The WoW Index

After a few weeks of collecting data in the Market Watcher addon, I finally have some decent charts for the WoW Index. The great thing about taking a look at this kind of data is to see when it's best to buy, sell and farm. Looking at Saronite ore, we can see that weekends are definitely the best time to either farm if you can, or buy and prospect for gems. Another thing the graphs show is that since the patch and Arena season 6, the demand for Infinite dust and Dragonfin has gone up at a steady and moderate rate.

If you're having trouble figuring out what day is best to sell or buy or what to focus on during the weekend, install Market Watcher and scan every day until you get a good 2 weeks worth of data. Being able to visualize what's happening with a market can be a great way to figure out what to do.

The WoW Index

I've been working on a project for this site which is to display an index of the top auction house consumables. It hasn't been going as planned. I originally wanted to mimic what the Dow Jones Industrial Average does, but coming up with a way to determine each items sale price is a bit troublesome.

The problem starts with the fact that the auction house isn't really like the stock market. If you want to buy a share of Walmart stock, you look up the price online and that's what you pay. There isn't 50 different prices for Walmart stock. But that's how the auction house works. This means that the auction house in WoW is more like a commodities exchange like the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, which sells stuff like corn, lumber and gold. Even that comparison is a bit of a stretch.

So, the WoW Jones Industrial Average will be more of a collection of graphs that I compile using the addon Market Watcher. I'll have my first graphs up soon showing how the price of things like saronite, buff food and flasks have gone up and down over the past weeks.

In non-economy news, I've started doing Arena matches for season 6. Starting from 0 points is kinda cool. A loss doesn't mean much other than a way to learn from our mistakes and a win is about 45 points or so. For 2v2, I've been playing with Krys, the hunter I've PvP'ed with for a while now. For 3's, it's me, Krys and my wife's death knight. The DK has some pretty low grade crafted gear right now, but we're still managing to win some. Things seem more "bursty" now compared to last season, even though Krys and I have more resilience. Maybe it has something to do with how Holy was changed around from last season. I'm definitely having issues keeping up with damage, even in 2's, compared to last season. Warriors are absolutely sick now. I have to keep far enough away from them so that if I need to bubble, the warrior won't just immediately smash the bubble and kill me. I guess I'll have to spend more time on Arena Junkies trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong.

The WoW Jones Industrial Average

The New York Stock Exchange has a stock index used to gauge performance of the market called the Dow Jones Industrial Average. I've been thinking that Warcraft needs something similar, so I'm going to try to create an index of the Alliance auction house on Bleeding Hollow. It will be called the The WoW Jones Industrial Average or "The WoW" for short. The Dow is an index of 30 companies on the NYSE and was originally a simple average of their stock prices. The formula is a bit more complex now but for my needs I think a simple average will do.

So, over the next few weeks I'll be gathering data and showing how I calculate my WoW index. I'll also be compiling a list of high traffic items on the auction house to use as the "stocks" in my calculations. I'll probably use Saronite Ore, heavy borean leather, a few popular flasks used by regular raiders, popular cut gems, buff food and Infinite dust.

Is there anything else that you think should be included in The WoW?