[X] My Assistant

Hi everyone, I noticed someone maybe has been using HVmarket to influence the Obsolete item auction price.

- skip -

I think wanry1331 never want to order any of these items, but only to jack-up the price for auction. Not sure if that violates any auction law, but should such practice be allowed on HVmarket?

Though knowing banning one account will not stop such mal practice, but that's be caution next time in the auction.

FYI, I am one of the auction's buyers; I didn't look or care for any HV price, and I bought most of the obsoletes that wanry1331 sold. Others I could not, since there was a small bidwar with other two buyers on some items, and I stopped bidding when I felt like that.

Prices on obsoletes more then a few years old can be extremely volatile. If one find a buyer willing to pay a price double or even quadruple then what he bought for, it's just market of rare items. The value is in the eye of the buyer. You can see that by the huge spreads between WTB/WTS.

Accusing wanry1331 of malice is not fair, imho.

All transactions in the market appear to be stalled again, for about the last 90 minutes or so (at time of this writing). It has been quite a while since I have noticed this occurring.

This post has been edited by shamil11: Jul 27 2021, 09:58

All transactions in the market appear to be stalled again, for about the last 90 minutes or so (at time of this writing). It has been quite a while since I have noticed this occurring.

It's a different error this time - the database connection timed out (and I've no idea how that happened, because the library that manages that stuff for HVMarket isn't my work). But I've restarted it for now and hopefully it doesn't happen again. (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/tongue.gif)

I did not received verification code in mooglemail when registering, how to fix this?

edit : exactly when i post this, i got the code, weird

This post has been edited by shao-saku: Jul 27 2021, 21:26

Something is wrong with the market?
Sent two mails - both marked as read - no items in my shop or sales logs.
Except two items, but look here


This post has been edited by dibdib: Aug 1 2021, 23:33

Something is wrong with the market?
Sent two mails - both marked as read - no items in my shop or sales logs.
Except two items, but look here

There was a small bug introduced by a change I made earlier for buy orders. I've fixed that now and manually returned the lost items to the 2 players that were affected.

This post has been edited by Nezu: Aug 1 2021, 23:49

Thank you!

I know this issue has already been addressed in the past and somewhat dismissed but I would like to give it another try and introduce the topic again: The possibility for HVUtils and HVMarket material prices to be synchronized in real time, eliminating the need to manually setting them on the script. Setting prices on is not that big of a deal if they roughly remain the same, but lately they have been fluctuating quite a bit. Take a look at Phazons, for example: I've seen them go from 290k to 340k in the span of a few hours; all it takes is a single person buying a lot in one go for the prices to shoot up, after all.

Now, If I remember correctly, Nezu (and correct me if I'm wrong), you stated previously that implementing it would be a cakewalk, especially considering your good relations with ssss2 which would facilitate coordination, and the reason you dismissed it was basically because it's very difficult to ensure that the real-time prices are realistist (I'm thinking trolls who set 1c for 100c item prices, for example). Though difficult, I still believe it to be possible.

The next step would be to discuss how to actually execute this in a meaningful and realistic manner and I'm sure a lot of people here would like to see this feature implemented and have a lot of suggestions on how to do it but, for now, I'll just ask for your take on all of this, especially considering it would probably be another large period of time you would have to invest in all this. Is it a possibility or is it completely out of the question?

Lastly I'd just like to point out that I've seen you react somewhat... defensively/aggressively to some comments or suggestions by users in the past, particularly when the revamp was first released. Don't take this as criticism (even though criticism is not necessarily negative) or even a demand. Take it as suggestions to try and make an already great platform into a even greater one, at least on my part.

I know this issue has already been addressed in the past and somewhat dismissed but I would like to give it another try and introduce the topic again: The possibility for HVUtils and HVMarket material prices to be synchronized in real time, eliminating the need to manually setting them on the script. Setting prices on is not that big of a deal if they roughly remain the same, but lately they have been fluctuating quite a bit. Take a look at Phazons, for example: I've seen them go from 290k to 340k in the span of a few hours; all it takes is a single person buying a lot in one go for the prices to shoot up, after all.

