How prices work
One cheap listing shouldn’t set the price of a whole market. Goldwright prices items from the depth of the auction house, so a stray low listing (or a deliberate bait) can’t drag the number down.
Where the data comes from
Every hour, Goldwright saves a full copy of every WoW Forever auction house from Blizzard’s official game data API: every listing, its quantity and its buyout price. Blizzard refreshes this data about once an hour, so an hourly snapshot captures each refresh. The add-on can add your own in-game scans on top, which are fresher still.
Each ruleset has three houses: Alliance, Horde and the neutral Blackwater house that both factions can use. They are separate markets with their own prices, so Goldwright shows them side by side.
Market value
Line up every listing from cheapest to dearest and walk up the list, counting units. The market value is the unit price at which you have passed 5% of all units listed (at least 5 units). In other words: what it costs to buy a meaningful slice of the market right now.
Example: 2,000 Copper Bars are listed. 5% of that is 100 bars. If the 100th-cheapest bar costs 83c, the market value is 83c, even if one bar is listed at 20c.
When fewer than 5 units are listed in total, there is no depth to measure, so the cheapest listing is used.
Bait listings
Some sellers post one or two items far below the market to trick price-checking tools into undercutting. Goldwright marks the cheapest listings as likely bait when both are true:
- they are more than 30% below the market value, and
- together they hold no more than 1% of the units listed (or 3 units on small markets).
The cheapest real listing is then the first listing above them. Bait is still shown on item pages, struck through, so you can buy it if it is a genuine bargain.
Units and listings
Units listed counts every item for sale (a stack of 20 is 20 units). Listings counts separate auctions. Commodities such as ore, cloth and herbs are priced per unit; for other items the buyout is divided by the stack size. Bid-only auctions are left out.
Sell rate (coming soon)
Blizzard doesn’t publish sales. Goldwright will estimate them from listings that disappear before their time runs out. A cancelled auction looks the same as a sale, so this number is always marked (est.). It needs a few days of snapshots before it means anything, so it isn’t shown yet.
Normal price and trends (coming soon)
“Normal” will be the 7-day average of hourly market values, and “below normal” or “above normal” compares today’s value with it. Charts on this site only ever show real snapshots; when there isn’t enough history yet, the chart says so instead of guessing.
Fees
The auction house keeps a cut when an item sells: 5% at the Alliance and Horde houses. Blackwater’s cut is believed to be higher and is still being confirmed. Gaps between houses on this site are shown before fees.
Freshness
Prices on this site come from the Nov 10, 21:22 UTC snapshot and refresh hourly. The add-on’s data pack is rebuilt daily; tooltips always say how old a price is.
Right now the site covers the US Normal ruleset. The other regions (EU, KR, TW) are already being collected and the other rulesets will follow once each house is matched to its ruleset in game.
Questions about a number? See an item page, for example Copper Bar, where the listing depth shows exactly where the market value comes from.