The first 72 hours of the Horde auction house
We watched one auction house from launch night on, with in-game scans and hourly snapshots from Blizzard's API. Prices halved, the ammo trade ran a third of all volume, and most listings that vanish come straight back cheaper. Here are the ten things that stood out.
The auction house filled up six times over
On launch night the first full scan found 593 different items listed. By Sunday morning it was 3,645. Most of that growth came in the first two days, while characters leveled into new zones and new professions. After that it kept creeping up by about 30 new item types an hour.
The total listing count tells the same story. Blizzard's API counted 156,534 auctions on Friday night and 207,663 25 hours later, a third more in one day.
Distinct items listed, per full scan
Each point is one full auction house scan or one hourly API snapshot
Show the data
Prices fell by half in three days
We took every item that was listed in the first 12 hours and tracked its price against that launch-night level. For the typical item, the price fell to 47% of where it started. The fall was steepest on day one and has nearly flattened since Saturday morning.
It hit materials unevenly. Leather fell to 19% of its launch price and enchanting materials to 24%, while cooking ingredients held best at 66%. Metal and stone held flat for a day and a half before falling, possibly because mining nodes were heavily contested early.
Price index by material type (launch night = 100)
Median of each item's price relative to its first-12-hour price, in 12-hour steps
Show the data
Supply didn't grow evenly, and herbs grew least
Comparing units listed in the first 12 hours with the last 12, quest items grew ninefold from a small base, ammo and crafting parts almost fivefold, and cloth nearly fourfold. Cloth drops from humanoids every player kills while leveling, so it piles up whether anyone farms it or not.
Herbs grew least, only 1.4×. Herbalism needs a gatherer to go out and pick, and early on most players were still questing. That slower supply is part of why herbs held their value better than cloth or leather.
Units listed now vs. launch night
Multiple of first-12-hour supply, by category (categories with 1,000+ units at launch)
Show the data
One unit in three sold is ammo
Hunters burn ammo every fight, so they rebuy constantly. Sharp Arrows alone moved about 33,600 units a day, five times more than Linen Cloth, the busiest crafting material. Nine of the ten fastest sellers are ammunition.
The catch is value. Most ammo sells for 1 to 10 copper per unit, so it dominates unit counts without dominating gold. For a seller it's steady, low-margin volume.
Units bought per day, top 12 items
Each mark is 2,000 units a day
Show the data
Copper Ore went the other way
While the rest of metal and stone deflated, Copper Ore climbed from on launch night to , seven and a half times its starting price. Supply moved the opposite way, from about 7,560 units listed to about 2,500.
Mining, Blacksmithing and Engineering all start on copper, so every new crafter needs it. Miners leveling past the starting zones stop gathering it. The Darkmoon Faire also opens on Nov 9 and buys crafted goods for tickets. We can't yet separate how much of the rise each cause explains. The Faire week will tell.
Copper Ore: price and supply
Two panels, same timeline. Top: market price per ore. Bottom: units listed.
Show the data
Cooks pay up for raw ingredients, and finished goods collapse
The biggest movers follow a clear pattern. Raw ingredients that cooks need to level, like Stringy Wolf Meat (up 15×), Small Eggs and Meaty Bat Wings, rose sharply. Copper bolts, bars and ore, the inputs for crafting, rose too.
The fallers are mostly things made while leveling a profession. Minor Mana Potions went from to , and Minor Rejuvenation Potions from to . Crafters have to make them to gain skill, then dump them for whatever they fetch. Across all 204 heavily traded goods and consumables, 73% are cheaper now than on launch night.
Price now vs. launch night, biggest movers
Log scale: each step is ten times. Left of the line got cheaper, right got pricier.
Show the data
Behind a few cheap listings sits a wall
The API lists every auction, so we can see the whole ladder of prices instead of just the cheapest. Linen Cloth shows the typical shape. A handful of sellers dumped 120 units at to , then there's a gap. Then 8,780 units sit at exactly , more than a third of all the linen on the market.
A shopper only ever sees the cheap layer, so the "price" looks like . Anyone selling more than a stack is really competing with the wall. At the rate linen sells (about 6,900 a day), the cheap layer is gone within the hour. Posting just under the wall, instead of undercutting the dump, gets over 50% more per cloth.
Linen Cloth: units listed at each price
Snapshot of Nov 8, 00:43; prices in copper per cloth
Show the data
Most listings that vanish are relisted, not sold
Between two hourly snapshots, about 32,450 auctions disappeared and 35,300 new ones appeared. We matched them up. Nearly 6 in 10 vanished listings came back within the hour as an auction for the same item, same stack size, at the same price or cheaper: sellers canceling and undercutting.
Only about 28 in 100 look like real purchases. That's why HordeLedger doesn't count a vanished listing as a sale. Counted naively, sales on this server would look two to ten times higher than they are. The market is efficient in another way too. Right now only 13 item types are listed below what a vendor pays for them, worth about 10 silver in total.
What happened to 100 auctions that left the AH in one hour
Nov 7, 23:43 to Nov 8, 00:43 · each square is 1% of the 32,448 that vanished
Show the data
The market is quietest in the morning and peaks at 11pm
Counting what left the AH each hour (purchases and cancellations together), activity stayed low from 5 to 11am and jumped from noon on. It peaked late in the evening, at about three times the morning low.
This is one Saturday, with one snapshot per hour and four hours missing while the PC collecting it slept, so read it as a first sketch. For sellers, the signal is already useful. Post before the evening rush, not at breakfast.
AH activity by hour of day (average hour = 100)
Units that left the AH early, per hourly snapshot, Nov 7 to 8, US Central
Show the data
Most of the AH will be gone in 12 hours
Every auction in the API carries a band for how long it has left. In this snapshot, 64% sat in the 2-to-12-hour band and another 20% had under 2 hours. Only 16% had more than 12 hours to go.
So roughly 84% of today's listings will have sold, expired or been relisted within half a day. A listing is rarely stale for long, and undercuts on a busy item arrive within hours, not days.
Auctions by time left
All 207,663 auctions in the Nov 8, 00:43 snapshot
Show the data
How this was measured
- Scans: in-game full auction house scans with the Blackthornes addon, from launch night (Nov 4, 22:39) on.
- API: from Nov 6, 23:33, hourly snapshots of every auction from Blizzard's WoW Forever Game Data API. These endpoints are documented by the community and not yet official, so details may change.
- Sales: units sold per day are estimates from listings disappearing while the cheapest price held or rose. The API's own "vanished early" counts include cancellations and are treated only as an upper bound.
- Scope: one Horde auction house on one US PvP realm, in the first week after launch. Market data only: no character, account or player information is used.
Built with HordeLedger, a personal toolkit for WoW Forever market data.