Help me perfect a pup pricing formula!

@salt&shell heck yeah come join the stats people!

That's a really good idea for RMA, and potentially for breed-only or color combo markings too - you could have a normal marking and a "special" marking count for each wolf, where the normal marking number would be multiplied by 10 and the special marking number by 50. 

And yes that's exactly what I was thinking, a market modifier that applies to the entire equation! So if the market is "stable" its just a 1, but if the market is wicked oversaturated it takes the entire thing and multiplies it by .6 or something to lower the price. You're right though that how to quantify what is or is not a saturated market is pretty hard to suss out... right now its a pretty fuzzy feeling that I get mostly from seeing people in chat discuss it or just from my own frustrations at not selling pups as fast as other times. 

Yeah I agree with a market modifier like that. I think with right now, you'd possibly have to consider changing the price even more, only because of how bad it is. Hopefully it'll even out eventually, but I think that'll take a while unless we get something like a giving tree so people can just send their pups there instead. Although as you said, I'm not sure how you'd figure out what is and what isn't a saturated market :/ that will be difficult to do.

So, taking into account all of your (excellent!!!) suggestions, here's some tweaks to the formula:

Price in SC = [20+(M*10)+(E*50)] * [S] * [T] * [P] * [R] * [V] * [B] * [L] * [F]

Marking modifier: M = number of markings

Extra marking modifier: E = number of RMA / combo / special colored markings

Sex modifier: if male, S=0.5; if female, S=1

Tier modifier: if Tier 1, T=1; If Tier 2, T=5

Potato check: if Male AND Tier 1, P=0.5; if not, P=1

Rarity check: if Base is rarer than 0.4% or breed-only, then R = 1.5; if not, R=1

Valuable check: if female AND Tier 2, V=2; if not, V=1

Breeding check: if Clean, B = 1; if Inbred, B = 0.75

Level / Stats modifier: if stats under 200, then L = 0.75; if 200-300, then L = 1; if 300-400, then L = 1.3; if 400+, then L = 1.5

Fricking market modifier: if "normal" market, F = 1; if oversaturated, F = ?????<1

Changes:

• Added variable E for Extra markings, meaning RMA-only markings or breed-only combo markings, which will be used to calculate the "Base" price in brackets that other modifiers apply to
• Added variable B for breeding, which lowers the price slightly for inbred wolves
• Added variable L for level & stats, which works on a tiering system where higher stat wolves get a bump in the modifier
• Since we've added in more Stuff, I lowered the rarity modifier to 1.5 instead of 2, so that you won't get stupid high prices for high stat special marking rare tier 2s that no-one would ever pay that much for even though they are valuable.

How's that equation looking to folks now? Still not sure what the market modifier would be but perhaps we let that be fuzzy and just kinda feel it out as we use the formula, where if we think its a real bad time its maybe as low as 0.5, or if its just a small dip its more like 0.75, etc. Unless we think it could be even lower?

To use our example wolves from before (now with our new variables taken into account):

- Lavender female: if from an unclean line would go from 1050 (with the lower rarity modifier) to 787.5

- Marengo male: if he had just 1 extra RMA marking and nothing else changed would go from 10 SC to 22.5, BUT if he had that same extra marking and 400+ stats he'd be worth 33.75. Does that seem low to anyone else?

Thoughts?

My suggestion may be a little severe, but at least temporarily with the market as dire as it is, I still think T2 coats are being valued quite highly compared to the actual market. A 400+ stat T1 puppy should ideally be priced a good amount higher than a T2 unclean 200 stat puppy? 

I'm not sure how that would be best modified, especially as a temporary thing, but certainly I can say from a personal standpoint that I have recently paid 500SC for a 350+ puppy who was T1, but turned down a 100SC pecan puppy. Obviously it depends what people are playing for, but for sure the current maths feels off in terms of T2 being weighted too high and stats too low?

@OwO thats a really good point!!! Even if its a temporary adjustment I think you're right, the market is flooded with pretty lowstat tier 2s, not JUST flooded in general, but high stat pups are still worth oodles.

