So, I took the first steps toward including WoW in my research data and I am rather beside myself. I (rightly) assumed that it would be easier to locate the data I need online. All these sites prompted me to “select a realm,” which makes sense, I suppose. I was not prepared for the list of realms, though. My initial reaction was something to the effect of “Surely that list isn’t up to date. They can’t possibly have 240 different servers can they?”
So I’ve been mulling this over trying to decide what does and doesn’t make sense. Near as I can tell, there is no way to trade between “servers.” This means that unlike FFXIV, I do not have to consider interaction between servers quite as seriously. It does bring up some interesting thoughts on how to select a half dozen or so servers as a sample of the larger population. What constitutes a “representative sample?”
In other news, and mostly unrelated to this, I’ve been entertaining the idea of trying my hand at WoW again for the third time in history. For the record, this is why I’ve been avoiding it in research. Being near novel (to me) games makes me want to play them. Not a particularly strong idea at the moment, but it’s on the radar.
The other problem is that I would have to identify some specific items to follow and I’m so disconnected from the game that I have to do additional legwork just for that. Trying to draw parallels between end-game activities in different games turns out to be slightly difficult at times. Could just be lack of knowledge though.
In addition to this, I’m wondering if I should consider setting up a small home server to execute some of these functions on my behalf. Shouldn’t need a lot, even a little RPi should be more than capable of running the python scripts once a day. This is especially useful for cases like WoW or EVE where the data is collected and updated regularly. This would prevent the “FFXIV problem” of having to manually update the prices by checking it in-game.
Either way, those are just the ideas I’m playing with at the moment while I watch all the real-world economic indicators do… whatever they’re doing. It’s nothing good, I assure you.
So y’all take care. Feel free to dump your WoW-related wisdom upon my ignorant head that I might better understand what I’m getting into.
Hey, it’s Blapril time! The goal is to simply promote and stimulate the blogging community by encouraging people of all skill levels and backgrounds to post. The official post can be found here and it’s never too late to start.
Unidentified Signal Source 