There is a problem with trade data.
I've put it all into some excel documents, and found what seems to be a discrepancy.
Tom, the "average" values quoted for prices.... those are average prices/100 bushels with each offer counted as one, equally weighted case, right? That is, an offer to buy/sell 10 bushels is counted the same as an offer to buy/sell 10,000 bushels? I ask because, when I did the fairly simple task of dividing total gold for buy/sell offers by total food for those same offers, I got rather different results than the "average price" quoted by the game data. Maybe you should have the option available to have volume-weighted averages displayed as well?
Also, regarding trade data.... is there a way the game could (maybe on an even bigger timelag) show the amount of food actually bought or sold, and what price those transactions actually occurred at? The problem with tracking offers is that the least profitable offers (or "emergency release valve" offers) will tend to linger on the market for a long time, while profitable offers will vanish, meaning that the data presented will systematically underestimate the profitability of trade.
Just some thoughts on other ways to do the trade data. Not sure how much data you really want to make available, but those are thoughts I've had while trying to work with it.
