Common materials Price Watch

[email protected] Starting today, I'm also watching rare materials and dyes. No screens are available (yet) and I still need buyback price research. I will try to get the site up in the following week.
Also, all pictures at this date are pretty much temporary. Graphs will be awesomed up, a calculator for material and gold usage, etc. But not just yet. Read my other posts for more info.


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OP:

I've been thinking of doing this a long time before I actually started. I was in dilemma how to get updates as often as possible and as accurate as possible. Thinking of getting 2 updates per day in 12 hour delays was bit too much (as I get up at like 5:15 in the morning at weekdays), not to mention the extreme 4 times a day in 6 hour offset.

And so, I am doing daily updates to the graph since 26th of December, 2007 between 14:30 to 15:00 CET, sometimes later in the day due to my absence (There are entires before that date, but those had 5-2 day gaps). I've decided that I will (for start) focus on CM market and expand to rares and dyes later (non-npc market will never ever be tracked (unless an auction house flies in suddenly)). First day I experimented with price comparisons of using artisans vs. buying, but that took too much space for that time. It's gonna be revived... Once.


Either way, my... "work" so far:

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE GRAPH (changed to link because it was kinda annoying to read the thread.)


- Buy/Sell difference is 100g, while minimum buyback price at trader is 30-40g. You can see how could one get super rich by buying and selling on right days
- See that massive blue spike? Canthan new year.



Facts:
- As I know next to nothing about Gw.dat, I have been limited to collecting data once a day, manually, walking to material trader every time and wearing off my keypad.
- Sadly, due to aforementioned reason, I was not able to closely record the price movements. For example, on one day I recorded 320 at the usual time, but in the evening it was at 390g.
- Wood planks, Bones and now even Chitin fragments: booring.
- Right now the graph is extremely confusing, except for materials with higher values. I know. It's temporary.



Aims:
- Somehow construct a giant terminator machine that will collect data each hour, every day. This could be either done by a constantly running machine doing checks (which is TECHNICALLY against the Eula) or public input.
- Create an online site with live data. Think Yahoo! Finance, except a lot worse.
- Maybe an analysis of effects of days in week/special events to the market.
- Alert something that will notify the user if a material gains on value enough to profit from it.


Suggestions, help, gold, Alaska, hosting (maybe later) are all welcome.


Mini Update1: Currently 59 days of data.

Since it took me some time to finally contact mods to review the thread and approve it, its age made it fall down half a page.
I don't usually double post, but for the sake of visibility I'll make an exception.


Also, I would be grateful if someone could point me in the direction of "getting prices out of the dat file".

61 days of data. I'll have the site (and more neatly visible data) ready before I reach 3 months.

You can not get it out of the dat file, maybe youc an get it out your memmory but i dont know how that works.

LOL

Man I had just the same Idea but I was a bit lazy to start counting them hehe.

I would have done it in excel... lol.

This looks like Wall Street graphs :P. Maybe its a bit confusing as you say but u can also see how the in-game events or news change the market value as the Cantha New Year event (see Piles of Dust value increasing).

I dunno why feathers are going so expensive compared to other comm. materials. Maybe caused by Essence of celerity consumables... ^^

Nice Job!

PD: Maybe we can announce something great / important to make the market's values just change like rumors about yahoo / google / Msoft do in real world :P.

I think feathers have stayed up in price for a few years now due to the high demand for certain monk armors and the low rate of salvage. Really the only place I have ever gotten feathers were straight drops from Avicara.

I think that they drop a lot... but you have to farm the avicaras of course. Nahpui it's told to be the "perfect" place... huh?

Anyway... offer & demmand will put them in their correct value.
Hope there's a noobish zone where ectos drop, lol. They will lower then their actual value.

I was lazy too, but I said "The sooner I start the better".

I'm actually doing it in excel.

I'm logging huge events that may affect market prices. CNY is the only thing in there right now.

Feathers, I don't know about feathers. I just hope they don't turn out as boring as bones are... yawn.