So, ok. Let's say we break the stat modifier down into 50 point increments, so you'd have the following:

• <200 - 0.5 modifier
• 200-250 - 1 modifier
• 250-300 - 1.5 modifier
• 300-350 - 2 modifier
• 350-400 - 2.5 modifier
• 400-450 - 3 modifier
• 450+ - 3.5 modifier

So now we're really prioritizing higher stats. Would you also bump the Tier modifier down as well? Maybe to 3? So then we'd have:

Lavender female pup with 240 stats, 4 normal markings, clean breed: 450 SC

Same lavender but with 360 stats: 1350 SC

Marengo male pup with 403 stats, 2 normal markings 1 special, clean breed: 67.5 SC

I'm happier with the tier 2 pricing with the smaller modifier, at least for now, but that still doesn't feel right to me with the male pup price. Maybe the potato modifier should only apply to pups under a certain stat? So if a pup is male, tier 1, and has less than 250? Then our marengo boy would be 135 SC, which still feels low??? Hmmmm.

Don't have any suggestions, but I did do way too much market research, and I hope it helps with adjusting prices to the value of SC. Please note that all of the below metrics are constantly changing, and will be mildly accurate for a week.

DISCLAIMER: PRETTY BAD AT MATH

Wolves and pups at this time account for a third of all trades in the market. This includes wolves that do not have a buyout price. The specific metric is estimated to be 34.48% because I'm bad at math and my method leaves out 19 trades, worst case scenario.

If all the trades for wolves with a buyout were sold, they would make a combined profit of about 347,786 SC, which is enough to buy all the GC that will ever be on the market, and much more. Speaking of which, all the combined 1GC for SC trades are worth ~64,382 SC. This number is changing.

(To find the total trades for something, multiply the total pages by 20. 20 is the amount of trades that can be fit onto a single page, maybe with some buggy deviants every now and then.)

Now, some fun things I found during my research:

1. People prefer to price their wolves in increments of 5.

2. People price their wolves at 10 SC more than any other number.

3. People pricing their wolves that are not in increments of 5 slowly go down as the price of wolves goes higher.

4. There is ~$210 USD worth of GC on the trading center.

5. $200 USD of GC on the trading center was bought as I wrote this, and the conversion rate is now at a solid 1 GC:80 SC.

Will post the raw data if it can help, too! :)

Wow @Lakia that's some really fascinating analysis... Have you found anything on if there's a relation between price and how long a trade is up? Or is that not easily seeable? But either way that's really cool.

Also if anyone is curious this is what my formula is looking like in excel, its a monster:

=(20+(I69*10)+(J69*50))*(if(D69="M","0.5","1"))*(if(H69="One","1","3")*(if((AND(D69="M",H69="One",L69<300)),"0.5","1"))*(if(F69>0.4,"1","1.5")))*(if((AND(D69="F",H69="Two")),"2","1"))*(if(K69="Clean","1","0.75"))*(ifs(L69>=450,"3.5",L69>=400,"3",L69>=350,"2.5",L69>=300,"2",L69>=250,"1.5",L69>=200,"1",L69<200,"0.5"))

and yet I'm so proud of it

Also if anyone wants me to explain how these functions work in excel I'd be happy to chat about that too!! This is all self-taught and once you kind of wrap your brain around how the functions work in excel its wonderfully satisfying to work on, even for me who has some pretty funky dyscalculia going on.

I haven't looked for data to support this, but it would be interesting to see if high stat male pups were sought after as future studs, since that would also affect their price. That example Marengo male could easily reach the leaderboard in his lifetime at the moment since wolves gain at 418 stats through leveling, never mind what they gain through the activities themselves.

@Irn It's not that easy to discern with wolves, but I think there is a connection. You see, GC fly off the market all the time. With GC, the conversion rate is everything. I like to think the conversion rate is controlled mostly by studding, food, art, and auctions. These are also some frequently discussed topics, and you will always see them in the recent chatter thread, food a little less than the others.

Since wolves are pretty closely tied with the GC:SC conversion ratio when they're auctioned, a profitable auction will shift consumer opinion on wolf prices, and GC:SC ratios. The market will eventually shift with it as more competitive prices are put up, so higher priced wolves either stay too expensive or become fair, while the lower prices wolves are not up to standards.

There are also a lot of buried trades with GC payment as an option. The only explanation I can think of there is that people see yellow better than silver, because it stands out against the site, and don't want to pay GC.

I’m not exactly sure how to price check could anyone check my wolves? I have a link. If not it’s ok