No market data? Let's make some.
By
Adeon Hawkwood,
Posted on: 2011-02-23 08:59 in The Market and Inventions
This is a very interesting idea indeed.
Ideally the very best thing to do would be to include it as part of a new version of Herostats, or Titan Sentinel (as opt-in options) simply to have a wider install base.
Titan Sentinel also communicates with servers already so technically that side of the app would be done.
*Edit : Checking their forums I see this mentioned :http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index....ic,3814.0.html
That's slightly different but it shows they're thinking along those lines so maybe they've also allowed for market tracking in v1.0.
Edit #2 : Hope you don't mind, I've reposted your suggestion over at the Sentinel forums as well here :
http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index....ic,3818.0.html
Regardless of the technical feasibility, I'm opposed to this idea from an ethical standpoint.
Having a detailed market history complete with past transactions and the prices that things are posted for directly undermines the system as it has been implemented in the game, and consequently gives an unfair advantage to those in-the-know over those who are just playing the game the way it was provided to them.
To anyone who would set up a centralized market database: don't. Reading character builds or reminding the user to cast buffs is one thing, but when it comes to side-stepping an information boundary that the devs put in place for a reason, you're treading their side of the privacy pool.
They don't share your private information with others, so don't go sharing theirs.
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Originally Posted by GuyPerfect
Regardless of the technical feasibility, I'm opposed to this idea from an ethical standpoint.
Having a detailed market history complete with past transactions and the prices that things are posted for directly undermines the system as it has been implemented in the game, and consequently gives an unfair advantage to those in-the-know over those who are just playing the game the way it was provided to them. To anyone who would set up a centralized market database: don't. Reading character builds or reminding the user to cast buffs is one thing, but when it comes to side-stepping an information boundary that the devs put in place for a reason, you're treading their side of the privacy pool. They don't share your private information with others, so don't go sharing theirs. |
Just a different set of advantages for different people in the know.
A lot of people that play the market already make private databases or spreadsheets for this kind of information. The only difference is that they have to do a lot of work to record all of the information by themselves. Making an online database would simply increase the ease with which people could make informed decisions about buying and selling on the market.
It seems to me like the kind of people that would not want this kind of utility are those that are already in the know, and do not want others to possess the same kind of knowledge because it would increase competition.
The case would be considerably different, however, if such a utility recorded posting prices.
The difference between watching the market and writing down values, and having a program write down values for every person using the market...
...is roughly the same difference as grinding through missions to get to level 50, and having a bot control your character so you can get to 50 while you sleep.
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This is different from me, a self-confirmed marketeer, vs the unwashed masses how? I've already got a lot better pricing picture in my head even if it isn't computer-perfect-digital-accuracy. They don't. Honestly, this sort of idea actually hurts marketeers more than the unwashed masses because it levels the playing field between us some.|
Originally Posted by GuyPerfect
Regardless of the technical feasibility, I'm opposed to this idea from an ethical standpoint.
Having a detailed market history complete with past transactions and the prices that things are posted for directly undermines the system as it has been implemented in the game, and consequently gives an unfair advantage to those in-the-know over those who are just playing the game the way it was provided to them. |
But it gives us good data to argue about, and I think a lot of marketeers are actually probably more interested in that than any slight loss-of-advantage over the masses it'd incur us.
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To anyone who would set up a centralized market database: don't. Reading character builds or reminding the user to cast buffs is one thing, but when it comes to side-stepping an information boundary that the devs put in place for a reason, you're treading their side of the privacy pool. They don't share your private information with others, so don't go sharing theirs. |
To be honest, you should be assuming this is already being done. I'd bet the gold farming shops are already paying someone the pittance they do to sit there and collect this data on the market. We already know from others who have posted things like 1 to 1 billion inf in a week RL that you can make quite some cash at the market if you even casually try. Having someone paid to run the market for 10 hours a day at a gold farming company... I'm sure they could do a lot better than 1 billion per week -- maybe faster than actually farming maps.
I had a previous "shared data" plan which was a lot less data than the market and a lot more use, personally, to me, which I can tell you'd like even less.
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Nobody's suggesting the latter. That'd be against the EULA/ToS because you'd have to crack their network data stream, and then write a bot to sit there and scan every page of the market (aka WoW's Auctioneer).|
Originally Posted by GuyPerfect
The difference between watching the market and writing down values, and having a program write down values for every person using the market...
