More fun with statistics
I play WoW. Not that unusual. Recently I downloaded this mod for WoW called Auctioneer. You see, within the game there is an auction house. People can post auctions and buy stuff and so on. It's an auction house. They're all linked together in the major cities so there's one enormous auction house that covers the globe, within the game world.
Well, Auctioneer is a mod that plugs into the game and scans through the entire Auctionhouse. It harvests tons of data from the auction house and adds all the information that it finds into the tooltip information for each item. This means that it does things like keep track of how much certain items tend to buyout for and what they tend to be bid on for. (Buyout is a seperate price you can set where you can pay that much (usually higher than the bid amount) to buy the item immediatly rather than waiting for the auction to run out.) So, all of this great financial information gets pulled out of the auction house and stuck into a program that lets me track all of it based on the items that I have and what I'm looking to sell and so on.
Well, obviously all of this needs to have a purpose. I mean, if I just wanted to collect items and sell them off and what not Auctioneer would be pretty cool by itself. It would give me all the information that I needed to sell my items for the best profit.
However, Auctioneer opens up whole new possibilities. Using it you can actually play. the. market. How cool is that? You can play the market in a COMPUTER game. That boggles my mind. I love it. Before I had already occassionally bought something off the market that was listed at obviously lower-than-market prices and then immediately resell that item for a profit. Now with Auctioneer I can do an even BETTER job of that. Auctioneer will let me know when items are currently selling for less than the market-value so that I can buy them up and then relist them. Or, if there's a glut in the market (and I have the money) I can buy up all the stuff I can and then later sell it off in small lots for a profit.
Well, Auctioneer is a mod that plugs into the game and scans through the entire Auctionhouse. It harvests tons of data from the auction house and adds all the information that it finds into the tooltip information for each item. This means that it does things like keep track of how much certain items tend to buyout for and what they tend to be bid on for. (Buyout is a seperate price you can set where you can pay that much (usually higher than the bid amount) to buy the item immediatly rather than waiting for the auction to run out.) So, all of this great financial information gets pulled out of the auction house and stuck into a program that lets me track all of it based on the items that I have and what I'm looking to sell and so on.
Well, obviously all of this needs to have a purpose. I mean, if I just wanted to collect items and sell them off and what not Auctioneer would be pretty cool by itself. It would give me all the information that I needed to sell my items for the best profit.
However, Auctioneer opens up whole new possibilities. Using it you can actually play. the. market. How cool is that? You can play the market in a COMPUTER game. That boggles my mind. I love it. Before I had already occassionally bought something off the market that was listed at obviously lower-than-market prices and then immediately resell that item for a profit. Now with Auctioneer I can do an even BETTER job of that. Auctioneer will let me know when items are currently selling for less than the market-value so that I can buy them up and then relist them. Or, if there's a glut in the market (and I have the money) I can buy up all the stuff I can and then later sell it off in small lots for a profit.