Tracking ye olde price of artifacts like [Wool Cloth]

June 18, 2009 9:05 PM

Where can I find data sets about in-game economies? Specifically, I'd love to know what the historical cost of virtual goods were by day.

There are lots of sites out there that track the current cost of goods (a web interface to WoW's auction house, for example), but the historical data just doesn't seem to be available. I'm doing some data mining research, and although I run a game myself, it isn't liquid enough to perform interesting experiments. Isn't there some place I can get WoW's linen cloth pricing for the past few years? Any and all games and virtual economies will do, as long as there are multiple days to parse. I'd love to know that on date D, the average price of ARTIFACT_X was N MONETARY_UNITS, for more than one D.

Thankee-sai!

posted by swrittenb to computers & internet (5 comments total)

FF XI AH is the best site for this I can think of without you being able to get your hands on anything direct from developers. It has quite a bit of historical data you can access for all of the Final Fantasy XI servers, which have the advantage over most games that they have a nearly constant economy flow, as game servers aren't divided up by country or region or language.

Hope this helps!
posted by strixus at 9:12 PM on June 18

You may find some of the Eve Central site useful.
posted by rodgerd at 9:34 PM on June 18

I don't have any specific examples, but look for eve online stuff. Possibly contact them as well? This is the kind of data they store, as far as I know, and certainly players are dumping out the info and storing it.
posted by cschneid at 9:34 PM on June 18

wowecon has what you are looking for.
posted by tacit_urn at 10:43 PM on June 18

Ultimately I would have liked to find some data that didn't need to be scraped from the site, but for now, it looks like getting this information is going to be a little trickier than originally thought. These sites are a good start though!
posted by swrittenb at 3:47 PM on July 6