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All About Tamriel Savings Co

written by SavageTSC

SavageTSC – Owner, Webmaster, Database Manager, Streamer, Auction Host, Mom, not a guy
VillhemVonka – Managing Partner, Developer, Programmer, College Student, not a used car salesman
DesignLogan – Volunteer, Graphic Designer, Web Designer, Puppy Dad, a real genuine dude

What we do…

Tamriel Savings Co. provides a sale history database, not necessarily a price guide. It is imperative that users of this tool recognize the difference. The prices you see in the item lists are harvested from the sales history of trading guilds each week, meaning we show what items sold for, not what players are listing them for. Just because an item is listed for a certain price in a trader, doesn’t mean someone is actually willing to pay that price.

While we strive to provide a relevant snapshot of the community’s current market, it is important to acknowledge there are multiple options for finding accurate pricing. You can ask guild members and fellow players or manually search through traders to see what items are currently listed for. There are plenty of knowledgeable traders willing to lend their expertise. Then you have pricing websites and apps. What makes TSC stand out above others is that our data is pulled directly from trading guilds’ sales history. Every sale entered in the database is an actual in-game transaction and is completely void of any personal influence.

Multiple price statistic are reported for each item: common range, average, minimum, median, maximum, and average stack price. The common range gives you the price range most sales fall between (for you math junkies, this is the 10-90 percentile range), which helps weed out under cutting and deliberate high priced sales. The average price is just that, the average of all sales recorded. The median is the price exactly in the middle of the pack. This is often similar to the average, but for the sake of reporting true statistics, I didn’t want to leave it out. The minimum and maximum reflect the absolute lowest and highest sale price of that item. The average stack price multiples the average price by the common stack size.

All of this data can be useful when it comes to determining the value of any particular item, which is why many players use TSC services.

How we do it…

Here at Tamriel Savings Co., we offer a variety of information related to the in-game guild trader market. All information provided is hard data taken directly from in game sources:

  • Item price data is pulled from the sales history of multiple in-game guilds. 
  • Current Trader Locations are pulled from the Guild Finder or by visiting each trader stall.
  • The Guild Info list shows all guilds that have hired a trader in the past 90 days (rolling) and details are provided by someone in that guild. If you would like to update your guild’s info, please contact us.

Sales data is harvested from approximately 30 guilds on Tuesday of each week, recording all sales from the previous 7 days. Before the sales are added to the database, I manually comb through the data to correct any errors, format item names, remove items we do not track, and categorize new items.

When this project first started, all sales history data was obtained through manual transcription. This painstaking process took multiple people countless hours and caused many hand cramps. Bringing digital scanning to the project allowed us to increase the sales volume quite a lot, while reducing the amount of time spent pounding away at the keyboard.

Each week the database goes through a purge we like to call the “data dump.” This removes old data to prevent it from skewing new data, thus making the lists more flexible and responsive to market change. Here’s how data purging works:

  • At a minimum, we keep the past 30 days of sales for all items. For items that don’t sell very often we keep a minimum of 5 sales (less if we haven’t recorded 5 sales yet). Here’s an example: I usually get anywhere from 1000 to 1500 Kuta records a week, which means the prices you see are from the past week. Tenmar Millet-Carrot Couscous, the actual crafted food rarely sells, I’ve only recorded 3 sales of it in 2 years, so the available data goes back to August 2021.

We keep historical records of all data collected in the Archive section, however we value the privacy of our contributing guilds and the integrity of the trading market as a whole. Here are a few things we do not provide or disclose:

  • We do not pull sales data from current listings, zone chat, auctions or 3rd party sources (Band, Discord, etc.). There is zero human influence on any sales data provided.
  • We do not share sales data in conjunction with a specific guild, meaning you can’t see a list of sales from a specific guild.
  • We do not provide nor do we collect information related to the gold cost of hiring traders. If you have the moxie to ask a GM how much they bid on their trader, go for it!

The website and Discord bot are updated simultaneously from the same database.

What the data means…

Here’s a brief explanation of what all the numbers mean:

  • Common Range: 90% of all sales for this item fall between these two prices. Sometimes people grossly undercut or overprice items which affects the Average. With Kutas, the average just happens to fall right between the two numbers, but a lot of times it doesn’t so this gives you a broader view.
  • The Average, Minimum and Maximum I think are self-explanatory so I’ll skip those.
  • Median: This is the sale price that falls exactly in the middle of all the sales. 1 2 3 4 5 … 3 is the Median. This price is often similar to the average, and maybe it’s not necessary, but I just couldn’t exclude it. Mathing… Oi…
  • Average Stack Price: This is the Common Stack Size (the most commonly sold number of units in all the sales recorded) multiplied by the Average price.
  • Oldest Record: This one confuses people the most. This is NOT how old all the data is… it’s how old the oldest recorded sale is. Almost all crafting materials are purged after 4 weeks because they sell frequently. Other items don’t sell as often, so it’s good to know how old the data is. I keep a minimum of 5 sales for each item, unless I haven’t recorded 5 sales yet, some items I’ve only seen once or twice. Let’s say the current trade week is 7/5/2022 and the “Oldest Sale” date of an item is 6/14/2022, which means all sales recorded for that item were made between Tuesday, June 14 and Tuesday, July 5. If the number of sales recorded is 5, that means 5 sales have been recorded between April 26 and the current date.

Who we are…

Tamriel Savings Co (known by a different name in the beginning) started out as a hobby and eventually grew in to a full blown project. It got it’s footing thanks to a group of like minded individuals who did all that manual data transcribing I mentioned earlier. We were lucky if we recorded 10,000 sales a month though, because the process was so time consuming. Unlike PC, there is no way to internally data mine on consoles. As the months went on people grew tired and the number of transcribers started to dwindle. Having faith in the Eights and not wanting the project to fail, I quit my day job and began transcribing sales data full time, getting it up to roughly 20,000 sales a month.

I’ll be honest, I grew tired of it as well. I was quite literally praying to the Divines when a fellow player popped into my DM’s with a miracle in hand. That’s when I partnered with my programmer and right hand mer, VillhemVonka. I affectionately call him Vonka and let me tell you, this guy is a right genius! Gone are the days of manually transcribing, because he single handedly developed a program that transcribes the sales data for me! That’s not to say I don’t still spend a lot of time working on the project, because the scanning process has it’s own time consuming process, but now we pull in 100k+ sales a week and I’m only spending about 40-45 hours a week working on it instead of 60-70. Vonka is also responsible for developing the TSC Assistant Discord bot and the TSC Price Fetcher on the website. 

Everything we do for TSC is volunteer work, which is why we campaign for donations and sponsors. I’m a single mom who (no joke) gave up her day job to make this project a viable resource for the ESO Xbox NA community. Vonka is a college student still carving out his place in the world. TSC might be free for you, but it’s not free for us. We pay for servers, web hosts, data processing, equipment, and the list goes on. If you love TSC as much as we do and want to help, head over the Donate page to find out how! Want to reach out to myself or VillhemVonka? We’re on Band, Discord, Facebook and Twitter. Just search Tamriels Savings and slide into the DMs. And don’t forget to check out the Tamriel Free Press, a monthly newsletter written by fellow members of the ESO community!