So you’re starting to learn the knack of searching, but are getting kind of aggravated at the sheer amount of items in the game? Do you really have to learn all of them to have a leg up? Of course not. Here’s what I do. By now I know by heart most all of the blue weapons and armor in the game, as well as nearly all of the sellable epics, at least for World of Warcraft. When I don’t know something, what do I do?

When you come across something you’re unsure of or that looks “out of place”, you should research it. For me, when this happens my heart races a little because I know there’s likely an opportunity here, especially if at first glance the item appears appropriately low priced. Usually my hunch is right. You will likely get in the habit of accomplishing this next part fairly quickly, so as to get back to the game, and buy the too-low priced item. So where do I go?

For *any* item I’m unsure if, I usually windows-key out of the game (macs have the program switching hot-keys), and go here first: wow.allakhazam.com. The site has most other mmo’s as well as the current big one, World of Warcraft. On the left is a search bar. Say you’re looking for the epic “Scepter of Sue-Min”. Type in part of the name, in this case, “scepter of sue” and hit enter. The next page will likely have your item there. Click on it once, and then under the item’s description, click on AH pricing details. On the right side you’ll see both an average price, and a median price.

So… do you use the median or average price? Sites like wow.allakhazam.com use both the average and median prices as part of their display. Almost always the average is higher. This is predictable because almost no one wants to sell a valuable item for less than it’s worth, but almost everybody wants to sell it for more than it’s worth. Common sense, right? You also get the ceiling smashers who will put the item at insane prices just to see if anyone is insane enough to bite. Therefore, the avg. is usually not the best indicator of an item’s worth. It’s the median.

For the non-statistic’s buffs out there, the median is the exact price in which there are the same number of prices above that price as there are below it. Why is the median a better indicator? Because in a competitive environment, the median price tends to be more regular and predictable. It’s kind of a filter that offsets the extremes at either end of the sale… those same extremes that can significantly influence the average.

Ok, so we use the median, and go just slightly below it for a quicker sale. On a competitive server, you might be able to have a quick sale by using the average price. On a very competitive server (where prices are ridiculous already due to a farming boom usually), you can almost set your price significantly above the average price and still sell fairly quickly if that item isn’t common.

Example: the server suddenly (within the course of a couple weeks usually) has people selling rare weapons or armor for significantly more than you remember. This usually means there has been an influx of gold for some reason or other into the server. Maybe a migration, or maybe due to people buying more gold. These can coincide. Either way, this is the best time to take advantage of people that… just haven’t noticed the price hike yet. You can make lots of money in these situations by coming on more often and checking prices. Snap up the deals, and put them back up according to the new price scheme. Other people will see that this new price scheme seems “reasonable” because almost every item is that price, and it will be accepted and people will pay.

Homework: try it out. Go to the auction house or trade channel in your favorite mmo, find an item there that you’re unsure about, and then look it up on allakhazam.com. Or just use mine above. This is amazingly accurate, moreso than addons you might be using, which I’ll get to in another post, but they can be useful too, especially for the beginner or hardcore. Me, I’m a “casual” and just look for the big deals. I’m going to leave the in-depth formulas to those more inclined, and for those types of explanations, I recommend participating in the mmo Auctioneer Forum. But I digress. The database at allakhazam is excellent, and across servers. Since about 6 months after World of Warcraft came out, I’ve been using it, and it’s never let me down.

Tags: auction house, statistics, useful tools