Now, If I remember correctly, Nezu (and correct me if I'm wrong), you stated previously that implementing it would be a cakewalk, especially considering your good relations with ssss2 which would facilitate coordination, and the reason you dismissed it was basically because it's very difficult to ensure that the real-time prices are realistist (I'm thinking trolls who set 1c for 100c item prices, for example). Though difficult, I still believe it to be possible.

The next step would be to discuss how to actually execute this in a meaningful and realistic manner and I'm sure a lot of people here would like to see this feature implemented and have a lot of suggestions on how to do it but, for now, I'll just ask for your take on all of this, especially considering it would probably be another large period of time you would have to invest in all this. Is it a possibility or is it completely out of the question?

Lastly I'd just like to point out that I've seen you react somewhat... defensively/aggressively to some comments or suggestions by users in the past, particularly when the revamp was first released. Don't take this as criticism (even though criticism is not necessarily negative) or even a demand. Take it as suggestions to try and make an already great platform into a even greater one, at least on my part.

Like I said last time: it really wouldn't be an implementation difficulty, and I don't think it'd really take that much time either (particularly since it'd just be a JSON response, so I don't have to do any UI work).

The matter is purely about how you determine which prices to give. Marrying HVMarket into HVUtils would naturally mean that people are going to expect the prices to be authoritative and correct - without researching it themselves. Philosophically, I oppose that - it's why I put effort into making sure there's a lot of ways to analyse prices in HVMarket.

Essentially, the problem is: how do you ensure prices are representative of sane, normal values without 1) discarding data, or 2) setting any kind of 'normal' numbers anywhere in the system?

Essentially, the problem is: how do you ensure prices are representative of sane, normal values without 1) discarding data, or 2) setting any kind of 'normal' numbers anywhere in the system?

Very true.
For a lot of items, not even two human users could agree on a "normal" price to be the same for both of them; how could two programs ? (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/sleep.gif)

Moreover, speaking of "normal" price is kinda fiction; there isn't any real "normal" or "abnormal" price.
There is just a transaction price accepted by the two parties (seller and buyer), that changes for each two parties, i.e. for each transaction; and those changes may be related to considerations of them that have nothing to do with past/future prices.

Just as an example, a rich player wishing to quickly forge his new PHOH, can well accept to pay a much higher price for his Phazons instead of waiting for a seller willing to trade at a so-called "normal" price.

On the opposite side, a seller short on credits looking to quickly monetize some assets in order to be able to bid in an auction, may choose to accept less then your so-called "normal" price.

That is, a strategist doesn't look for minimum cost when buying, nor for maximum income when selling; instead he does (implicitly, whether consciously or not) a cost-opportunity analysis, aimed at reaching a globally (in the game contest) higher time-averaged performance.

You could add button which copy in clipboard current 7 day average prices formated in a way hvutils use it, so we just past it into hvutils.

The matter is purely about how you determine which prices to give. Marrying HVMarket into HVUtils would naturally mean that people are going to expect the prices to be authoritative and correct - without researching it themselves. Philosophically, I oppose that - it's why I put effort into making sure there's a lot of ways to analyse prices in HVMarket.

Well to address this part I'm gonna quote something you told me yourself a few months ago, regarding H@H:

I don't think you're the sort of person that needs to hear this, of course, but you wouldn't believe how entitled some people can be, throwing tantrums because they want their free HV income..."

My point being that, the same way people have no right to demand anything out of H@H (even though they still do like you pointed out) they also have no business demanding anything from HVMarket which is a free/profitless platform. That said, there's also no reason to create friction. A possible solution would be to put a toggle button on HVUtils (turned off by default) to switch between static and dynamic pricings.

...

Everything you said makes sense and is true but I think you're mistaking two different concepts here. What you said addresses "fairness" of prices, which is not what is needed here. Prices being fair or not is irrelevant for the script since it only wants to show the prices that are practiced in reality (fair or not). The challenge here is taking the data that we have, which is not linear while being subjective at times, and compiling it in a manner that gives us only the relevant final value -> what is the ACTUAL value that a certain item is being sold for at that particular point in time as opposed to what is the ACTUAL value that a certain item is worth at that particular point in time.

