The website GW2Shinies.com is the pet project of Sam Hemingway, a graduate of the University at Buffalo’s Computer Science & Engineering program, which gives insights to players of ArenaNet’s Guild Wars 2 insights into the player driven economy. It serves as an example of how, when a massively multiplayer game exposes in game data to 3rd party developers, that data can be used to build tools for the community of that game.

Guild Wars 2 has seen over two years of increasing popularity and with its first expansion on the way has had a bustling audience of players—this means not only new players, but old players who want to be able to understand and take advantage of the in game market.

This is where a website like GW2Shinies comes in by providing market data and a set of tools that provide insight into that market.

Right now, players can use the web page to look up prices, listed with in game currency costs, for buy and sell orders on the GW2 auction house. This includes anything that can be bought and sold between players in the game. Each item also comes with its own graph showing its price history (like many other market tools for real world items) tracked on windows of daily, 3 days, weekly, monthly, and even yearly. Players can also add specific items to a watchlist, in case they want to track prices long-term.

The site also provides tools that give players insights into the market itself.

With a view of the market and links leading to charts, GW2Shinies gives a lot of depth and insight.Image: Screenshot from GW2Shinies.com

Smart Find provides a list of items most likely to turn a profit by looking at buy orders, sell orders, and the apparent demand for the item. Currently, one of the best returns on investment in the game is a legendary weapon warhorn named “Howler” which is selling for almost 2,449 gold. An impressive sum for anyone playing GW2.

Shiny Salvage acts as a tool that tells players if it’s better to sell an item outright on the marketplace, or destroy it for its components (in GW2 this is called salvaging.) Sometimes the components that come from destroying an item as salvage are in more demand than the item itself.

Skill Alchemy looks at a type of crafting in the game where items can be thrown together into a thing called the Mystic Forge (MF) to craft other items. Like in real life, sometimes the whole does in fact sell better than the sum of its parts. For example the exotic scepter “Immobulus” takes 1,047 gold to make but sells for 1,699 gold. An important part of the economy with the MF is a currency players earn by levelling up called “skill points,” which are used to buy items used in the MF. The Skill Alchemy tool tracks how much each skill point is worth in gold crafting and selling a particular item.

While all prototypes all of these tools provide extremely valuable insights into the way the Guild Wars 2 economy works—this is especially useful for new players who want to make virtual coin in the game

One Guild Wars 2 market tool in many

This isn’t the first tool out there to help Guild Wars 2 players, the game has been on the market over two years, but Hemingway explains that he chose to go for it because he thought he could build a better website.

“I saw a multitude of functionality issues/formatting issues with other websites,” Hemingway explained, referring to why he started developing GW2Shinies.com. “My vision of gw2shinies is to be unmatched in not only speed, but also cleanness and functionality. I’m a little over a month into development and have already made great progress so far.”

Hemingway also told SiliconAngle that he feels that it takes more than just going to college “to adapt and survive in the developer’s world” and that means learning by doing. As a Guild Wars 2 player he saw a market opening and something he could do. Thus GW2Shinies.com came to be born.

A look at how GW2Shinies does the Skill Alchemy tool.
Image: Screenshot from GW2Shinies.com

Under the hood with GW2Shinies

Hemingway brags that the GW2Shinies website updates its database every five minutes and has page speeds of one second or less. Curious, SiliconAngle asked what he used to construct this useful tool and what it was like connecting to the Guild Wars 2 API.

The current page is made with JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL—making this project look like it’s right out of the LAMP stack.

To get the job done, Hemingway says he used Notepad++ as a crude-but-functional development environment.

“Simpler has always been better for me (and its free!) which is why I prefer to build my projects from scratch,” he says.

As for interfacing with GW2’s API, through which the game developers expose a lot of interesting market and game data, Hemingway says, “For simple tasks, accessing the API is a breeze,” but he found a little bit of a challenge working out the kinks of running a database update every 5 minutes with a cron job on the server side.

This meant making sure that the code that ran in the cron job was elegant and mindful of memory concerns, which can become an issue with rapid-fire queries to an API for updates—because GW2’s marketplace can be a volatile place.

He says that he also went the route of a 5 minute interval in the background polling the GW2 API so that increased visitors would not stress his connection to the GW2 API. It meant that visitors would always have an at-most 5 minute local version of the data from the marketplace to look at.

Plus, having that particular update rate, Hemingway says, would help put him on player’s radar.

Did Hemingway hit his mark? If you’re a Guild Wars 2 player or not, check out GW2Shinies and see what sort of information it reveals.

Image credit: ArenaNet, Guild Wars 2, and logo from GW2Shinies.com