Nexushub has been running a website which expoese the TSM data for classic servers for a while. Recently they released some data on the popularity of items and realms, which is quite interesting. So let’s take a small look.
What did they release
They released popularity data, measured in page views for the top items, top professions and top realms. They also released the items that had the largest reductions and increases after the Zul’Gurub release date got announced.
The data is based on popularity of viewing the page, so we don’t know if these players want to buy or sell the item, but we can make a guess.
Let’s see what we can learn
Item popularity numbers
The top items are Black Lotus and Edgemaster’s handguards who are both head and shoulders above the next one. IT’s followed by a bunch of crafting materials with Elemental fire, Arcane Crystals and Arcanite bars being the top three.
Black Lotus is no surprise as it is one of the most high profile expensive materials in the game. Edgemaster’s likewise is the best BoE item in the game by far.
The rest of the list mostly consists of materials and consumables. The two top consumables are Greater Fire Protection Potions and Elixir of the Mongoose. I expect the elixir will remain popular for a long time as it remains the top choice for all the melee dps. The GFPP will likely take a dive once we head into the later phases where fire damage is much less pronounced.
Overall it seems to me that these are items players look up because they need or want them. Most of these items are hard to acquire and unless you are a dedicated farmer you will want to figure out how much you will have to fork out.
Profession popularity
Items related to alchemy and herbalism get looked up WAY more than any other profession. Alchemy has a LOT of different consumables though, so perhaps this is not so surprising. Most classes will want at least one type of alchemy-crafted consumable for raiding, which will contribute to the huge number of page views. It’s the only profession that crafts items literally everyone wants. Herbalism follows as a natural consequence as players compare the price of herbs and potions.
After that it’s mining related items, which is surprising considering the popularity of Arcane Crystals followed by the rest of the crafting professions.
Realm data
The graphs Nexushub made does not contain too many realms, but they also made the base data available in .csv files. The most interesting datapoint is of course going to be the faction split. For most realms you would expect it to correlate heavily with actual faction balance. You can use this together with data from ironforge.pro to really get an idea of how your realm or other realms look.
Changes since the Zul’Gurub Announcement
The last data they released is the change in page views since the ZG announcement. Some of these numbers wil likely be a coincidence and not really related to ZG, whereas others will have a strong link. Black Lotus tops the list and since it is needed to summon the Edge of Madness bosses it is not surprising.
The only other item that seems strongly correlated with ZG is of course mooncloth that’s needed for the Bloodvine set. The other items on both the increase and decrease list does not seem directly related to ZG. I guess the Maiden’s Circle decrease might be related to new caster rings in ZG, but everything else seems to me to be more on the random side of things.
Play around with the data
If you like playing with data you can get the raw data in .csv Format. I didn’t have time to look into it myself, but I suspect there may be some more interesting tidbits there.