[Suggestion] Bazaars Item Average Prices

Hello,

This is more of a add-on suggestion than a feature on FFXIAH.

Is it possible if someone can create a LUA that calculates the average price of bazaar listing for an item from ffxiah/guildwo for all "bazaar'able" items in inventory makes it easier to price new items in bazaars, and list them as scoreboard lists parse.

If there is a way to know this already please let me know,

thanks!

How would this even work with everybody bazaaring things for 99m or 1gil constantly?

I am not a programmer but filter/ignore conditions maybe?

Median VS average.

So if you have 45 bazaarable items in your inventory, running this is going to run 45 requests to AH? That's shitty for us and kind of shitty for the end user.

There's ways to make this in a way that's not terrible, but I'd have to think about it. Maybe an endpoint that gives the high/median/mode/low bazaar prices for a list of 30-40 common items, updated at some interval? It wouldn't be everything but unless something's changed since the last time I played every bazaar has the same 15 things anyway.

I think that is the idea, then available in json/xml to load into the add-on. It wouldn't need to be updated much more than once a day. Reporting 1st Quantile, Median, and 3rd Quantile would be more than sufficient for this need.

You'd have to work around people who bazaar things that they don't intend to sell for 99,999,999 affecting the averages. And if you do decide to implement some type of threshold detection to handle that problem, then you're still going to get people who bazaar a wanted item from their mog house for min_amount + 1 to throw off the average/median in hopes of getting people to bazaar desired items cheaply. It currently only takes about 10 seconds to type the item name in on ffxiah while you're in your bazaar list so it's probably not worth the effort to automate.

Agreed, adding such a feature would cause AH bazaars to display many characters with bare minimum threshold prices in an effort to force the lua, or Ah.com to alter its results for personal profit. In the end, it would reduce the functionality of ah.com/bazaar by flooding it with dozens of mog house/garden bazaars for each server.

Showing 1st/3rd quantile, median and mode would head off all but the most insane and determined ***. If someone's willing to go to all the trouble of adding a ton of *** bazaars on mules and such, report them to me and I'll omit them from the price checking. We already keep a couple of lists of bad actors for other calculations, what's one more?

I mean, I get the concern, but unless the number of bad actors greatly outstrips legitimate users, it'd be hard to do too much damage. I'm not going to be showing the mean, because it's effectively useless for anything that can be shown for max gil, and all the other measurements would require a concerted effort over many characters to actually make a real dent.

This thing is going to be behind a couple of other projects anyway, so it's not gonna get built tomorrow, but I'm always glad to hear concerns. I think as long as we avoid the mean the numbers are pretty resistant to malfeasance.

(I can't wait to be proven wrong by weirdos bazaaring things on 45 mules for stupid prices)

Well, you got some people doing some really shady stuff already, and FFXIAH is always showing it.

Take https://www.ffxiah.com/item/4060/beitetsu for example. Some people next to the NPC will post singles at slightly lower than stack price, so the eager person would see a cheaper stack price and not realize it's for singles.

You should take that into consideration too.

Looking at that list for Asura, how is it not solved by quantiles/median/mode? There aren't enough entries. What I'd show as that list stands right now is: 8,000 1st q, 8,000 mode, 8,200 median, and 9,500 3rd q. I mean, those are reasonable values.

For now at least.

I'm just showing you an avenue that *** would use to alter the average.

Wouldn't affect the 1st quarter though, but it will skew the median if enough people/mules do it.

Just my 2 cents.

Yeah, if/when I build this, it's going to have an interface I can easily add bad actors to to get them excluded from the calculations. Some lag on that obviously because I'm a person (for now!), but there's not THAT many people who'd even bother with this, and even then, how big could the profit margins be? It feels like gil is easy enough to get that trying to engage in beitetsu arbitrage and price fixing is probably pointless.

Suggestion: a toggleable filter (can turn off if you are logged in) that makes bazaars not show up when prices match AH stack prices for that specific item? That's how bazaar scammers get you, after all.

I think the mode is a bit of an issue since it could drift to one or max gil, but the median should be pretty robust. Let me know if you need any help with this, I've built a few outlier models for work and did related research during my PhD.

I thought about that, but I think the mode being max gil actually works out fine; it shows at a glance that the data set is very skewed and they should probably just open a browser and have a look at the full set.

median being robust sounds like an Asura benefit.
Frequently there are only a few thousand of a given item in total on my server. a single bad actor could easily drag the median away.

This lua idea looks like a solution looking to create problems to me.
It would require moderation and provides, what?

To be clear, I'm now thinking of this in terms of adding some better metrics around the economy on the site overall; the lua idea was purely the ignition.

Thanks guys you are awesome. Regardless of the solution, the whole idea is to get a better indicator of price based on supply and demand of an item. Definitely if better metrics is the starting point.

Although there is some divergence, you could also show median AH price for items that are AH/Bazaar. That will both be helpful in shopping/setting price and identifying cases of 'peculiar' prices.

On a side note, has anyone figured out the packets for identifying selected item in a bazaar and the price?

I was going to suggest a simple page that just has this premade, but... apparently FFXIAH has had Item Sets for who-knows-how-long already. And here I was looking stuff up manually over and over.

Maybe other people also just need that brought to their attention; could just have a banner show up mentioning item sets are a site feature if someone performs > n searches [on y-set of common bazaar items] in a given period of time, or if someone searches for x-item at regular intervals, etc. Could link to a premade list with commonly bazaared items as a starter/shared guide

You may also be interested in the "Shopping" section under the right hand menu. I made it specifically for Byrth so it's tailored to his exact requirements, but it fills a similar role and it isn't restricted to just equipment like itemsets. It does need some touching up, though.

Depending on how the data is distributed, a median should suffice in most cases. If it doesn't follow a Normal distribution, though, there are ways to find a more accurate "average" beyond just removing outliers. That's likely out of the scope of what Rooks is trying to accomplish, but it would be interesting to see how it would play out.

I'm an idiot when it comes to these things but can't you use this website to parse what prices are for things? Going by that logic can't your addon just request the average price for each server if you use this site as the database instead of asking the game server?

Although this is possible, it's generally frowned upon to "scrape" sites in this way, not to mention unreliable.