As for the announcement... That wouldn't really work. Google is google, and gwguru is, imho, a small site, even when comparing to actual amount of Gw players. The only thing that would catch enough attention would be "WE WILL PAY A THOUSAND DOLLARS TO EVERY MEMBER IF BONE PRICES REACH 300g IN THE NEXT 5 DAYS!"


As for how do I do it:



In those lines, you can see entries, and CNY notice few lines lower.

In the ugly-cutted-out bright yellow thing, you can see how was I originally doing materials research and how could a calculator work (like, would it be cheaper to craft the material from material bought by trader or artistan or buy the thing at the material man in the first place.)



Also, if someone is wondering, yes, I will do dyes and rare materials aswell... when collecting data gets easier.


schaapie: I'll see what I can find about memory stalking applications.

Yeah I know, but i have still so much fun farming feathers till they drop to 30g per 10 feathers as a trade.

Not like an ecto, better than green farming nowadays.

BTW, you can check a fact that I tell ya. Sometimes in almost everyday, ectos and some rare materials drop their normal price (5'5k) to a lowest value (4'8k) and then get their normal price again. It happens every night, i think. At 1am GMT+1. Maybe American ppl is getting up. ^^

Good luck with mem addresses. I tried . They change anytime you entered a new instance / town, so ... you will have to be searching when ya change map or have a permanent logged on char :P

It's like that every time with every thing. I've seen feathers jump up for 120g in just 7 hours. It's most probably that. Or koreans playing their last hours. I have no idea.


My dreams, crushed before they started... Most probably.
Another option would be to get some kinda scanner that would automatically parse numbers from an image. Or something. I better focus on .dat and memory for now.

Sorry about that . What you'r asking for is called OCR and i think i read it in this same forum (gwg) or... well i wont tell what my sources are :P.

Maybe you can try about using an OCR program with a screenie . Or have a "good" program that search at any boot in memory for these values. I dunno if its legit to do any or both things. just curiosity.

Thank you so much for Thread

PRO JOb love GRAPH

That.
I've done a quick search and found a program called SimpleOCR. It's got a sdk, and with some tweaking, it will be super duper easy to get the data out. Theoretically.

And then, code a bot* to do this by himself continuously and I win.



The graph is made from a template shamelessly stolen from Microsoft.



*About that: Gaile has, I believe, stated things that technically break the eula (okay, that sounds a bit stupid written like that, but still), but doesn't give an advantage to player using it, the player won't be banned or terminated. A super duper automatic bot that does everything by himself probably won't be made (and very probably not from me), so I'll try to come up with something else. Community input sounds pretty good, and ability to send in images to be parsed by the server/me/waiter rather than typing everything by yourself would also be probably welcome - of course, if people willed to participate.

*Tricked me thought u did all the work ..shoulda known better *

Yeah, i like to give answer to tech questions. I am like an oracle, rofl.

And BTW, what you'r thinking about "Getting screene -> OCR -> get prices" is not a bot in any form. It doesnt give you any advangate and is more like a disadvantage, it will let u have less Hd space :P !(lol). Technically you'r taking screenies only. Should us be banned for all our 1k photos(on average)? :P

Good to hear that u can get a easier way to do this .

No, not really.

In order to get the latest price information, you have to reopen the trader window. Therefore, total automation without using bots would be impossible - especially not if rare materials and dyes were (or rather, "as they will be") included.


Even though that would be a bot, sending automated commands to the game client, it wouldn't give you an advantage ingame. Only exception would be material and dye stockbrokers. But still, when I come to that, I'll ask the right people.


Also, I'll probably start with rare materials and dyes on saturday, maybe friday.

Just as easy as select him and press Space, Print Scr.

To update the prices: Esc, Space, Print Scr.

The way you do that.... is at yours :P.

Probably it will be easier to do this in your GH if yours have the NPC's needed for testing purposes.

Another day, another update.


Also, I'm gonna need some help. As I don't have all the rare materials and dyes, I'll need someone to check sell prices for those. That way, I can calculate trader's sell and buyback prices. This isn't as important as collecting data, since the difference doesn't change on its own spontaneously.

(In unrelated news, I stole a crown from myself)

Very Nice idea as i like to buy and sell common materials.