Think about the different examples and possible ways to break them
1) Lowest Sell value, the most obvious choice:
-- Can be broken by people setting stupidly low values just troll
-- If there's a single item being sold at a low value, and imediately above him thousads more expensive, people will argue that the relevant value is the one of the thousands and not the lowest single one.

2) Lowest buying value
-- Ridiculously low buy values that will never be met with any sale
-- Same as 1b) reversed

3) 7 or 30 day average
-- If the average differs too much from the current value, it's not a valid indicator

And so on, these are just examples of reasons why those values by themselves might not be reliable.
For what it's worth, I personally would be satisfied with the lowest selling value being used simply because I can judge based on past experience if that value makes sense or not.

P.S.: Still waiting for some math/data analysis genius to come forward and suggest some solutions (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/laugh.gif)

Well to address this part I'm gonna quote something you told me yourself a few months ago, regarding H@H:

My point being that, the same way people have no right to demand anything out of H@H (even though they still do like you pointed out) they also have no business demanding anything from HVMarket which is a free/profitless platform. That said, there's also no reason to create friction. A possible solution would be to put a toggle button on HVUtils (turned off by default) to switch between static and dynamic pricings.

Oh, for what it's worth, I don't oppose it for that reason.

When I made HVMarket, one of the biggest motivators for me was that I wanted people to be more informed about price information. That's the reason why I put in the various statistics in the first place.

But if people are automatically receiving a price value via scripts as a standard feature, without understanding how that price was calculated (or being able to see for themselves whether the average price is realistic, based on things like the amount of stock available or trade volume in the last 30 days), then it compromises those values.

You captured it best yourself here:

For what it's worth, I personally would be satisfied with the lowest selling value being used simply because I can judge based on past experience if that value makes sense or not.

That works for you, because you have the experience, but HVUtils is something a lot of people install without even knowing its features, letalone where the information behind it came from. For newer players, that means HVUtils numbers can be taken as authoritative, because it's a widely approved and acknowledged script that is used by almost all modern serious players.

That said, like I've said each time - I really don't mind providing it anyway, despite my personal objections, as long as a good price can be given for each item without having to anticipate special cases.

3) 7 or 30 day average
-- If the average differs too much from the current value, it's not a valid indicator

The actual 7- and 30-day averages are not necessarily good for some items that may have infrequent trades (such as the elemental mitigation bindings, which are generally not used), but it's probably the closest we can get to accuracy. There's the possibility to default back to last-known-sale for items that have extremely infrequent data.

An option I might consider is taking the time between now and the last known sale, and then taking the average for sales between that time, and the same duration before that (with a minimum of 7 days).

For example, if the last sale of an item was 90 days ago, we'd look at the average of sales between 180 and 90 days ago. However, if the last sale was a minute ago, it'd be the last 7 days of sales.

The thing about sale value is that it doesn't really reflect the current state of an item, and that can be misleading too. Consider the following scenario:

1) Someone buys all the Crystallized Phazon at 300k
2) Another person sees the opportunity to list theirs for 500k
3) A HVUtils user plans their upgrades based on the 300k material price, then goes to HVMarket and finds they're currently selling for 500k.

Obviously using averages based on current stock prices means it can be swayed by prices that nobody would actually pay, so I think sales data is better, but there's still issues either way with automatic pricing systems that try to reduce the multiple dimensions of data into a single number.

This post has been edited by Nezu: Aug 5 2021, 18:55

The thing about sale value is that it doesn't really reflect the current state of an item, and that can be misleading too. Consider the following scenario:

1) Someone buys all the Crystallized Phazon at 300k
2) Another person sees the opportunity to list theirs for 500k
3) A HVUtils user plans their upgrades based on the 300k material price, then goes to HVMarket and finds they're currently selling for 500k.

