How auction house prices work in World of Warcraft: Forever

Six markets, not six hundred realms

Every earlier version of World of Warcraft had one auction house economy per realm and faction, which meant hundreds of small markets with wildly different prices. Forever is realmless. Everyone on a ruleset shares one world, so there is one auction house per ruleset and faction. In the US region that is six economies: Normal, PvP, and RP, each for Alliance and for Horde. AHledger calls each one a market and gives it its own page.

The consequence for prices is liquidity. A market with the whole population on it has more listings of everything, tighter gaps between the cheapest listing and the typical one, and faster reaction to news. A price on PvP Horde says nothing about Normal Alliance, though; the two never trade with each other except through the neutral auctioneers, which charge a larger cut. Compare them on any item page under Across markets.

What a listing is

A seller puts a quantity of an item on the house with a buyout price, an optional starting bid, and a duration. They pay a deposit up front that is tied to the item's vendor price and the duration, and they lose it if nothing sells. When a buyout goes through, the house keeps five percent of the price on a faction auction house and fifteen percent at the neutral ones; the seller gets the rest in the mail.

Two things follow. Nobody lists below the vendor price for long, because a vendor pays that with no cut and no deposit, so the vendor price is a hard floor. And every listing has a clock on it, so prices on a busy market are constantly being re-posted, undercut, and expired.

The two numbers that matter

A scan reads every listing on a market at one moment. From it, AHledger keeps two prices per item, both per unit.

• Minimum buyout is the cheapest listing right now. It is what you pay to buy one this second, and the price you have to beat to be first in the list.
• Median is the middle price across all units listed, weighted by quantity. Half the units on the house are at or below it. One person listing a stack at a silly price moves the minimum buyout a lot and the median almost not at all.

Read them together. A minimum buyout far under the median is a deal, or a mistake, and the addon's deal finder is built on exactly that gap. A minimum buyout close to the median is a settled market. The units listed figure says how deep the market is: a low median with three units listed is not a price you can buy a raid's worth at.

Why AHledger keeps medians over 7, 30, and 90 days

A single scan is a snapshot. Prices move by the hour, dip on reset day when raiders sell off, and spike when a zone or a patch drives demand. To know whether today is high or low you need a baseline, so every item on every market also carries a 7 day, 30 day, and 90 day median of its daily typical price, and a volatility figure that says how much it swings.

The 30 day median is the one most tools on the site measure against. Deals are listings a percent under it; alerts can fire when the median falls a percent under it; the vs 7d figure on a price card tells you whether this week is above or below last week.

Where the numbers come from

1. A player with the AHledger addon opens the auction house and scans it. The scan holds item ids, quantities, and prices, and nothing about anyone.
2. AHledger sync on their desktop uploads it under their upload key. The server checks the signature and drops partial or corrupt scans.
3. The scan becomes a row per item in the market's time series, then hourly and daily rollups, then the medians above.
4. Item and market pages read the rollups. Every price shows its provenance and age, and a stale badge when nobody has scanned that market for a while.

AHledger uses no third-party price data. Everything on the site comes from the game client's own tables, Blizzard's API, or scans that players run in game. If a market has no scans yet, its pages say so rather than showing a number from somewhere else.

Which is also why the more players scan, the better every page gets. Several scans of the same market inside an hour are merged, so a market that ten people scan is fresh all day. The setup checklist takes about ten minutes.