Sales (vs.) Purchases Reports

Would it be possible to track, and calculate this data for individual players along with the Profit/Loss result, with adjustable controls, for say like: all transactions, past week, past month, past year, visible transactions, etc as well as a toggle to show whether or not you want this to show in your profile page.

On the Members Home these values could be shown, along with the combined totals for all the player's characters.

Also as one last (far-fetched) thing; graphing these would be nice for the visual-type people of there, with a bar graph for Sales vs. Purchases, overlaid with a line graph for Profit/Loss (with the values on the right-hand axis).

I was thinking I'd like to see something like this, only I was just hoping for something much more simple, like showing a total spent/gained for each character. Sure, it wouldn't come close to being accurate given all the other ways to earn/lose gil, but it'd be nice to see just how much I've spent and earned off the Jeuno AH.

Something like the last 30 days or your publically (or just privately?) viewable sales history would be pretty cool.

With how it's laid out on your character price history (item, date, buyer, seller, gil) you could probably copy the table into an Excel speadsheet and have the items in the gil category added based on the string in the buyer/seller categories. But I don't know Excel very well at all, so I'm not sure what the syntax/commands are for doing it.

nod. sounds good actually. code shouldn't be too hard...right?

Suggested, with no reply from the powers that be:

http://www.ffxiah.com/forum/?topic_id=351

So far, this suggestion has come up a lot, but we haven't investigated it much further. While extremely easy to code, the problem is that keeping track of profit/loss analysis per player over arbitrary time periods would require multiple additional database transactions and operations for every auction house sales record.

The problem isn't the code. It's partitioning the database records and transactions in a way that wouldn't cripple our server.

What about offloading the transaction history calculation to the client side based on the visible transation count on each users page?

The db call is already being made to the database every time the page is expanded as it is, right? Perhaps a bit of embeded javascript to read from the user rendered HTML?

Yeah, there's ways of offloading it to be only a small partition of most recent data. The problem is people want very robust profit/loss calculations over all time, etc.

We're thinking about it. It's a common suggestion that people seem to want. There are other concerns though, like whether or not the calculation should obey the visible transaction count settings, what the defaults should be, how far back the calculation should be retroactive, etc.

Hopefully it doesnt become cost prohibitive.

Our main transaction database has almost 304,000,000 rows in it by now, across about 1,303,000 characters. That's the primary concern. Operations which require us to execute queries against each individual transaction record tend to be pretty brutal. Our current data is partitioned in a way which usually allows us to avoid ever having to do this, but adding a global feature to each transaction like profit/loss query lookups + sums tend to be slightly scary, especially if people want it retroactive to all past transactions.

Like I said though, it's on the table. It's a suggestion that comes up a lot.