Friday, June 29, 2012

May 2012 Glyph Sales



I call this month, Diablo 3 messes with everything.

Stats:
  • Total Glyph Sales: 39,510g
  • Total Glyphs Sold: 779
  • Average Glyph Price: 50g72s
The combination of variables for the complete dive in sales compared to the last three months is a mixture of other interests in game (I finally had to round out my stable of tanks with a Paladin), everyone deciding to play Diablo 3 and ... well me playing Diablo 3.

I'm going to keep this relatively short, since it's almost time for the June graph already. I'm hoping June will show a decent improvement as I've managed a more regular posting schedule and checking my mail most days.

I've had just a $#@%ton of whiptail to get through that was posted in bulk at about two thirds of my regluar acceptable price. The cheap whiptail was timely as the discussion on stockpiling for the glyph market for Mists is heating up. I have already been dividing up my surplus blackfallow ink into the lower level inks so I don't have to rush to do it at the last minute. The consequences of forgetting come the Mists preparation patch are more dire than for Cataclysm, since while Ink of the Sea was by far the most utilised ink in the next expansion, currently blackfallow ink is only used for one glyph in the beta. I admit that I did completely miss the boat for the Cataclysm... but really, c'mon; THE WORLD WAS ENDING. Saving the world from Deathwing and then chilling out for some panda / monk funk is a lot more relaxing.

In other news, I've finally started working on my relational database for WoW sales data. I've been meaning to make a start for freakin' ages, but it's winter and my PC for bookwork is upstairs in the really, really cold part of the house. So the solution was to set up a recently retired laptop by the fire downstairs (which needs more wood by the way) where I can work, write and indulge projects without squinting at the TV. I started out with some Ruby to parse my .lua from mysales and moved into mysql. Unfortunately I didn't keep my original .lua files intact, so my most recently impemented feature to record horde vs. alliance sales, will come up a little short for some previous data. My favourite activity so far as been writing a program to take a list of item names and go and fetch the item ID from wowhead. My least favourite part was double delimiting the apostrophes for items like [Queen's Garnet] in order to get that item ID. Aside from a general discussion of the milestones of the project (and to present the all important new graphs) I'll make sure to label and posts about the techical detals appropriately. Any requests for specific graphs or information from my growing pool of data are not only welcome but encouraged.

There's more wood on the fire, and those belt buckle sales aren't going to jump into a database by themselves!

2 comments:

  1. How do you get your data into graph format like that? If I read the above correct you have a custom Ruby app to pull data from MySales data?

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  2. @Ryan All my glyph graphs have have been produced with gVim (my favourite text editor) and a google docs spreadsheet. So what i have done in the past (I can't wait for this month's data) is just strip out the delimiters and turn it into a comma separated list. It takes a line like:

    "^1^SEnchant~`Bracer~`-~`Precision^N79925^S^S05/03/12~`07:40:20^^", -- [1]

    and turns it into:

    1,Enchant Bracer - Precision,79925,,05/03/12 07:40:20

    Then I just import a commma separated file into a spreadsheet and manipulate the data from there.

    So for future data (and loading in all my old data) I'll use my own Ruby program to insert the items into a mysql database in a more automated fashion.

    It really isn't the time saving I'm after, but the ability to look at all my data at the same time without blowing up a google docs spreadsheet. While researching my most and least sold glyphs, I tried to jam a years worth of data in a google docs spreadsheet which promptly blew up, so I had to settle for just three months of data.

    There's two other things I'm after out of the database. Firstly, there's the ability to add a lot of features to my reporting, so I can easily query for things like 'all iLvl 365 items', items by category and if I add recipe data 'all the stuff crafted with chaos orbs' for example. Secondly, once I get the data sorted, I'd like to be able grab the presentation of data directly from the database to the web. It would be great fun to be exploring my own data through a web interface and come across something I'd like to blog and just link it into a post right then and there.

    I've been taking a closer look at all the data of late, purely because I'm investigating bugs in my code as I go along. One of the first things I noticed is how often people chew through my 12 singles of potions on the AH, and how rarely people buy less than 5. If I hadn't taken a closer look as a byproduct of this project, I wouldn't realise I'm losing the potential for sales. So I'm going to jump into TSM and sell 4 (or 6 maybe) stacks of 5 rather than singles, and hopefully my sales of potions will reflect that. That's the kind discovery I really enjoy with gold making, and having my data at hand.

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