Happy Friday everybody! One thing that I have been very curious to see information on is a chart tracking villager auction prices and their trading volume over time (i.e. since the game was released). Does anybody know if any such data exists? I've done a couple elementary searches online but have not managed to find a comprehensive data set.
It would be interesting to see the types of trends that would be revealed by the data. For example, do villager prices decrease around holidays because people feel more generous? It also could help create a more concrete set of ratings for villager tier lists.
If anybody has this data readily available, let me know! If this data is not available, would anybody on the board be interested in forming a team to compile the data?
Thanks so much for taking the time to read this thread and have a great day ^_^
Hmm i don't think any data has been made, however you can just read through past threads to get an idea.
I only have an idea about Marshal's value. When i first join, Summer/Fall time, Marshal sold btwn 40-60 mil. Nowadays, he is sold around 15-35m.. I think the fact that a lot of people have marshal in their town might be making the demand go down.
Also, when i first joined the forums, there weren't many cyclers but now there's dozens on the villager trading board which makes it easier for people to obtain their dreamies so I dont see as many auction/selling threads as i used to.
I cycle so if anyone wants to start compiling the data, I will be more than happy to report to someone every time I sell, auction, or giveaway a villager.
Villager popularity changes with time too - I remember back when Shep was the most sought after villager, now he's nowhere to be seen! Julian seems less popular than he used to be too...
That makes sense on the trend seen for Marshall! The impact of village cyclers has to be pretty big too. I wonder if you could see a pronounced dip in value around when it became popular.
I work in finance and have a strong economics background, so this information definitely intrigues me. I would love to have the time to go through all the posts and put something together, but unfortunately I don't have the most time in the world. Maybe it could be a summer project haha.
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Fallenchaoskitten, I would love to keep track of your transactions if you'd like to keep me posted on them!
Summ3rain, I totally agree that villager popularity shifts and changes (just like in real life). I do agree that Julian does seem less popular. I never knew that Shep was highly sought after either!
I think the best way to go about a project like this would be to have people take a month and comb through all of the forum posts to hone in on transactions. I'd be happy to make a spreadsheet template to get things started lol.
That would be a cool project to compile actually! I'd love to see the data and trends on this kind of stuff!
I've noticed certain demands for villagers go way down as well, like when I was auctioning Stitches there was barely any interest in him which I thought was odd :/
Glad that other people share a similar curiousity I wonder if part of the decline in prices could be attributed to the game having been out for a longer period of time? (i.e. there is less irrational exuberance about Animal Crossing after the game has been out for 9 months compared to when it was only a month or two old)
A nifty overlay to test for correlation would be game sales, which could be used/modified into a proxy for users playing the game (you'd look at cumulative units sold and try to figure out an attrition pattern from existing users from the previous month).
I would like to know this too, but I think it would be difficult. I've seen the same villager go for 15mil and 30mil. That just seems like too big of a disparity to accurately calculate anything. It seems like people get caught up in whatever villagers are currently the most popular and are willing to pay more than they need to in order to get the villager as quickly as possible. These people inflate the villager prices.
I've seen auctions where the hb is 6mil but instead of going up a reasonable amount, a person will come in and bid 20mil just so they can get the villager ASAP. This seems silly to me and just inflates the prices of the villagers.
Lavendar, you make a very good point. I think that there'd have to be a way to account for that in the study (i.e. you'd need to calculate the difference between the final bid and the penultimate bid).
Has anybody ever seen sealed price, second bid auctions done for villagers? I wonder what prices would look like if people did that method instead of traditional english auctions.
I've been told to include villager prices on my popularity thread in the VTP, but it's so difficult 'cos of how often the prices fluctuate..
Marshal goes for 20-40mil quite often, while at the other end of tier one, Erik and Whitney tend to go for around 15mil and under
But the reason that villager popularity (and prices) dropped so suddenly is because of the huge influx of cycling threads and cyclers in general.. So many people giving away popular villagers mean that people don't feel the need to compete with others in auctions when they can stalk for them in a cycling thread
However the cycling frenzy of Christmas has fizzled out slowly, and so prices are beginning to climb and re-stabilise..
But popularity will be ever changing, and my thread will keep up with that!
Ooh you have a thread with some of this? I will have to check it out.
The Christmas explanation makes a lot of sense. There could definitely be correlation with when people have time off from school, an influx of new players playing the game and villager prices.
I will be curious to see where prices go when we get to late spring and then again during summer.
I wonder if part of the decline in prices could be attributed to the game having been out for a longer period of time? (i.e. there is less irrational exuberance about Animal Crossing after the game has been out for 9 months compared to when it was only a month or two old)