Did have a problem telling some of the colors apart however, maybe add different boldness' to some more of them like you did for iron or just make the lines fatter so we can tell the colors apart.

That's just a placeholder. It's kind of a "hey guys, see what I was secretly working on for the past 2 months (muahaha)" and "I've got and idea and I already started executing it rather than waiting for help to arrive sometime."



(possibly even next week) I'll make a simple site with everything visible one by one.





Also, I've found an awesome Google Finance graph clone. I'll start coding (the site) pretty soon.

Also, starting today, I'm also watching Rare materials and Dye market.

Keep up the awesome work and major thanks for watching the Rare Materials and Dyes now. I just started considering "investing" around because I feel a certain trader item will be gaining value soon. I always wanted something like this so I hope it works out great.

Investing in materials will be a bit hard - at least until the buyback formula for all the things is constructed. After that, it'll be just hard and long.


Plus, amongst common materials, only smart investment (in case of selling back to the trader) would be feathers (and possibly scales on long term).

The interesting thing about feathers is that it had its lowest value on 27th December, and its highest exactly 1 month later (counting only my recorded history). The difference was 150 gold, and if you'd sell that to the ripoff trader, you'd still gain 50g per ten-stack, or 5g per each. Let's say you invested 5 250 stacks, which makes it 1250 feathers, and times 5 that is 6250 gold. From npc. Nice.


But I think that b&w dye and certain rare materials will actually be good investments eventually. You'll just have to be careful and check the market yourself as well.

I need urgent help.

As my gpu pretty much died yesterday night, I cannot collect any data for the time being. Since I don't know when is the earliest time I'll be able to get a new one, I need someone to check prices.

There are ~42 prices that need to be typed out manually. Note that Monsterous eye is bugged and its last sale shows up as 100, although it is actually 200g.

Just open up notepad and type out last sale prices. Do it in this order: Common materials, rare materials, dyes. Seperate prices with commas, like this: 100,400,320, and so on.


I'll be grateful to anyone who will help me and I am willing to pay for such deeds.

Thanks.

I can do the data collection for the time being, what time do you usually get the data?

I usually get it sometime between 14:30 and 15:00 CET (Gmt+1).

For today, get it as soon as possible. I'll probably be back on track by tuesday, possibly wedensday... Hopefully.

Thanks for help.

Common materials for 2/24:
100,230,170,260,100,130,100,200,160,190,330
Rare materials:
120,200,450,120,5500,190,850,850,100,1200,3900,320 0,950,3200,
170,2300,170,200,250,270,140,210,180,150,110
Dyes:
260,110,100,400,130,100,100,290,8000,4000

The data's in, thanks.

I have found a replacement so I'm back on my computer again. Unfortunately it's even older than my already-old Radeon 9600, so I can't even run GW. And, in order to get something better than my old crap, I'll have to sum up even more cash since the slots won't fit... Oh well.

Either way, thanks a lot. If you have msn messenger or steam, send me a pm, so we can get in contact in the next days for the next days.

Update. I'm back and I never left.

I'll soon be finishing Phase 1 (= totally filling up what my old Excel supports) of the data collection. More precisely, on the 31st. Plus, since I'm super lazy to make a site, I'll release data publicly.


Here's some statistics (that will be true when I'm done):

207 fields + 62 common materials only
31 fields missing due to unsatisfactory timing or inability to collect data



I'm posting this in order to find out if anybody is still interested in this project. If there is no-one, I will just stop since there's no point in doing anything if nobody cares right?

Opinions, suggestions, possibly an offer to create a site using the data or even help with the collection, those are all welcome.

i am interested and if can help in any way let me know

i am also interested, though only if it doesnt require you to spend an extensive amount of time on it.

Well, data collection takes about 1-2 minutes when you get used to it. Though you gotta be careful with bugged Last Prices.

I may be interested as well. I do not got lots of time atm (think its still enough could collect date 5 days a week). When I, in a hopfeul not so far future, got more time I maybe could do some programming work (knowledge of more or less all important languages).

Here it is. Batch 1.