How did you determine what was under-priced?
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.
Getting 70% of the way to a goal has 0 value. You can often sell your patience to other people in that game.
Well, apart from the fun of playing the game?
I.e. it became indistinguishable from normal adult life.
(But with the distinction that you can withdraw and spend that money.)
Would you buy you a Lexus or help someone else buy their second yacht?
This is what breaks most games for me. Once I see the gameplay loop, I know I'm just playing spreadsheet optimizer behind the scenes.
Gamification has gone too far, circled back onto games themselves and made them into chores. Everything is gacha or tamagotchi or both now.
I have a few genres I will play now because you can avoid that loop. Big fan of idle / incremental games like universal paperclips, kittens game, etc. I find bringing the numbers to the forefront and more obvious helps. Plus most those games can be played passively or semi-passively with only a few check-ins a day if at all to buy the next update, etc.
Otherwise I do still enjoy the short-duration multiplayer match modes that now exist with battle royals or other battle pass games like Fortnite, Apex, Warzone, etc. I don't give two shits about the cosmetics or any battlepass, barely even open those screens, I ignore daily challenges or other lures too. I like that most rounds can be played in 5-15 minutes depending on your skill, low commitment, no tutorial or nonsense quests to complete. Get some good moments with other people either via in-game actions or voice comms.
I recently got into the online casino's in my state. Its pretty crazy how similar they are to mobile games or even console games. Login daily, daily rewards, gotta check 15 places for all the bonuses and free stuff, half the "fun" and "addition" is just doing the daily or hourly ritual of getting all these "gifts" or rewards. The gacha or tamagotchi comaparison is spot on.
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.
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.
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.
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.