Brainstorm about Liquidity: how could we measure it?

[Erorus]

In all fairness, I wonder if TUJ's hourly AH parse model didn't set the precedent for their decision anyway. It was probably the only serious AH application around while the API was in development...perhaps we should be blaming @Erorus for all this mess in the first place.

I guess now's as good a time as any to drop some names.

Back when TUJ had to close in December 2010, that was when the original Armory site shut down. Technically Blizzard's XML was still available for apps, but the website was not. Something changed on their end and I couldn't pull the volume of data that I had pulled before the shutdown, so I closed the site.

Heroes made a racket on Blizz's forums, and in January, 2011, Nethaera dropped me an email. I explained the situation to her, and gave specifics about what I needed and how I would get it from the Armory. She forwarded my comments off to their web dev team, and during January 2011 I exchanged a few emails with them. (I forget their forum aliases, or else I'd mention them. Not sure if it was Straton or Osundir or someone else, since the emails went to their real name addresses.) They explained to me how they were throttling requests, which I could code for now that I knew what was happening, and they changed some server-side stuff on wowarmory, such as allowing me to pull auctions 200 at a time instead of just 50 at a time. After that, we reopened in early February, 2011.

Blizzard reps continued to make noises about the API, and how the Armory would no longer be supported. In April, 2011, when a thread asking about future API plans came up and Straton made multiple appearances, I kinda asked for the moon.

At the end of June, 2011, Straton sent me an email, asking for some info:

I wanted to talk about how you use and engage our websites to get AH data. I want to make sure that any changes we implement to throttle requests or change data formats don't catch you off guard. I suppose the best way to start would be to give me a run-down of what data you fetch, how and how often. From there we can make sure that we support that data in some form of an equivalent API in a way that wouldn't throttle your services.

Then, after I gave a few details, he replied,

Ok, so I think we've got the following goals for the AH API to make sure you've got the data you need and you are getting it in a way that won't get you banned.

1. Expose an AH dump of current auctions (per realm/faction) and make it accessible through the API or a CDN.
2. Allow AH dumps to be retrieved without having to authenticate.

I'm not the primary developer on that feature, but I do believe that the dumps will be compressed JSON. We'll try to get a sample out for you to test and develop against when we've made some more progress.

If you want to send over the IPs, I can make sure they get added to a ujournal application that is whitelisted.

That was June 30, 2011. The AH APIs went up on August 1, 2011 and the old wowarmory.com API went away August 2, 2011. So that's kinda how we wound up where we are.

[Kathroman]

I guess you should have asked for the streaming API higher up, then

[calianna]

And a bottle of Scotch...

[Tawnos]

Totally fascinating guys, thanks for the responses. The whole motive behind this was twofold. First, I wanted an easy index of some kind (like that have in, say stock markets) that would tell me about markets that I have no experience with - for instance, engineering and blacksmithing. That would show me where I could focus my efforts to make an easy sale, regardless of profit margin. I'm sure we'd all agree that a 50% increase over costs is better than 20%, but if I can make 20% on an investment every single day instead of 50% once a week.... Second, I wanted a tool that might tell me about trends; I'm sure we've all had those days when one market just isn't moving and then the next day everything sells. This latter point may be something I can measure with the activity heat maps, but anyway; I just wanted better information, faster, with graphs and stuff.

Reading all this, it appears that until the AH becomes significantly more like a stock exchange and vastly increases the quality and resolution of data available to players outside the game, it looks like this is something that wont be possible on a scale outside of my own experience.

[Kathroman]

@Tawnos - you'll find there are quite a few people here with similar interests. Unfortunately we haven't yet managed to co-ordinate our efforts to really get somewhere with this.

One day...

[calianna]

Yeah, I find myself constantly asking... "What are we going to do tonight, @Kathroman ?"