I wrote about the value sources in TSM in my guide, but today I want to take a more specific look at the market value based price sources and when to use them. Choosing between dbmarket, dbregionmarketavg and dbhistorical can be confusing.
How do the sources work
First let’s look at how these sources are calculated, this will help us understand when they will be appropriate.
Dbmarket
Dbmarket or the market value is based on a weighted average of the price over the last 14 days. It is not based on the cheapest price, but on a measure of the prce that is roughly around the 15th percentile. It will ignore both very high and very low prices.
A weighted average means that the price yesterday will have a larger impact than the price 7 days ago which will have a larger impact than the price 14 days ago. The TSM team does a pretty good job showing the concepts here, so do check that out.
It is based only on prices on your realm.
dbregionmarketavg
Region market average is the average dbmarket value across all the realms of a region. It is simply computed by summing up dbmarket for every realm and dviding by the number of realms. It is not weighted in any way. It is quite stable as it is based on prices on a lot of different realms so changes happen slowly and will only be based on long term trends.
This makes it great for cases wher eyou want to compare prices across realms or where you want a stable anchor for your price source.
Dbhistorical
Dbhistorical is similar to dbmarket based on the prices on a single realm. The major difference is that it includes 60 days of price history when calculating the value rather than just the last 14 days. This makes dbhistorical considerably more stable and you need larger and more sustained price changes to get a large change in the dbhistorical value.
When do the different price sources make sense.
The differences in when a particular source makes sense depends on the market.
Dbmarket
The most widely used one is of course dbmarket. This one is great as it’s based on just your own realm. This makes it easy to understand. It also changes fairly quickly if the price changes. For most fairly high sale rate current expansion markets dbmarket is great. I use it for BfA material flipping where it is by far the best price source.
You want a price source that changes with the market, but not too quickly and you want to focus on your realm as material prices are VERY different across realms.
Dbregionmarketavg
Dbregionmarketavg on the other hand does not take individual realms into account. This is great for items that have similar prices across realms, or where you want to compare the price on your realm to the price across realms. I use regionmarketavg for Battle pet flipping where you can actually move the item around to another realm. Regionmarketavg makes great sense here as I buy and sell on tons of realms so I want a price that is stable across realms.
I also use dbregionmarketavg for BoE flipping. This is because I want to use a stable price source as my base. I then use different percentages on different realms depending on how the prices on that realm compares to the region market value. Dbmarket on a single realm would be way to easy to game as any one item is quite rare and you will often be in situations where you have the only item of that specific version on your realm.
Dbhistorical
Dbhistorical is great for markets where variation is much smaller on a week to week basis. I used this in my mining flipping setup for old world materials. These items have markets and use cases that have not changed much. The price can fluctuate quite a bit as both supply and demand will be variable. Few people are actively farming and few are actively buying, but when they do farm or buy a lot the price can make a sudden change. You don’t want this to change your buying or selling thresholds too much so dbhistorical makes sense. It also makes sure you capture the specific dynamics of your realm.