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Comment by andenacitelli | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You can learn more about economy from these threads than following a course at Stanford.

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