...is roughly the same difference as grinding through missions to get to level 50, and having a bot control your character so you can get to 50 while you sleep. |
I'm talking about looking for the correct pairs of "You receive XYZ from the market. You paid XYZ to the market." that are generated as you collect sold items in your chat logs.
I think it's more like the difference between using a spreadsheet and using a build planner. But analogies haven't been an accepted reasoning tool since logic was invented.
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This had dawned on me as a huge issue. My plan had been to make the client open-source -- preferably a scripting language. Since I'd been thinking I might host on AppEngine, that'd lead to Python as the language of choice.|
Originally Posted by hemmingway3
The case would be considerably different, however, if such a utility recorded posting prices.
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Then it is easy to inspect that it is in fact only sending the sold data up to the server. Of course, you'd end up having to give it your google account credentials to send the data to appengine (gotta have a way to ban people who feed bogus data -- because some folks get their lulz from that). Some folks may not like that, so it'd be easy enough to implement an "upload file" web page too on appengine, but then that has the ability to pull out posting prices too, which is less good.
Ultimately it comes down to trust of the folks writing/running it.
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Is there a way to find out what items are linked to the inf transactions? Archie and I thought about something along those lines a while back, but if it's inf values only without the items, it seemed like it would have fairly limited utility.
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Originally Posted by Rhysem
Much like herostats can watch your CoH channel logs and remind you of buffs to recast, it wouldn't be that hard to write a little application to do the same, but look for market transactions (specifically the got/paid-5% pairs) and ship the data up to a big old database of transactions somewhere on the internet. Say maybe Google's appengine...
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Arc#314490: Zombie Ninja Pirates!
Defiant @Grouchybeast
Death is part of my attack chain.
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Don't overlook the fundamental function of the market: you don't know exactly what others are posting for, and you don't know exactly how much others are willing to pay. In order for it to actually be a market, sellers need to take a risk and sell low, and buyers need to take a risk and buy high.|
Originally Posted by Rhysem
This is different from me, a self-confirmed marketeer, vs the unwashed masses how? I've already got a lot better pricing picture in my head even if it isn't computer-perfect-digital-accuracy. They don't. Honestly, this sort of idea actually hurts marketeers more than the unwashed masses because it levels the playing field between us some.
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Now, imagine a detailed log that goes back several weeks saying exactly what people posted for and exactly how much people paid for it. And at the top of the list, it shows exactly what people are asking for the items currently on the market.
There's no risk for the buyer there: you know exactly how much you'll have to spend. The seller gets shafted and what was once an economy is thrown out the window.
How is that different from you and the unwashed masses? You participate in a market.
"Paging Gordon Gekko. Paging Gordon Gekko. ...Uh, sir, I think they're onto us."
*Begins shredding documents.
DOOOOOOOM!
Ok, seriously. I think that if someone were to write a program that could read the market data over long periods of time for you, without writing the data out yourself. It would effectively make the savy marketers even stronger. I seriously doubt a sizable portion of the game community seriously works very hard marketting in this game. There's plenty of people who still do not wait, and place bids at buy it now prices (myself included). All this would do is make the uber marketters... gods.
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Linking to one of the other market threads...|
Originally Posted by Grouchybeast
Is there a way to find out what items are linked to the inf transactions? Archie and I thought about something along those lines a while back, but if it's inf values only without the items, it seemed like it would have fairly limited utility.
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http://coh103.gtm.cityofheroes.com/s...=226514&page=3
The screenshot about half way down. The "you put" + "5% listing fee" and the "you got" + "% final cut" should be sufficient to track it down.
No, you're right actually there's going to end up being too many assumptions you'd have to make there. Since you don't know that they priced things in the same order they put them on the AH in.
I suppose the other option is doing something akin to fraps, but instead of saving the image doing OCR against it for the sold tab being highlighted then recording what is seen there. Messy though.
Then again at that point you may as well just OCR for the last-5-sales prices and be done with it. Still will have to deal with redundant/duplicate data, especially on high-volume movers.
