World of Warcraft's Auction House is similarly interesting. It can get really complicated trying to corner the market on different goods, although it's less integral to gameplay over all. It's more like an embedded minigame at times.
One thing I learned in that game is that while one can make a lot of money being the middle man, the real value is from labor (as far as WoW is concerned) -- but grinding for materials can also be monotonous and not so profitable if you don't go about it in the right way.
So, there are lots of addons (Auctioneer being the most popular) to help one track data throughout the market.
I think there are far better games for market PvP such as EVE Online, Guild Wars, or Kingdom of Loathing. Making profit on the WoW AH was very formulaic (refining raw materials into the largest variety of items possible to maximize turnover - see JC shuffle), the best route was to find botters who would sell raw materials to you below market rates, and the huge number of shards made markets much less interesting.
Every action also required far too much clicking, which meant many people just used tools like autohotkey (cheats, although nobody ever got banned for them), and having to relist products constantly to beat minor undercuts was a terrible experience.
WoW AH is to virtual markets what hitting a pinata is to hitting something that fights back - it's simplicity makes it unrewarding.
I remember a simple tactic that I used in the WoW AH to make some money:
1) Buy bulk of item X.
2) Divide item X into single units and post on AH with a markup in the price.
People would then buy it because they would need only 1 or 2 of X instead of 10. It only worked for some items and under the right market conditions, but when it worked, it was a simple way to make money. From this I learned some important lessons:
1) Convenience == profit. This is the basis of a lot of business and industry. Why do people use and pay netflix instead of downloading shows? Convenience. Why do supermarkets exist? Convenience. And this is just a specific form of a more general rule, time == money. If you can save people time (convenience) then they will pay you for that service.
2) It made me appreciate and respect more how difficult this must be in the real world. In the WoW AH, I don't have to worry about things decaying or transportation or other things. But the supermarket down the street with shelves full of food? How do they know how much to buy in bulk and sell in units before the food expires? What do they do if they're wrong? I realized that just managing the inventory at a store could be an interesting computer problem. Models, simulations, even some AI could be used to try to figure out the best decisions. And companies already do this and those that do it well have a massive competitive advantage.
Former buyer for Whole Foods Market in the dairy department; arguably the most volatile of all -- Almost any decision I made to order was based on data of last week / last year / seasonal data, etc --
It got pretty instinctual after a while -- Holiday? Better get the baking materials ready! Martha Stewart mention something on her show? Better have 10x available the next day! -- Those scanner guns you see clerks wandering around with from time to time have all that data (well, not the Martha stuff) right there at our finger tips. It even alerted you if something was well out of the norm.
Yes, grinding, dis enchanting, etc was boring and it seemed like I never made much money. Towards the end of Cata it seemed like I made more money selling materials I collected in the AH while grinding up to 80.
I think connections and information also helped out a lot
Yes! I loved doing this. Faction arbitrage, cornering markets, playing the weekend tides. At one point I even had a bot set up to snipe epic items that people were transferring on the neutral AH.
that you know, are there any other games with an auction house/ any other sort of market(that is available in the browser) with the same depth of WoW. When I used to play it, the last few months I remember I spent more time in the armoury than in the game...
One thing I learned in that game is that while one can make a lot of money being the middle man, the real value is from labor (as far as WoW is concerned) -- but grinding for materials can also be monotonous and not so profitable if you don't go about it in the right way.
So, there are lots of addons (Auctioneer being the most popular) to help one track data throughout the market.