Yeah but doesn't this scenario strengthen the need for a dynamic feature? Because this is exactly what happens now with the pre-set value of 300k that sssss2 decided was appropriate for phazons because that was the standard value for so long, while its value is already on 320k-ish. If a user goes by the static pre-set value then they will plan for 300k only to go on the market and find out its actually 320k. I'll go even further: Earlier today I updated HVUtils and noticed a lot of pre-set values that were adjusted by ssss2 since the previous version, because they had indeed increased or decreased at the time he compiled the new version of the script. The catch is that those items actually WENT BACK to their original values so the info became somewhat obsolete yet again.

but there's still issues either way with automatic pricing systems that try to reduce the multiple dimensions of data into a single number.

Now that you said this, it actually makes a lot of sense... The problem is not simply looking at a "wrong" number for a price but rather looking at it without context, which is what we're trying to do by passing a single value to HVUtils while HVMarket has that same value surrounded by other measurements. And like you pointed out, I can somewhat bypass that problem because of experience but more casual users will not, and will look at its face value, I suppose.
Soooooooooo the solution is simple: find a way to "reduce multiple dimensions of data into a single number" without it losing information (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/cool.gif)

Yeah but doesn't this scenario strengthen the need for a dynamic feature?

Sure, yeah, I do see the use case for it, and like I say, I'm not opposed to actually doing it. We just need to decide on an appropriate method for picking the prices, so it avoids misleading clueless users who aren't informed about exactly what's going on.

Soooooooooo the solution is simple: find a way to "reduce multiple dimensions of data into a single number" without it losing information (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/cool.gif)

Well, another potential pre-processing option is using current sell prices trimmed by sales data. The method I described in my last post could be used to select the sales history period to work with. We'd then take the lowest price for a confirmed sale, and the average sale price, to determine a 'range'.

For example, if there's 1k credits difference between lowest and average, and the average was 5k credits, then we'd use a range of 4k to 6k.

Then we'd look at all of the current stock listed for prices between 4k and 6k, and take the average price from that...

But even a complex method like that - accounting for the various things it does - still has issues. What if the lowest sale recently was a mistake, where someone missed inputting a digit? We can't rule out a number of extremes (like removing the very lowest sale, or the lowest 1%) because that might include legitimate sales, or the number of bad sales might exceed the ignored amount. And what if the item is extremely volatile, perhaps because an update changed its drop rate or something?

I don't really know if giving price values to the uninformed is a good idea in a live economy, because there's always going to be some compromise made. But I get that if it's a feature in demand, people will just make a flawed version if necessary, so we may as well work to find the least disadvantageous compromise.

I didn't get the verification code in mooglemail...
edit : oh, I got the code.

This post has been edited by rastord: Aug 6 2021, 08:31

Think there'd be a way to set a toggle for certain items to not sell unless the stock is above a certain threshold? Just automation for the sake of laziness, but it'd be nice to not have to manually delete/zero depleted items that sell for under 10/Unit. Always feels bad when I miss one of them, already got yelled at for it once.
Maybe an additional checkbox/field on the other end of the list for "Delist if total value of inventory is under #$"?

Marked stalled? Queued transactions frozen for about the last 2.5hrs (at time of writing)...

Marked stalled? Queued transactions frozen for about the last 2.5hrs (at time of writing)...

Yeah, I've fixed it now.

Technical info: the E-Hentai credit log has no guarantee of being correct - sometimes, a CoD being paid won't appear in the credit log. HVMarket uses the credit log to track which orders have been paid for, so this can cause it to think an order needs to be cancelled and recalled even if it has already been paid for.

This has only ever happened twice as far as I know, and the technical issue on the E-H side isn't known to me (but it's probably not really fixable).

There were lot's of complaints/support requests here but I didn't see the love letters.

Nezu, thank you so much for working on this. Years ago when I was last active, this was a laborious activity for me to fuel my gaming needs, i.e. play with scrolls and other consumables I had to purchase and deplete the market manually.

Then superlat's market search option came and that made huge improvements. I was still always limited in my scope as the market bot within the game was often unsuccessful in buying what I needed. And naturally superlat's script would only pick up what people are willing to post.

Now with your tool, I've saved a significant amount of time. I can play freely on persistent just depleting the credits I accumulate naturally. Fun is back in business.

To that end, thank you and I love you (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

<3