What we measure
Faction Pulse counts new auction house listings. Every listing that appears on an Alliance, Horde or Blackwater auction house between two updates counts once. New listings show players actively trading. They do not show how many characters exist, so this site is not a population census.
Where the data comes from
Blizzard publishes the auction houses of WoW Forever through its public Battle.net API, about once an hour for each region. Our collector checks every 15 minutes whether a new update is out and downloads it only when it is. Regular items and stackable goods such as herbs or ore come from separate parts of the API, and we count both.
Sometimes an update arrives late or an hour is skipped. The next update then covers both hours, so those listings are still counted. Only listings that appear and disappear between two updates are never seen.
Faction balance
For each ruleset we add up the new listings of the last 24 hours. The Alliance share is the Alliance listings divided by the Alliance and Horde listings together, and the Horde share is the rest. Shares are rounded to whole percent.
Blackwater, the neutral auction house that both factions can use, is left out of this split. It is shown on its own, as its share of all new listings.
When data counts as complete
We compare each update with the one before it. Two updates form a usable pair when they are at most 125 minutes apart. A time window counts as complete when usable pairs cover at least 80% of it. Otherwise the site shows “Not enough data yet” and leaves the window out of rankings and charts. Gaps stay visible. We never fill them in.
If an auction house with more than 1,000 listings suddenly loses more than 90% of them in one update, we treat that update as a glitch, ignore it and keep the previous state.
Activity index
Within a region, the complete ruleset with the most new listings in the last 24 hours, counting Alliance, Horde and Blackwater together, is set to 100. The other rulesets are scaled to it, so 50 means half as many new listings.
Time of day
The average number of new listings for each hour of the day, over up to the last 14 days. Hours are shown in your local time.
7-day trend
The change in Alliance share between the last 7 complete days and the 7 days before, in percentage points. It needs 14 days of data.
Prices
We follow 20 common trade goods in five groups: herbs, mining, cloth, meat and fish, potions and reagents.
- Item price: we sort all offers by price per unit and take the average price of the cheapest 15% of all available units. Single bait listings and extreme prices hardly move it.
- Daily price: the median of an item's prices on one day (UTC).
- Price index: each item's daily price compared with its base price, the median over the first 7 complete days, combined as a geometric mean with the base set to 100. It needs at least 15 of the 20 items and appears after 7 complete days.
What these numbers cannot tell you
- How many players each faction has. Trading activity is not the same as player numbers. One busy trader can post hundreds of listings.
- Sales. The API shows listings, but no buyers or sellers. A listing that disappears may have sold or may have been cancelled, so we do not count sales.
- Short-lived listings. Anything posted and gone between two updates is never seen.
- Every ruleset match. The API lists all 15 auction houses of a region under every ruleset. We matched them to rulesets in game for all four EU rulesets. The US matches are assumed to follow the EU pattern, so the US rulesets carry the note “mapping assumed, not yet confirmed in game”.