Those that are "in the know" already know. Those that don't, you are about to find out. Acy, a dedicated EU WoW player has announced a new site that they have started. Now EU players have an opportunity to see what the US has had in The Undermine Journal.
Upon seeing the site, I contacted Acy to see if there was anything we can do to help this website become a success. After a bit of conversating, I was able to get some great questions for your reading enjoyment. If you are an EU player, I hope that you are as interested in this as I am, and you can help out by uploading your AH scans. Yeah, this means you! So enough of my preampt, here's the interview....
Who are you and what is your site all about?
I'm a WoW player who has been casually been playing since vanilla.
IRL I work in IT in the financial services sector so have an interest
in Trading in both real life and WoW.
wowTrader is a new EU based website that allows people to easily see
price trends and price gaps on World of Warcraft Auction Houses. The
data for the site is currently crowd sourced from Auctioneer data
files stored when doing a full scan of the AH. These files can be
uploaded by any registered user which then get analyzed for prices and
presented in the form of graphs and stats analysis. Once the WoW
armory API is released I will be looking to automate the data
collection direct from them.
I am sure that alot of EU players are willing to help, how do they go about doing it?
As the data is crowd sourced the best way for people to help is to get
registered and upload data files from their server, its a really
simple process and is documented on the upload page. In short, grab
and install auctioneer, do a full quick scan, log out, jump on
wowTrader and upload. The quality of the data on the site is only
currently limited to a resolution of 1 hour, just to keep the amount
of data being stored managable, so the more people that upload data
the better a resource it will be. As soon as a user uploads data for a
server it will become live and can be searched for items.
Please tell us more about the registration....
The primary reason for registering is so that users can build a home
page and set their personal preferences. Currently, registered users
can build a home page with all the items they trade in regularly which
a small graph for each item so you can see at a glance the trending
price for all the items.
A secondary reason is to track uploads, price manipulation is not
beyond the realms of possibility from Auc-ScanData files, tracking who
uploads what means I can keep an eye on any odd data.
What are your plans in the future with the site?
The site at the moment is a bare bones project that simply analyzes
and presents back stats and graphs. Future improvements include:
o Email alerts, triggered on specific price conditions for an item,
once the site sees the item you are tracking selling for more or less
than you specified you can be alerted by email. It is important for me
personally that people realize I hate spam, all emails will be opt in
and must be setup by the user. I will never, ever, use their email for
evil!
Better crafting integration. I plan to be able to let users select
the professions they have and the site tell them which items are most
profitable (and in demand) on their server at the current time. Dynamic graphs, they are currently static and rendered using HTML5,
I would like to improve these so they can be zoomed and scrolled but
currently the resolution of the data doesn't really warrant that. Code clean up and bug removal, there are definitely a few gremlins
in the works are the moment but most of these just produce crazy error
messages and don't manifest as inaccurate prices.
I hope that gives you an insight on what is happening with this great new addition to help you with your Auction House sales. I look forward to digging into this new site to see all that it has to offer, and keep a lookout for updates and "how to's" coming soon!
