Price Updates

Ive been toying around with macro maker, and i have made a little macro, it takes a screenshot, crops it to a certian size, then uploads it Via FTP to a website, so i was wondering...

If i put up a webpage with an update every 10 mins of the prices at the material and rare material traders, would anyone use it? basically, is it worth the electricity of keeping a computer in the garage going (and the effort of finding an account to use- probably a freinds old no longer used one)?

very funny. Altough not that needed. You can run up to a trader and check it youreself.
Saves ureself the time to alt tab, run internet explorer and open ure website.

Usualy ( when I trade ) im in LA near the traders to check out the prices of the things I sell

Actually the idea is you can check it while not playing guild wars (i.e, on MSN, whatever)

if ecto jump to 10K , you dont have to miss it

Maybe if gold really actually meant something in this game, sure, but it doesn't.

In game prices of items aren't that critical to me that I need to check when I'm not playing. Maybe to some people it is, but sure as heck isn't to me.

Nice idea, but I don't think that I would use it. If it where an ingame macro I would use it because that would save time. Since Anet doesn't have macros then I guess that will never happen.

I'm still waiting for the day I can use an in-game macro for attribute points and skill sets to quickly change my character from runner/fighter/or farmer.

just because it doesn't mean anything to you etc

nice idea dunno if i'd use though

It's a good idea to use during work.

i was actually thinking of making a spreadsheet (could be coded as a little mysql/php db/app though) that would auto-calc which rare materials would be profitable to craft and sell to the trader, so it could flag them as good ones quickly, the idea being to watch price fluctuations and profit.

so, a program that calculates based on the sell-to-merchant prices would find an input such as something that grabs the values from in-game invaluable.

more than likely, my personal project on this will be dropped in short order, but someone who has a little more follow-through on the matter would im sure find a user for your little data contribution.

eudas

I would be using this if it kept a history record of prices changes during the day.

Prices go up and down at certian times of day. I would defenitly use this if it game me a record of what time of day the prices change.

If it would just be a cropped screenshot of the trader I don't think that'd be all that useful. But if you could do some image analysis on that picture to turn the price data into text, and kept a history, it would be invaluable, though a lot more involved.

Peace,
-CxE

Optical Character Recognition

I think this would be very awesome to do, but very tough and involved.

Too bad ANet can't create an RSS feed of the price of each material rare or common in the game.

Would be nice to document the history of prices in the game.

Just what I was thinking. It'd be great to see some sort of statistical analysis of price fluctuations and what affects them.

listen to us, we're getting all stock markety about stuff that doesn't exist. =)

eudas

This is a really great idea considering I usually just hop on to check for any price swings in rare materials. Also it'll help read the way you think the economy will shift towards certain materials and you can invest in them just before the price goes up. Definately do this.

Heh, Character recodnitions a little out of my leauge (although i'll look into it)


i'll put it up this weekend on my second account, (i wont be using it) , if it gets used, i'll put it up properly

seems a little to close to being a keylogger combo deal. you would have to get more than one person to stay on top of the trader prices for your update and im sure as hell not going to download something that i cant control. not to flame your idea but it will end up being just another spam in LA to get people to download crap


and even if that isnt what is going on, im sure GW has rules about bots/macros that do stuff for you

well a stock share doesnt 'exist' really, its just a legal document proving that you own a percentage of s company.. you cant actually quantify it.

and as gold can be sold (illegaly) on ebay it does have a physical value!

Though the market place in GW is nowhere near as intricate as it is say with 'Eve-online' I would love to know what the prices of my materials were at WITHOUT having to leave my farming zone!

I do feel however that if someone were to put the prices in a spreadsheet format with a nice graph (like you get with eve) you would be able to analyse the market and it we be FAR more usefull

I would love to see over a year's worth of data just to see price flucuations etc.

good Idea, I'd definatly support it.

It'd be on his website automatically updated with just a picture you idiot.

Read posts properly next time before you start making such accusations.

About your flame, re-read what he's going to do.

About the macros, it's not doing anything in GW.

sounds to me like he wants us to use a macro that sends info automaticly to his website...

my english skills arent the best but thats what i got out of the OPs post

screenshot -> crop -> OCR to yank the #'s out -> plug in to db or spreadsheet -> autocalc profitability and profit margins -> step 3, profit!!!

pretty easy to understand.
harder to implement on such an awkward procedure...

part of the challenge, as well, is that to get the rare material trader's buy price for a particular rare material, you have to have one of them in your inventory to get a quote.

course, the step after that is to get at it coming from the other end, so it will also tell you when to buy. then you could really start profiting.

eudas

Instead of character recognition you could possibly pull the values directly from memory. I recall someone who modified the amount of gold in storage on the client this way. The reverse should be possible.

He is saying that he would run this macro on his own computer, which will then update onto his website. He concludes with asking if anyone would use the website with all of the current prices on it. He asks no one to run any third party software, simply go to a website.