Edit: I tried a quick test with tesseract-ocr but failed to get it to do anything with the low-rez screenshots. I'll try tonight at home when I can make my own high-res screenshots and see if it has more luck there.
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You can't make the logical leaps you are between the list of data collected by under 1% of the player base inputting what they list and sold for and an all-knowning database that can tell you the exact minimum you need to bid to get an IO down to the last 1 inf. Not that, as grouchy points out, it is clear we can get that data.|
Originally Posted by GuyPerfect
Don't overlook the fundamental function of the market: you don't know exactly what others are posting for, and you don't know exactly how much others are willing to pay. In order for it to actually be a market, sellers need to take a risk and sell low, and buyers need to take a risk and buy high.
Now, imagine a detailed log that goes back several weeks saying exactly what people posted for and exactly how much people paid for it. And at the top of the list, it shows exactly what people are asking for the items currently on the market. There's no risk for the buyer there: you know exactly how much you'll have to spend. The seller gets shafted and what was once an economy is thrown out the window. How is that different from you and the unwashed masses? You participate in a market. |
Put another way: those not participating in collecting data mean the market keeps its qualities despite more people having data.
All you can say about the data we're talking about collecting is it gives you a better average and standard deviation. Nothing exact by any means.
I doubt such a database would be excessively problematic. Back when I played WoW I used Auctioneer a good deal and even with the orders of magnitude more information it gives compared to a system like this it wasn't a hardly a win button. Did it help? Hell yeah. Best addon I even downloaded. But even if you did have a weeks-long graph detailing the trends on an item and knew the exact listing prices of that item you still got burned, you still got undercut and you where still vulnerable to the usual fickleness of market trends.
Just my 2 inf on the matter.
I don't think the devs put in information barriers for a reason other than "don't have a good plan for how to make the information available cheaply".
I think they did actually limit the info intentionally, much like the theory about limited <all types of storage>* to force people to trade things on the market rather than hoard them like other games.
I just don't like said artificial limit. Its like playing board games where he-with-the-best-memory-wins. I'd prefer a little more strategy and less memorization, thanks.
* Of course they've massively undercut the limited storage these days, between all the boosts you can get, RWZ salvage booster, and base changes, so....
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This statement is roughly irrelevant because such a program would roughly require someone to roughly opt in. This is also roughly a gross use of hyperbole.
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Originally Posted by GuyPerfect
The difference between watching the market and writing down values, and having a program write down values for every person using the market...
...is roughly the same difference as grinding through missions to get to level 50, and having a bot control your character so you can get to 50 while you sleep. |
I agree with GuyPerfect. The devs specifically chose 5 things in the last 5. Automating a way to bypass that is outside the allowable addon line.
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Originally Posted by Chaos Creator
I agree with GuyPerfect. The devs specifically chose 5 things in the last 5. Automating a way to bypass that is outside the allowable addon line.
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And that would include things like trading between servers, setting up a red blue currency exchange or providing a secure way to have transactions that bypass the inf cap as other things you would be against by the same logic ?
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AUTOMATING any of that. Yes.
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Originally Posted by Another_Fan
And that would include things like trading between servers, setting up a red blue currency exchange or providing a secure way to have transactions that bypass the inf cap as other things you would be against by the same logic ?
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To put it another way if the system is set up such that you must manually enter everything. That's fine
The AUTOMATION is what I and, I believe, others take issue with.
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Shrug. I'm a system administrator / programmer by trade. I automate away any boring task I can.
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Originally Posted by Chaos Creator
To put it another way if the system is set up such that you must manually enter everything. That's fine
The AUTOMATION is what I and, I believe, others take issue with. |
I'm going to toss in with the no side here.
I firmly believe that the devs should add more price trend info to the main market interface but I also think that an automated system to collect and distribute it is a bit questionable. It's mostly the distribution bit that concerns me, if the program simply stored the data for the user to peruse I wouldn't mind but aggregated data is giving a huge benefit to those who use it over those who don't.
Much like herostats can watch your CoH channel logs and remind you of buffs to recast, it wouldn't be that hard to write a little application to do the same, but look for market transactions (specifically the got/paid-5% pairs) and ship the data up to a big old database of transactions somewhere on the internet. Say maybe Google's appengine...
Writing such an application: not so hard. The hard part is getting people to run it.
Thoughts?