Trade API and data statistics?

According to the latest Exiletools blog, indexing sites will be able to track individual items as they move around the market. One major use of this was stated to be able to catch people trying to manipulate prices by tracking how long an item has sit in a player's stash and presumably using that as a measuring stick for the validity of player reports.


But another interesting thing about this is that it opens the door to statistical analysis of the PoE economy. With the proper brain-power, someone could analyze the average price in which certain uniques are sold, how easy or difficult it is to sell certain uniques, identify hardcore flippers, people who only sell, people who only buy, and if the item ID doesn't change with crafting, it could even identify people who buy to craft, such as someone trying to roll a good corruption who buys up a bunch of items and lists the same items once again but as corrupted items.


As for what this sort of stuff can do for us? Well it all depends on how much brainpower is put to use by tool creators. It's not too difficult to imagine a future, for example, where instead of listing that you want to sell vaal orbs and waiting for a buyer, you get an Amazon-like suggestion of people who are currently consuming large numbers of orbs on a daily basis. Or if you've got a Meginord's Vise, plugging it into the tool could return players who are mass buying them to corrupt, giving you an very easy way to find buyers.


Interesting stuff all in all!

Interesting.

Stats like "Previously sold for" or "average listing price of similar item when traded" would help markets stabilize pretty fast.

I just had another idea: Flipper Score.

Enter a player's name, and it will list all recorded "item flips" that player made (e.g. buying an item for X, selling the same item for Y shortly after), along with a final tally of total currency invested and total currency profit from flips.

I just want to point out that ExileTools already has in-depth Unique Item Price & Availability reports available - unfortunately I just cleared out the Talisman indexes in preparation for the new API which I thought would be released earlier today, so they're all blank, but bookmark it for later:

http://exiletools.com/uniques

I also think we're going to see a transition towards default searches that exclude items which are much lower price than they should be and haven't been modified in a few days (meaning people are almost definitely fake listing them and ignoring whispers). Very easy to detect those players now.

As to flippers, it's an interesting thing to track. You could potentially do that right now to some degree with the ExileTools Index, such as looking for people that added a unique item within 15min of a similar unique item being removed from someone else, but this will always be guesswork (and probably inaccurate on any popular unique item).