This is a very good idea. I'm sure it is completely possible, since Kuntz made G-Stats. The only problem (which is a problem with g-stats) is that you need to update the program every time GW updates.

there's also the problem that, i believe, getting the information that way is against the TOC.

check it just to be sure:
http://www.guildwars.com/legal/rulesofconduct.php

and possibly #20 as well:
(emphasis mine)

of course, there is the difficulty of enforcing it, especially if it's just taking information received on your personal machine and not sending it out anywhere. it becomes a "how would they know?" issue.

if you really wanted to make a program that would pull the data somehow, i mean, i guess if you wanted to be 100% above-board you'd just secure the written permission of ncsoft and keep it on file and then begin development of the app. if it's truly harmless, they might grant it. then again, they might say "no" and take the request as proof of concept for customer demand, then steal your idea and develop it themselves. who knows. depends on how rogue you want to be. the beastie boys say you have to fight for your right to party, after all.

developing an app that takes the data from the game datastream would be the most efficient way to do it, but as you can see there are issues there. using the screenshots/OCR method is a gimpy workaround but it avoids some of the legal complications, at least, those in section (17) above. there's still the issue of (20) above to be concerned with. of course, section (20) doesn't say you can't *develop* a tool or *use* the tool, just that you can't *post* it or *distribute* it without written permission.

(yes, i have too much time on my hands... plus, the good ol' INTJ personality...)

eudas

whoops, i killed the thread... :P
Any other ideas/comments?

eudas

Heh, I think you pretty much said it all :P

INTJ FTW! :P

eudas

Hmm.. How about a Lion's Arch ID1 webcam?

17. Is referring to the actual packets that are sent to and from the servers. It can refer to modifying the data client side(that may modiy the data sent to the server), but does not refer to retrieving the information from your computers memory. Although, a transmission might be able to be interpreted as the information sent from the server and stored in the clients memory. In which case...

If the information in the RAM is not encrypted then the decipher portion does not apply, as this would likely be in reference to network packets. I don't see why ANet would waste CPU cycles deciphering information in the RAM everytime it is accessed, in which case there will still be an unencrypted copy of the data somewhere in memory or in the CPU registers. Now onto, "hack into"

definition a. does not apply
definition b. I don't see how I can access any part of my computer illegally, considering I own it. I'm not a lawyer though, this is just my analysis of the rule.

20. Does not apply considering the way I would do it.

Program grabs the data, stores it in a database, when queried a CGI program would send out the webpage with the data on it. Only the data gathered from the program would be distributed, not the actual program.

To you people who say that in-game gold is worthless(it actually is considering it can be spawned), consider this: everything in the real world has no value because an objects value only exists in the mind.

To the Original Poster, this is a cool idea. Just a screenshot would not be very helpful but a history would be useful. As for Optical Character Recognition I've never even trifiled in the matter. However, I do have an idea on how this can be done.

Requirements for the screenshots:
1. Items must be in the same place everytime a screenshot is taken.
2. Preferably the background should be dark.
3. Screenshots need to be the same size everytime.
4. Text needs to be the same size everytime.

First you would have to know the bounding box of the areas around the numbers and then you need to have an image of each number. You compare each number to each slot where a possible value can be, if they match then that is the correct number. Of course looking at the screenshots to find the coordinates for the bounding boxes would not be very fun. Extracting the data from RAM is probably the best way. To get the current price would actually be the easiest, as the price always appears in the same place everytime.

You would have to write a macro that clicks the get current price button and then the program needs to know when that has happened so it can grab the value. If you were to do the current price by screenshots you would need a screenshot for each material.

I’m going to play around with this, I’ve been looking for something to program for a few days now.

I have too much time on mine too. Online college classes rule.

Well i have been playing around with it, at first, i would get this:


-------- b-vb---- >.. -- (and so on)

now, i am getting:



i'll have it finished in a few hours, i need to sleep (been at work for 12 hours, uhh)

ahh nice work taineck, if i wasn't a bum who plays gw all day, i'ld probably do something like that.

yeah the screenshots thing would be a real PITA.

the other option i was thinking of was a wiki-style community input page, but then you have to deal with griefers who think it's funny to mess with you by inputting wild values.

so then you are just left with being the sole source of input, probably doing it manually, which is a pita. the goal is automation.

i can guarantee though that if you are able to program something of the sort, and esp if you are able to obtain permission to put the web page up for the community to use, you will see one metric ass-ton of traffic stampeding to your page. set up your paid advertising now!

eudas

What I have so far.

What you don't see. It saves the prices it grabs to files(one for each material) The price is saved with the date and time it was grabbed from memory. I'm going to work on retrieving the sell prices and generating an HTML table for the information after this post.

This seems pretty cool, it would help Pre-Searing players from being scammed out of expensive dyes!

That's pretty sweet. I can see this evolving into something like X-Fire's status box.

This kind of stuff is very interesting to me, taking information from one source and repurposing it thru different technologies. Nice Job.

I left it running this morning. It ran for four hours and gathered 48 pieces of data(checks every five minutes,both buy and sell prices). It ended when GW got err=59. Attached is two of the data files.

The format is as follows:
[Day of the week] [month] [day] [year] [hour(GMT)] [mins] [seconds] [buy] [sell]

Very nice LAMS3K , exactly what i had in mind


i havent had time to work on it myself (college work ftl >.<)

*edit*

Me an LAMS3K are working on the project together, expect a page soon

hmmm..

actually. what i think would be an awesome thing to have available would be the possibility for guilds to place a code on there website that would have a constantly updated roster...

since the members in guilds change so often, this would be a great thing to have available.. just dunno if its even possible to accomplish.