Hi guys,
I’ve been working on a few side projects lately, and one idea I’d really like to explore is a tool that helps players estimate the value of items in the game.
The amount of loot variety we have is massive. Between different item bases, affixes, idols, and all the possible combinations, it’s getting harder and harder to judge at a glance whether something is actually valuable or just another item worth almost nothing.
I think a lot of players run into the same problem: you either try to keep a huge amount of market knowledge in your head, or you end up second-guessing almost every drop.
At the same time, the Bazaar obviously has market data behind it. At minimum, there has to be information on how many of a given item are listed, the current price range, how many were sold over a certain period, and what the average sale price looks like. Even if some of that is not stored directly as analytics, it should still be possible to calculate from periodic database snapshots.
So I wanted to ask whether there’s any chance of getting access to a private read-only API, with sensible limits on request rate / number of connections / update frequency, or even just a once-per-day export of Bazaar item data. That would already be enough to build a useful prototype around item valuation.
Of course, if I build anything, I’d be happy to share all prototypes with you first for review and approval.
P.S. Another way to approach this would be to build part of the functionality directly into the game itself. For example, you could calculate an average sale price server-side once per day, attach that value to items internally, and let the loot filter highlight items - at least uniques and idols - that are selling above that threshold.
For rare, exalted, or corrupted items, pricing is obviously more complicated because affixes, meta relevance, and popularity matter a lot. But even there, I think it should be possible to identify certain patterns or key combinations that set a realistic minimum value based on Bazaar sales history.
I honestly think something like this would be a real QoL improvement for the game.