Stock History

I think it would be nice to see a history of the Stock value to gauge item availability. The Rate tag gets skewed by this particularly when Stock==0; an item isn't selling slowly because no one wants it - it's selling too quickly for the supply to meet the demand. And if you could compare the difference between when the Stock drops versus actual sales to track when stale auctions expire, that'd be cool too.

If this is too database intensive, perhaps the records only be kept for items that members have in their Item Watch lists instead of the full AH list.

As an example, I'd been watching the Earth Staff for about a week. Checking while I'm at work during the day there were about 3-4 in stock. By the time I'd get home to buy them they'd be sold out. This happened every day, until the weekend when to Stock-surge hit and I finally got one. The Rate was only tagged as Average, though the demand was higher than what could be gauged by a simple Number_of_sales/time calculation.

I have no idea how they do it, or the intervals at which they do it, but it seems the stock information is updated more frequently than the sale histories. I know I bought out items on the AH, and within a couple of minutes the stock on the site was down to 0, though it took I want to say about a half hour for the item to show up on my sale history.

My point is that I think the item stock number is pretty accurate. It may be cool to see this, but I am not entirely sure how much new value this would add.

I think what Trahern is saying is that it would be nice to get a history of Stock, where as you (Yaji) are talking about how up-to-date the current Stock displayed is. I agree with Trahern that there is a mental distinction between "sells once a week even though it's always available but nobody wants it" and "sells once a week but within an hour of being listed because it's just that rare".

oh and Yaji I think the reason Stock updates faster than history is because it's easier to update the Stock. For example if you get the AH listing for Materials->Clothcraft you'll see all the Stock values for Silk Thread, Silk Thread [12], Gold Thread, etc. etc. with just 1 listing, whereas you need to drill down into each of those listings (a few dozen) just get the sales history for each one.

I ramble.

Your mom rambles.

But I digress. I believe this was brought up in the old forums - I can't recall the response, but I want to say that it was considered a good idea and would be put on "the list" of things to do... I have been looking forward to this for a while now; I hope it wasn't forgotten! (hint hint)

I think it's a good idea and would like to implement it.

The only thing I'm concerned about is making it play nicely with the database. As in, how far back do we record, in what schema, etc. All those records could grow fairly large after awhile.

id say 2 weeks should be good enough.