No market data? Let's make some.

i support this philosophy.

While I understand and agree, I'm not sure how feasible this is. HeroStats works because all the info it collects is relevant to your interests so gets echoed to the client. An app like this would either need to 1) collect info resulting from user requests to the market or 2) query the market for that info.

In case 1 you only get access to stuff people look at [regularly], which would put some pretty gaping holes in your data. This may be swell, and the best way to do it, incomplete data notwithstanding.

In case 2 you bog the market down with automated requests and slow it to a crawl. I can see this being very unpopular both with players and devs.

What were you expecting/planning on?

Bots are illegal in every nearly game. Guess what a bot does?

This argument is therefore invalid.

I've written a bot that was within the EULA and ToS of a game. Also, what's being discussed isn't a bot. Try again.

That's pretty much your only option. The market is so fast during periods no bot could catch all the trades. Besides, the last-5 is already compressing out data, like bid a stack of 10 and have that show up only once for salvage or recipes. My hope would be to catch something resembling a representative sample.

For non-salvage stuff, the sales are slow enough that a few people checking it would give you passable data. The higher end sets people use aren't pushing that high of transaction volume -- you do see a day or two ago's sales on a lot of them.

Some market data is better than none, which is pretty much what "last 5" is for doing any sort of analysis or debates about the market, the state of it, etc. Also, even a weak snapshot like that would let you start trending for "are prices rising? by how much?" and similar.

Interesting point. I think anyone considering this should seek an explicit okay from a redname in advance. They might well consider it as exploiting and modify the client to block such a program completely.

I had to do some image editing (because it doesn't understand a full screenshot -- I did try!), but it seems to have no trouble pulling correct text out of a screenshot of the market I took. That's the <Sold> tab. Unfortunately it didn't pull out the IO name, just what I listed it for. Switching my font might help...

How much work that'd be to bundle a working OCR engine into a python app to screen-scrape is another matter. I at least did find other people doing screen grabs in python under windows, so that part shouldn't have to be manual (though if it was, watching the directory of screen captures would be easy enough).

Except it's not a bot, is it? A bot would be something which plays the game for you, not which analyses logs / on-screen info and summaries it in one central location.

Personally I feel the "screen scraping" idea is dodgier than something which mirrors Herostats and uses logs to collate information, since a log file analyzer synced with an online database is by definition you deciding to share your data with that on-line system (opt-in).

Any sort of "screen scraper" is harvesting general data which isn't really easy to monitor continuously which would seem to me to be a bit closer to the "unfair advantage" argument (although I think myself the chief reason Market Data isn't publically accessible in some way is based on system load as well as any other concerns, which may or may not be valid, the Devs certainly are not infallible when it comes to how the market was originally designed to work).

To give you a data point, I spend a few days doing some market monitoring a while back. For a selection of about 20 level 50 IOs that were at the time profitable for trading, checking the market once every hour was enough to catch virtually every recipe and crafted IO sale that went through. The main problem I encountered was when all the sale prices were the same across the last five, so it became impossible to see if a new sale had occurred until a different price showed up, since we no longer get the time of sale data. That happened relatively rarely, though.

I find my memory for trend analysis ... could use some work. That's why I want to feed it to the PC.

You know, herostats could answer the inflation question at a basic level. It already tracks inf in. Add the market transactions in the chat window log tracking and that should give you what you need.

It just won't let you quantify what is getting more costly, only if the inf prices on the AH are rising over time.

I don't think its so much hate as fer and I doubt its inspired by the means. If you had a legion of people volunteering to do this by hand, people would suddenly discover why that kind of cooperative action was against the spirit of the game as well.

I think most of the concern is related to the fact that this information would be exceedingly valuable to marketeers of all stripes so it seems like a bad idea to:
A) Make public information the devs have decided should be hidden
B) Do so in a way that will make it available to only a small portion of the population (since if someone doesn't read the forums or such they would not easily find out about it)

I personally would not object to something like Auctioneer since that is just facilitating something anyone can do manually. It's the combined database that I worry would cross the line. The devs are, for the most part, pretty cool about mods to the game even if occupy a gray area with regards to the EULA as long as they aren't detrimental to the game. I don't know how the devs would feel about the proposed mod, however since it's goal would be to specifically circumvent a restriction that the devs have put in regarding information availability and as such it's entirely possible they would regard it as crossing the line. Of course, it's equally possible that it would convince them to make more market history information publicly available in the interested of leveling the playing field and that would be fine with me.

To be honest, it'd actually be of more use to non-marketeers than the other way around. Marketeers see the market regularly enough that even with imperfect memory like mine we can make a killing. It doesn't improve my data as much as it improves a casual player's data.

I just want it so we can argue (with data!) about what the market is doing on the forums.

ugh... I can see it now...
"Look at this chart I compiled! This PROVES that prices are being manipulated!"
"What the hell are you talking about? It doesn't show that at all!"