The thing i’m most excited about that i built today is sharing data in-game. This is gonna be crazy. I haven’t tested it yet, but it might go online tonight. If this works we willl essentially have a database of auction house most-recent pricing data that is distributed across all consenting players that explicitly enable one another ( i might make this safety boundary softer, later, depending on feedback from you guys). I just love how decentralised its going to be. The plan is that our addons will all be talking to each other and sharing AH prices in a way that is invisible to default chat channels. ( I checked that its not gonna spam chat as that would make it unusable). Also, this will mean we can see auctions without being at the auction house, by receiving it from others.I thought that sharing capacity would depend on physical proximity in the game but I was wrong. It’s not so much of a space-time thingie xD

I’ve also reduced the maximum disk capacity for data to 100 MB per user. A lot of auction data can fit in there. This is your saved data on disk, not the in-game buffer of a good chunk of the latest data. When your 100MB disk limit gets full, it will by default delete the oldest records first and keep updating itself with the newest ones.

In terms of retaining history, that is going to need a more centralised approach. We are going to have to save historical data for future analysis and have a combined public database –the data will be free for everyone. I will also be enabling free API access to this dataset in the future. (but that might need genuine cloud storage which means real cost for me). For now, the centralised database is stored on my laptop. I at least will be adding to it for now.

I have also developed a cloud streaming service that is again entirely opt-in. This will require an additional .exe install on your machine, but it will mean that you can push your saved disk data into a temporary cloud inbox, which I will then download and store on my laptop. This is a temporary solution, and if this project kicks off, I will likely have to look into proper, permanent cloud storage options. Even without contributing your data in this way, you still get 100MB on disk that is continually updated (always freshest data), with the good chunk of in-game AH rows that are more than sufficient for live personalised profit-route-finding for your profession matrix.

It was about 3pm on Sat 10th Oct when another crazy idea struck me. I was waiting for the Northern line tube on my way back home from Hampstead. I’ve been playing the World of Warcraft Forever beta lately, and that morning I’d been trying out addons like Forever Ledger and their auction house scanning technology to see if i could make some gold– the new crafting recipes are sooo juicy, but with very expensive mats. I’ll skip the tech for now, but lets say I realised a new way to crawl the auction house for market data.

So when I got home I got GPT 6 Astra to make it for me. It took it like i dunno half an hour? And it worked maybe first time?

Whatever might have occurred during those hours, i know what happened next because there is data in my database.I turned my AH sampler online at about 5pm on the 10th. I had about 5 gold in my bag. At the time of writing 11:30pm on the 12th I have 1) bought myself the mats for Shadow Leggings plus the Spinning Wheel, costing 15.0 gold 2) bought myself the mats for Enchant: Revelation on my staff costing 11.5 gold, and 3) I hold a current total worth of 50 gold, so thats 76.5 gold total made from my original 5 gold in like, a couple of days of experiments that were suggested by the addon. Small beginnings.

I’ve probably way overbuilt on features–i hit the limit on my weekly GPT tokens in the first day of the week, ooops. The addon itself does a lot, it’s basically a market intelligence platform inside WoW. I’d love for you to try it, and I want to try sharing data between users at some point (watch this space) – that would enable the market histories to be very well sampled and very powerful for a traditional machine learning approach to forecast the auction house markets. We would also get data on more items!

I have it set up so that it reads your professions, all the recipes you know, all the inputs and outputs of those recipes, and samples the markets of those items. You get data on items for which you can potentially make profit. I’m not gonna lie, disenchanting has been absolutely huge for my aforementioned profits over the last couple of days. But this addon helped me find those routes: which is the optimal green item(s) to disenchant on the AH right now. Buy loads, DE, profit, repeat. Tailoring supplied secondary profits, especially from making Woolen Reagant Bags at like 2g a piece. I want to know how other professions do. I guess I could try it out on my lowbie mage with lowbie alch…. but i want You to try it :)

Really, it’s just getting started. I’m not sure how much time I will have for this going forwards, but i kinda hope i get to at least spend some time with github bug reports :P.

above is some of the data i've collected so far. with multiple users this dataset is going to be extremely powerful (btw i have worked professionally as a data scientist on machine learning problems, so i kinda know how to build tech that can maybe profit us) p.p.s. what is this gonna do to the forever economy if it catches on??) p.p.p.s. i originally had codex write this site too, but my brother told me that sucked. that was good advice. maybe i'll do more than one post here!