World of Warcraft Auction Statistics

If you're unfamiliar with World of Warcraft, it is a massively multiplayer online game that included an auction house where players could sell goods to each other. The game is designed in a way that a character can learn a trade and create goods that can be sold to other players.

Sometime in 2013, while I was still playing World of Warcraft, I built an application that would capture, and record auction data from the newly available API. This first phase of the program enabled me to track price history over a long period of time. This history allowed me to extract average sell price, sell volume/availability, etc. for items in the game. This data was used by me to determine when, and for how much to list my own items.

From this data, I then created a series of algorithms and reports that helped me identify items listed at unusually low prices so that I could sell them, as well as times of unusually high buying pressure/high prices so that I could sell them.

The next phase of the project involved importing recipe data for different craftable items. This recipe data was used to calculate the cost/profit of buying crafting materials from the auction house, and selling the produced good. When new auction data was added, a report was generated that identified the most profitable items to produce and sell.

Before Blizzard changed their API, and made it more difficult to manage the auctions, I made quite a fortune, which proved nothing more than that the data was valuable, and the tool quite effective. However, after a time, I grew tired of the game, and stopped playing, and eventually the application was decommissioned.

I have no screen captures of the application.