about the day we would have been able to craft our first item, the price had crashed so much we bought them back at a lower price. If you waited a few more days, you could buy enough for two items. Getting 70% of the way to a goal has 0 value. You can often sell your patience to other people in that game.
- eru 3y ago
  > Getting 70% of the way to a goal has 0 value. Well, apart from the fun of playing the game?
  - pests 3y ago
    No, games are only fun if you get all the achivements and 100% the game and buy every item ever relased in the shop and complete all battle pass levels because FOMO because gaming is not about having fun anymore, its about reaching artificially set goals and collecting cosmetics.