Posted by Admin DHAdmin on 1/8/14 03:35 PM
#1
Posts: 938
Last year I was contacted by a student at the University of Hamburg about the fact that he was doing his Master Thesis on the Virtual Economy of Diablo 3. He finished it a few months ago and asked that I post it on his behalf to our forums. So here it is!
_______________________________________________________________________________________ Hey everyone! My name is Niko. I am part of a team of economics researchers from the University of Hamburg in Germany. We are currently working on a research project involving data from the Diablo 3 auction houses, and we are hoping for your support. We are trying to find out if people use virtual currencies differently than ‘real’ currencies when they can be freely exchanged for one another. More specifically, we are investigating whether prices differ systematically between the D3 gold and the real money auction houses, and if so, whether this difference is due to the nature of the currencies (i.e. virtual vs. real), or can be explained by other factors. This study is a follow-up to my master’s thesis, which I have completed over the past year. As a fan of the series who has grown up playing Diablo 1 and 2, I naturally jumped at the research opportunities offered by the Diablo 3 auction house. I collected my data right from the price tracking tool on this website, and have been in contact with Jeremy from the beginning. (If you want to have a look at the finished thesis you can download it here) Having daily prices for the different commodity items is great, but it leaves so many questions unanswered. It does not tell us anything about how much of each item was traded at different times in the different auction houses. It also doesn’t tell us whether price movements are a result of a few individuals being extremely active, or whether there is a more evenly distributed involvement of the entire player base, etc. In order to be able to address these sorts of questions we need more detailed information, and this is why we need your help. We were hoping you might be able to spare a few minutes to take screenshots of your transaction history from the gold and the real money auction houses, or whatever part of it you are comfortable sharing with us. We have set up an upload link that you can use to send the files directly to a dedicated Dropbox account here or here. Your information would be extremely valuable for this study and others like it, and unless we manage to preserve it somehow, I’m afraid that it might be lost with the coming closure of the auction houses in Reaper of Souls. Thank you all for taking an interest in our project! Any support you can offer is greatly appreciated! If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear them. Just post them here, send me a private message, or find me in-game. See you all in Sanctuary! Cheers, Niko Battletag: Niko#2937 ------------------- Links ------------------- Upload Links: Upload Link or Upload Link First Study: The Thesis |
Master Thesis on Auction House - Call for Data
Posted by Member razer22 on 1/8/14 04:20 PM
#2
Posts: 194
Recently my activity in the AH is very limited. So it's mostly canceling and reposting items. But even if I post some sales from early on how would that help? All you see are random names with no info on the item and numbers. Also, I doubt they can even manage to follow the price of a single unique item.
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Posted by Admin DHAdmin on 1/8/14 04:32 PM
#3
Posts: 938
You can mouse over items to show their stats in the auction house. The other questions I am not sure, I am not involved in the project. I just posted on his behalf and read through his thesis which was rather interesting.
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Posted by Member Niko on 1/9/14 02:07 AM
#4
Posts: 2
Hey guys!
Anuiran, thanks so much for posting our request! Your support is invaluable! Razer22, you are right of course. Tracking the prices of equipment items, even uniques is pretty much impossible without seeing all the stats. When I started working on my thesis I was trying to come up with a system of standardizing item stats (aggregate the individual stats into a final stat score for each item) in order to be able to compare prices more easily. It’s a monstrous task, and I soon gave up to save my sanity. From then on I focused only on commodities because of their fungibility. We have a pretty good idea about the development of average prices for commodities from looking at the data collected from the Diablohub price tracker. What we don’t know is how these prices came about. To list a few things that we hope to glean from the transaction histories: - how much of the different commodities was traded at any point in time and across the different auction houses - how much the prices of individual transactions deviated from the recorded average - differences in individual trading behavior (preferences for gold vs. real money trading, buying in one AH to sell in the other, etc.) - if some individual players traded enough volume in order to influence prices (market power) - … and more we haven’t thought of yet This kind of information will help us put the price data into perspective and allow us to draw much more meaningful conclusions. So for the time being we are mostly interested in commodity transactions. We are still hoping to make use of the equipment data at some point, which is why we’d like to be able to access it before the auction houses get shut down. However, if it makes it easier for you to only take screenshots of the commodity transactions, then we are happy with that too! I hope this clarifies things a bit. If not, or if there are any other questions / concerns, feel free to ask! |
Posted by Member arpger on 1/11/14 07:20 PM
#5
Posts: 58
The thesis sounds very interesting and I would love to help out. Despite the fact that I have spent much time playing the Diablo 3 auction house, I haven't done much commodities trading (other than recently doing a bit of gem flipping on the HC ah - which I assume is not relevant to the study). Most of my activity has been flipping items off bids and selling them for higher buyouts, flipping items from the gold auction house to the RMAH, and purchasing gold on the RMAH. I have collected a bit of data on these activities, but I'm sure that this information would largely be irrelevant since you are focused on the commodities trading. Let me know, though, if you are interested in any information on armor/weapon sales.
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Posted by Member Niko on 1/17/14 03:12 AM
#6
Posts: 2
Hi Arpger,
thanks for your interest in our study and your willingness to help! The fact that you didn't trade commodities very much, or not at all, is very valuable information for us. Our goal is to gather a sample that is representative of the player base at large, many of who might not have done any commodity trading. If we only gather data from the players who traded the most, we get a very biased picture of what the average player did, and what the distribution is. Therefore, we very much interested in the data from players who did not trade much. |
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Posted by Member Bort on 1/17/14 12:05 PM
#7
Posts: 551
Hmm.... well. Do you need logs, or can I just tell you what I did and/or didn't do?
This data is for EU server. On softcore: Initially I used the AH pretty much to buy the occasional upgrade, but nothing fancy. Back in the day (can't recall dates, but basically after release, but before unique items were good, or plentiful) I spent most of my time crafting, and selling crafted items. Pants and Belts initially, Chest and Helm later. Never had enough money for the bracer or glove recipes. During this time I bought a lot of crafting materials. (Essence and tomes, as well as recipes) Then they redid unique items and crafting became way too expensive for what you got. Then December 2012 I went through a short time of flipping gold items to RMAH items. Not bigtime though. Probably max of 30 items. Then back to just buying the random occasional upgrade, and selling looted items. I have dabbled a bit in flipping items, but I suck at it. ;) Oh.... before one of the patches (think before the amulet recipy and the Dex/Int/Str/Vit batch of items) I bought a couple of low cost legendary items to sell the brimstone. And occasionally there would be some arbitrage opportunities where I bought a couple of gems on RMAH, and was able to sell them for a lot more gold on gold AH, and then sell the gold for more than my initial investment. But once again I never went big. Probably 10 or so gems only. On HC: I have probably crafted and sold more than a thousand lvl 11 shoulder pads. For them I buy the essence as well, instead of grinding it myself. Hmmm... think thats about my history. Mostly random stuff, and trying to do what the big money makers do, but usually finding it too tedious, boring or time consuming to be profitable. |