Guild Wars 2

This is about the site, gw2bltc.com, not the in-game Black Lion Trading Company.

Looking at the history, which is which of “Bought” and “Sold”? Maybe it’s a language thing, but too me they really describe the same thing just from different view. (Buyer vs Seller)

In this context however, it’s obvious one is fulfilled Sell Order (by someone klicking “buy now”) and the other is fulfilled Buy Order (“sell now”). But I can’t make heads or tails of which is which.

Correct, sort of, in a perfect world. The “Buy more at Trading Post”/“Buy Instantly” decreases the supply number while “Sell at Trading Post”/“Sell Instantly” will decrease the demand number.

Now if nobody pulls their orders or items off the TP between snapshots, or ADD items , then sold is when supply goes down and offers if it goes up. If demand goes down then it’s listed as bought, up as bids.

But, and it’s a BIG HUGE BUT, it’s simply the delta change between snapshots of the supply and demand number that determines Sold/Offers and Bought/Bids. If any item is posted for sale and sold within the time gap between the snapshots will not register as sold or bought. If someone offered 250 iron and 240 are sold between snapshots, we will only see +10 being “Offers” and none of those 240 that were sold.

Bought and sold is based on changes in the supply and demand numbers respectively.

The mirror database the API uses is updated every 5 minutes or so. BW2BLTC compares snapshots and estimate based or either supply/demand numbers or the actual current buyers/current seller numbers the amount of goods either bought by a current buyers, or sold by a current seller.

Now players can pull there orders and items off the TP at any time so the number changing doesn’t actually transaction happened. Plus since it’s based on snapshots of the current state of the item on the TP, it wouldn’t see say 3 sold and then 3 others than put up for sale between snapshots.

Also sold/offers and bought/bids go hand in hand, depending if the delta in supply and demand is positive or negative. If supply goes down between snapshots, it’s “sold”, goes up it’s “offers” for instance. If demand goes up it’s “bids”, down “bought”.

Technically, the jargon is misleading. It would be more accurate to phrase them as:

• Buy offers removed + fulfilled.
• Sell offers removed + sold.

However, that’s ungainly and likely still going to be misunderstood, so I don’t fault bltc’s programmer for using the more intuitive “bought & sold”, since that’s close enough for most people most of the time.

I get what they represent collectively, including not being able too differentiate between a sell order filled by purchase and one removed by the seller.

What I can’ figure out is which is which.

If I read Behellagh right, it’s
Buy Now = Supply goes down = Sold
Sell Now = Demand goes down = Bought

Is that right?

The main reason to look at the charts is to get an idea of trends. Are current prices going up or down? do they fluctuate generally? are price changes related to supply|demand changes or part of an ebb|flow that happens normally.

For high volume items, like metals or cloths, there’s no meaningful difference between GW2BLTC’s approximations of trades and the actual trades on the TP. You don’t have to make allowances.

However, for items that don’t sell often, you have to use some personal judgment. With things like legendaries & precursors, you know that few will sell each day. You also know that people will frequently overcut each other on buy offers . So take “bought” with a grain of salt.

On the other hand, for legends, “sold” is going to be close; it will miss someone selling direct to an overcut within the 5 minutes between the script checking the API, but that’s not going to happen that often.

In short, you don’t need to worry about the distinctions for high volume. For low volume, use what you know about the market to make allowance for the limitations of the data collection methodology