More Accurate Sales Rate

I think that the sales rate is really misleading. There are items which are just difficult to produce or are rare drops, resulting in a shortage of supply. It misleads people into thinking that an item isn't worth camping or crafting, because it gives the appearance that it won't sell quickly enough. Instead what I would love to see is a more intelligent approach to calculating the sales rate.

Example (this is hypothetical, use your imagination here):

An item is found to go up on the AH by FFXIAH, and is sold within a few hours. However, turns out this item is an incredibly rare drop off a 72 hour mob that only spawns during night on a full moon, and will skip until the next 72 hour period if conditions aren't met. This means that the item is only obtained once every 3-4 months. However, EVERYONE who knows about it wants it. But FFXIAH shows the sales rate as "Dead Slow." Why? Because there's been a total of 7 sold since the game started. This isn't because nobody wants the item, but rather the supply is so low.

What I would *like* to see instead is this:

The above rare item goes up on AH and sells within a few hours. FFXIAH sees how quickly it sold, and compares it to the turnaround time on previous sales and sees they all sell within hours of AH listing. Result? Rate: Very Fast. This is a more accurate representation of how desirable an item is, as opposed to just calculating how many are sold per day.

Calculating how quickly a specific item sells once it goes up on the AH is fine with only one item, but how would you track which item sold when there are multiple of a certain item up on the AH at one time?

You could calculate that based on the number of them sold per hour/day/week using the old system in that case. What I propose would only apply to items that seem to sell slowly, but in reality they're snatched up as soon as they're placed on AH. Would be somewhat easy to code up, I'd think. Are there multiples on AH almost all the time? Use old system. Are there rarely any on AH, but when they are placed they sell quickly? Rate using system based on how quickly they sell after AH placement.

Do you think having something tracking the average number of items in stock would accomplish what is desired here?

For example, let's imagine an item that sells every 10 days. Is the item low in supply or low in demand? If you were to track only once each day for 10 days and the item was up for 9 days and finally sold on the 10th day then there would've been .9 for sale each day. Since the frequency sold is below the average up for salve, you could guess it's low demand. However, if it's up for sale and sold immediately then no others come up for sale for another nine days maybe there was an average of 0 in stock each day. This would indicate high demand.

I hope that makes sense. I'm not sure if this would make things more or less confusing than they already are.

i like it the way is it. making it more complicated is only more work for them that really is unnecessary. when i want something on the AH i look around to see if i can farm it first. if the drop rate is ridiculous 1. it usually says so in a comment (see Agaricus Mushroom ) or 2 is says it on ffxicopedia.

less complainin more lovin mr smash keyboard for my name guy ^^

"1. it usually says so in a comment (see Agaricus Mushroom ) or 2 is says it on ffxicopedia."

But why not do it in an automated fashion. Relying on comments is fallible and results in spotty information. If the system automatically generated accurate sales ratings you wouldn't have to try to track down information and data that may not even exist. Hell, even adding an extra field in the sales history without calculating the estimated sales rate would be incredibly useful. Example:

Price History (25)
Date.................Seller...............Buyer.........Gil.............Approximate Time on AH
Feb. 1, 2007.....Renkintyan......Darthsul.....75,000.....10 minutes
July 29, 2007....Laone..............Xevin..........80,500.....1 hour 3 minutes
March 6, 2008...Laone.............Aritza.........100,100....5 minutes
May. 29, 2008...Chiharuchan....Bodyodor...200,800...1 day 2 hours 47 minutes
July 29, 2008....Chiharuchan....Bodyodor...175,000....1 hour 43 minutes

This shows that the item is rarely on AH, but when it goes up, at *most* it spends a little over a day. With the way things are now, this would show as "Dead Slow." However, this representation shows that it is not dead slow, rather it is in incredible demand, but is very rare.

Also, I'm not complaining, this is the suggestion forum and I'm making a suggestion. =P This site is awesome, I'm suggesting something to make it even better than it already is.

doing that would create more work as i said. EACH item would have to do that. even then the "very fast" items would be inaccurate (yagudo drinks sell WAY more than posted. they just sell THAT fast) i dont even know if ffxiah has enough people working for them to do that? personally i'd keep what we have now over adding times on the AH and possibly losing something in another area. as i recall FFXI doesnt use bots. it's real people checking the AH for hours on end. so i dont know how you could automate that 24/7. its a good concept its just not able to be reasonably done.

edit: out of curiosity which items are you referring to that are in high demand but low stock?

I believe FFXIAH reads SE's FFXI database directly, so all that would need to be done is add two fields to the database that FFXIAH uses to record the time an item was found and when it was sold. Shouldn't require any effort on actual people doing gruntwork. I think that was the way they initially did it, and then Cliff figured out how to read the actual SE database.

The biggest issue I'm seeing with this still doesn't have a proposed solution: there's no way to track which item sold in X amount of time. We can track when the stock goes from 2 to 3, but when one sells, we can't tell which of those three actually sold. (The third one listed could have a lower bid price and sell first. Assuming it was the first one listed would be incorrect and very misleading, as the first two could be price-fixers or people shooting for the moon in their list price.)

This makes it difficult to determine how long a particular item was on the AH. We could write a special service like this say, for items that only ping-pong between 0 and 1 stock, but that would make the display path fairly difficult and probably prompt a slew of support questions about why the sales rate seems to be calculated differently for different items.

maybe we could put a tag on whatever items he's talking about that says something along the lines of high demand low supply? little red dot or something? as far as tracking times up on the ah i still say it's not doable. but if we did put a button that says high demand low supply how would you go about figuring out where the line is for getting that tag and not getting it?

I have a simple solution:

Jae says they can track the amount available on the AH and obviously how many of the item gets sold. The rate of sale is a relation between these two. So all you need to do is found out the rate at which people put the item on the AH. Take this value and divide it by the rate at which it sells. This way if the rate at which people put up the item on the AH is like... 1/week and the sell rate is... 1/week, even though currently it would be considered a low sale rate if you divided them it would come up with a value of one which you could designate as a good sales rate. Lets say it's 2/week but perhaps the rate of sale stays at 1/week. Divide the two and you get a value of 0.5 which could be designated as a decent sales rate. This also works well with highly saturated items. For example... beehive chips. Lets say the rate at which it goes up on the AH is 924/week and the sale rate is 479/week right now it would be considered a high sale rate. But right now this value could be misleading because even though it sells quickly because it is over saturated if you put it up on the AH you may not sell it because so many people are putting them up on the AH after you. when you divide them you get a value of roughly 0.5 which would be a decent rating, meaning you have a decent chance of selling it on the AH.

Yeah, it's irrelevant which specific item in that category sold, rather it's a function of how quickly any item in that category sells. If only 1 item of a specific category is sold every two days, but that 1 item sells within a few hours of being posted, it seems that the demand is high but the supply is low. That doesn't mean it's a slow sales rate. As a matter of fact it means it's a pretty fast sales rate, since it disappears pretty quickly after being posted.