Auction Oracle: Research & Discovery Report (Phase 0)

Audit run on 2026-11-05 (about 22:50 UTC), one day after WoW: Forever launched (2026-11-04). Every endpoint was called anonymously with User-Agent: AuctionOracle/0.1. No account was created and no personal data was sent.

Status legend: - TESTED-OK: the endpoint was called and returned 200. - TESTED-FAILED: the endpoint was called and failed; the HTTP code is given. - DOC-ONLY: the endpoint is only described in documentation and was not called.

1. What WoW: Forever is (as far as the data shows)

Fact Value Source / certainty
Launch 2026-11-04 Press (digitalcitizen.life, warcrafttavern.com) and Pinta365 release notes. Confirmed.
Client product wowf / wow_classic_beta, version 1.60.1, builds 70009 to 70790 Item tables (auctionhouse.fyi, Everloot) and the addon API dump. Observed.
Addon interface (TOC) 16001 API dump at atraeau.github.io. Observed.
Level cap 60, horizontal progression Press. Reported.
Realms None. Each region has rulesets instead: EU/US have 1 PvP, 2 Normal, 3 RP, 15 RP-PvP; KR/TW have only 1 and 2. Blizzard forum thread. Reported, not verified (needs a token).
Auction houses One per ruleset × faction, for example forever.normal.horde.us auctionhouse.fyi market ids. Observed. A guide calls the AH "global"; that claim is unverified.
AH cut / deposit Unknown. Classic uses a 5% cut on faction AHs. No source. The app treats the cut as an editable ESTIMATED setting.
Raids unlock 2026-12-09 guildorder.com, third party. Reported, not confirmed by Blizzard.

2. Source matrix

# Source Auth What works today Freshness Limits Licence / commercial use Verdict
1 Blizzard Game Data API (develop.battle.net) OAuth client credentials (account plus authenticator) Namespaces static-/dynamic-/profile-forever-{region} (forum). Auctions: /data/wow/ruleset/{id}/auctions returns 404, which means no AH data. Forever has no official documentation. n/a 36k requests/h, 100 req/s Blizzard Developer API Terms. Commercial reuse of the data is restricted (read the terms before SaaS use). Connector built. Today it reports unavailable for auctions, with the reason.
2 auctionhouse.fyi none for public reads; Bearer token for live data TESTED-OK: /ah, /ah/{m}/snapshot, /ah/{m}/history, /ah/{m}/{item}, /ah/{m}/{item}/candles, /items (full 10,631-item catalogue in one call), /items/search-index, /me. TESTED-FAILED 403 (needs a token): live table, /book, batch /candles?items=. Hourly snapshot taken at the top of the hour. History is 7 days for anonymous readers. 60 requests/min/IP No licence published. Attribution is requested through auctionhouse.fyi/item/{key}?m={market}. Ask permission before any commercial use. Main live price feed. Data comes from player uploads with a consensus check. 2 of 6 US markets have data (normal-horde: 4 contributors).
3 Everloot (everloot.app, GitHub Everloot/everloot) none (free key raises limits) TESTED-OK: /api/items (31,960 items), /api/edges/client-layer (2.6 MB recipe graph: created_by 3,335, reagent_for 9,635, in_skill_line 2,670), /api/corpus/public?kinds=vendor, /api/health. /api/market/prices returns an empty list (not enough reporters yet). /database/download returns 403 behind Cloudflare and was not bypassed. Corpus every 10 min; a fact needs 3 agreeing installs 30 requests/h/IP anonymous Code AGPL-3.0. Data CC BY-SA 4.0, so share-alike applies to derived datasets. Game-file data belongs to Blizzard. Recipe graph source. Reagent quantities and skill ranges are not available yet.
4 Everloot MCP (/mcp/public) none TESTED-OK: 32 tools, including profession_path, recipe_thresholds, market_value, item_page and vendor_page. Profession paths currently return a gap: "No agreed recipe". live per IP, limit not stated same as Everloot Usable later; the data is still sparse.
5 wow.gg public API none (per its docs) TESTED-FAILED 403 on openapi.json and /docs. The host looks like a dev deployment (fastapi-dev-…railway.app). n/a 60/min (per docs) CC BY 4.0 (per docs) Connector built with a health check. Disabled until the API answers.
6 ForeverDB API key; needs a Battle.net login and manual approval TESTED-FAILED 401 without a key. Docs list items (with sell price), vendors (with prices), professions (with reagents, skill colours and trainer cost). n/a 60/min, 10k/day "Don't resell the data". Link required. Not usable commercially. Connector built. It turns on when the user enters their own key. This is the best source for recipe quantities.
7 WoW: Forever addon API (atraeau.github.io) n/a TESTED-OK api.json: Interface 16001. C_AuctionHouse.ReplicateItems and GetReplicateItemInfo are present. Legacy QueryAuctionItems and GetAuctionItemInfo are absent. C_TradeSkillUI.GetRecipeSchematic is present. n/a Server-side AH throttling No licence stated Our own addon collects full listings (market depth) and recipe quantities.
8 Forum thread "WoW Forever API: what works so far" n/a Read (200). Confirms namespaces and rulesets. Auctions return 404. TS client: Pinta365/blizzard_api (MIT, no auctions). 2026-11-05 n/a n/a Reference only.

Community projects found: AuctionatorMarketValue, AuctionatorSync, wow-addons/GoldFinder, ironforge-exchange-commission, craft-ladder. All of them are addon- or sync-based; none uses an official API. Avoided: auto-auction-bot-wow-forever. It is an automated buy/post bot, which breaks the ToS and may carry malware.

3. Consequences for the design

  1. No official auction source exists. Prices come from (a) auctionhouse.fyi hourly snapshots and (b) the user's own addon scans. Every observation keeps its source and timestamp. Markets are never merged across sources.
  2. History is short: 7 days anonymous, starting 2026-11-04. Forecasts beyond about 2 days will mostly answer INSUFFICIENT_DATA for the first weeks. Auction Oracle stores every hourly snapshot locally, so its own history grows from the first run onward. This is the system's main long-term data asset.
  3. Recipes: the graph (product ↔ reagents ↔ profession) comes from Everloot game files. Quantities come from the user's addon (C_TradeSkillUI.GetRecipeSchematic) or from ForeverDB with the user's key. A small Mining/Blacksmithing seed uses Classic reference quantities. It is marked ESTIMATED / classic-reference and is checked against Everloot's graph before it is accepted.
  4. Vendor prices (sell/buy) come from the item catalogue (sell, buy), observed from game data. AH-below-vendor-sell is the only deterministic arbitrage, so it gets the highest confidence.
  5. Market depth needs full listings. auctionhouse.fyi's order book requires a token (403), so depth is computed from addon scans and is otherwise shown as UNKNOWN.
  6. Farming routes: no reliable, licensed node-coordinate data source exists for Forever, so generated routes would be fiction. Auction Oracle instead records the player's actual farming sessions (duration and loot) and computes real gold per hour against buying from the AH.
  7. Release calendar: Blizzard publishes no machine-readable calendar. Events are entered with source URL and certainty (confirmed / reported / estimated). Nothing is invented. The seed contains only the launch (confirmed) and the raid unlock (reported, third party).
  8. Screenshot OCR: not shipped in v0.1. No OCR engine is installed, and the addon export is strictly more accurate. The connector interface leaves room for it.
  9. Licensing for SaaS: Everloot's data is fine (CC BY-SA, share-alike). auctionhouse.fyi needs written permission. ForeverDB forbids resale. Blizzard data is governed by its API terms. The SaaS architecture therefore keeps a per-source commercial_ok flag and serves only allowed sources publicly.