Guild Wars price tracker

I'm trying to figure out if this would violate the bot policy:

I'm interested in writing a script to automate price tracking. My idea on how it would work is basically sit in Spamadan and watch the trade channel go by, and as it receives about 10k different messages a day, build an automated bid/ask spread graphic for various interesting items (limited to the spread, and not actual trade prices, for obvious reasons).

I don't know if this would violate the bot policy, though. The section says anything that "plays" the game for you is not allowed. I'm not sure I could call a message scraper "playing" though -- all it's doing is literally sitting in place and collecting messages. Who would I direct this sort of query to? I don't think I violate the policy at all, but I'd rather be safe than sorry.

Like GWEstimator?

Exactly like it, in fact. I cannot seem to access the site, so it looks like a rebirth is needed (or the site is temporarily down).

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/g...ml#post5420299

That thread is recent but it's been down for a while.

You would have to send an email to support. However even if you did this I'm pretty sure they won't give a proper answer. They will just quote the EULA and say they can still ban you if they want, but they might not.

Use at your own risk. :]

I would love this since GWEstimator seems to be closed down. However, to make sure it would be legal and not risking the status of your account, I would recommend contacting NCS about the matter first. Heres the link:
www.guildwars.com/support

Meh, GWestimator has done what is doing now before. Probably be back up in a few days.

Would it be so complicated for ANet to provide this service themselves? It sounds very simple. You archive chat trade in any of the major trade hubs (Kamadan, LA, Pre-Ascalon etc.) and provide a simple webpage with a search field and a town drop-down selection.

To the OP: there's no need to try to track down certain items. Just archive chat lines and let people search them, that's all.

ANet would not want to provide other users with a list of usernames.

It would actually be a lot easier for ANet to provide this service than one of us, because they have access to something we don't -- actual trade data. We have to go on the bid/ask spread, they can go on actual trades. If they did it like I'm proposing, it would be a strictly anonymous moving weighted mean.

As far as just archiving chat lines -- no. I want trend information, and I want it in a fashion that's easily human-readable.

Roflmao. So Anet doesn't want people actually playing the game to see trader's username in trade chat as well? Your logic is fail, dude. There is no anonymity in any online game, if you play one it means other will contact you in-game whenever they want, including but not limited to whisper spam for any silly reason. To me, there is absolutely no difference between seeing seller's name adjacent to his trade offer an a screenshot outside the game, or seeing the same content while playing it.

If this is not a legitimate concern, why did Guru stop displaying in-game names and why has this same concern been expressed by people before?

Because on the forum there's email address, in game name, and potentially an indication of in-game wealth all in one place.

In game, you have no such association. (Ok, sure, perhaps you could guess wealth from wtb/wts messages, but still you'd have to guess on email address).

You might want to change the thread's title.

Looks like someone already had this idea and is currently working on implementing a solution.

http://forum.cheatengine.org/viewtop...5ed 623d3959b

The link I posted above I came across while searching around for a new website hosting GWEstimator, apparently there isn't one. It seems as if that person is trying to modify code to generate a chat log and I do believe that would violate the Eula. If I were you, I wouldn't attempt to do such a thing if as you could potentially lose your account.

Now I just thought a way that someone could automate retrieving Kamadan trade spam and generate a list without having to modify game code! Whether of not this is a violation could be debated till we all drop dead of old age.

How to go about this is: You would have to setup a script(potential violation) to automate taking screen shots every so often and then direct your script to run some OCR software(ms office provides this) that will retrieve the text from the screen shot image and save it a .txt file. You would also want to consider removing all interface options except the trade chat as an OCR will pick up every word on the image, as well as placing yourself in a some dark corner where no one will be walking in front, otherwise you might pick player names, chat, etc...

You'll still have to create a searchable database and set up a website but at least you'll have the a data list.

Best of luck, I miss GWEstimator so hurry and make this happen!

Yeah, that's not happening. Too failure prone and computationally expensive. I'd much rather sniff the incoming packets and figure out how to decrypt them, or in the worst case inspect process memory. Incidentally, none of the things you mentioned are actually problems, because the chat window is in the exact same place on every screenshot, making it easy to crop out.

It's all for naught until GW support gets back to me with a yes or no, however. I've got some ideas, but I'm to implement them (and post about them) until GW support responds.

Anet isn't going to care about the principle of the thing. Don't do stupid things like bot farming items and crap like that. Logging chat? They won't care. Technically several things that they "allow" are prohibited by the EULA (texmod/ksmod), there is just the overall rule that you can most likely figure out for yourself whether something is right or not.

The trouble is, depending on how you go about it doing this may LOOK like a bot, depending on how they go about detecting it. Due to the nature of the thing, Anet isn't going to tell you how they are detecting it and if you trip a flag somewhere and get banned you are going to need be a good sweet talker to get your account back. Probably just best practice to buy a new Nightfall account for like $10 and have a dedicated account that you wouldn't care about and whose information feed wouldn't be interrupted if you actually wanted to play on it.

Technically OCR wouldn't be hard or computationally expensive. Since its typed text every character is the same and getting the text out of an image is really simple. OCR is only a major PITA with written characters that vary to person to person (as in, if you could do it with near perfect accuracy quickly you would be a millionaire, a friend of mine did her graduate thesis in this area and it still wasn't reliable enough to base pricing on) . The problem is that programming it is an absolute bitch even with easily decipherable text, simply packet sniffing and getting what is probably easily convertible to plain text is much simpler and easier to implement.

The original site (argos) is back up now. Just for those wondering

http://argos-soft.net/GwEstimator/

This idea is now worthless due to GWEstimator back up:
http://argos-soft.net/GwEstimator/

How does that affect my idea at all, which is completely different to GWEstimator? o_O