First of all, apologies if this has been suggested before, I tried going through the first few pages of the suggestion boards, but the search came up a quite messy.

As a newbie, I'm finding it difficult at times to get a clue of item values.

Sometimes I can look at the item auctions, see active bids people are currently offering to pay for an item, and I see item buyout people are hoping to get, but it's harder to get an idea of what items actually sell for.

I try to search the forums but likewise, I see mention of items being given away or sold, but don't see any prices mentioned, and threads quickly become quite old as well.

The example to prompt me to post this is the rainbow potion an island is currently offering me, which granted is probably one of the more rare and less commonly sold items, but I've felt similar uncertainty with pricechecks on other items.

As such, would it be possible to do a search on items, and get a rough breakdown on what items sold for in, say, the last week or so? Nothing fancy, just to give people a general idea of what an item has been selling for.

This is a good idea that might be helpful. Getting an average of what these things are sold for would help fair prices be developed.

I agree, it's a good idea, but would be pretty hard to implement, due to various reason:

For pet trades, when placing prices, you have to take into consideration a bunch of variables: Deviant, GP, gender, genes and combination of, etc, so a global sales history here pretty much won't too much, especially with how some players are placing pet prices extremely low/high.

For the Items Trade, it might work, but, like most markets, you'll have to take into consideration supply and demand; an example would be Rainbow Jaws, when I sold some of mine, they went for around 80k, because there were barely any selling, I think mine was the only one up, now it's around 40-50k maybe. Same with a bunch of other items, such as Energy Jar (Exploration events) and Vermillion (being the biggest one, where prices fluctuate due to players trying to control prices). -- Also, some players just don't bother checking prices and place items for what they think it's worth, or accidentally placed them for a low amount (Happens to me frequently, since I don't double check). Also, you'll have to take into consideration resellers, people who buy cheap items, then sell them again for a higher price. This has happened before with vermillion, where some players sell them for around 500 silver each, then someone goes and buys it, and places them for 1000 each, like with supply and demand, if there is a high supply, this won't work, but when there isn't it'll work wonders. Lastly, you'll have to take account for if it was buyout or bidding. To my knowledge, most players would use buyout, as it's a hassle to enter a 'bid war' for the item, but it can happen, if the item is placed cheap enough (an example is Energy Drinks being placed for around 100~1000 silver).

Now that the problems are out of the way, you'll have to take into consideration how it'll be implemented, such as looks and load; Would it give you a listing of all the prices, time, etc, of the item you're looking at? If so, I would think the lag would be pretty high, (if you take into consideration how long it takes to pull up 5+ pets when looking at the childrens). Also, you say about a week, so would the 'history' be deleted daily, or weekly (Such as Sunday, when the rewards are given out)?

What I had in mind was something along the lines of, for example:

Vermillion
Cheapest: 250S
Most expensive: 5000S
Average: 1250S

Or perhaps even just the average, but I certainly see your points after buying and selling a few things, prices are very fickle.

Perhaps even something as simple as keeping finished auctions viewable for 24 hours?
The moment something is sold, all record of it is lost, save to the buyer and seller, so that to me feels like the biggest hurdle, since it leaves mostly the unreasonable offers left for us to view.

I agree with the last suggestion here, jast making finnished auctions viewable for a longer period of time, I think, would really level out 'item/pet worth' and give a new player a range of price idea for an item in a recent time frame. 

I also would find it beneficial if the stuff on the reports page stayed a couple days longer, however I know this takes up server space, I just think both histories would be super useful if possible.