Auction-House App Interest?

[Kich867]

Hey all,

Relatively new here but interested in contributing my expertise to the community!

I was wondering what the interest would be in some form of application that would serve as sort of an auction house for the server?

Obviously the items couldn't transfer and play couldn't be exchanged this way. However, I think this would be a good way for players to organize selling their items, the EC Tunnel's auction channel gets spammed incessantly and are difficult to follow sometimes. Furthermore, I think it would encourage people to sell -more- items that they may not have bothered selling before--why sit around EC tunnels spamming to sell these 25-50pp items? Well, what if you had them up on an Auction House (AH) and someone sent you an inquiry for them? Seems easy.

The idea would be to provide a place for users to list what they want to sell, what they want to buy, and what they're looking to trade. Users would create a simple account (just username / pass, which should not be your EQ username / pass), enter their character name that they'd like to sell from (it'd make sense to see "Brekk" instead of "Kich867", since Brekk is my in game character's name), and make some lists.

These lists would be searchable by other users and easily filtered. But most importantly the system would be passive. I would throw up an item on my Want to Sell list, I would go to work, come back, and find that I have a few offers.

How you'd handle it beyond that is totally up to you--you can log in to EQ and simply send tells to everyone that wanted the item and sell it to whoever happens to be on, or you could look for the first person to send a request to buy it, or you could connect to a private chat / send that user a message about when you'd like to meet them and on what characters.

After you sell the item you could flag it as "sold" to a character and the other players wanting that item from you would be notified that the item has been sold.

So just a quick recap:

Initial Feature Set:
- WTS, WTB, WTT listings.
- Listings sortable by price, stats, name, slot, race, and class.
- Passive user interaction via notifications and Sell / Buy / Trade inquiries.
- Notifications for when an item you have an inquiry for has been sold/bought/traded to someone other than you.

Future Feature Set:
- Item analytics: average sale price on the app, average buying price, item statistics, etc.
- Live chat complete with user list and online/offline indicator.
- Service trade lists, if you're a blacksmith or a tailor or you want to sell Multi-Quests (I haven't quite nuked out an idea on how to properly store and display selling MQ's and tradeskill lists yet).
- Any other interesting features the community dreams up.

Things I Haven't Worked Out Yet:
- How to get a database of the items in the game.
- How to distribute the application (be it a web-app or a .exe).

Qualifications:
- I have 2 years of full stack development experience (I program the UI, the server-side code, and design/manage the database architecture).
- I really enjoy EQ and have been itching for a side-project.

I don't believe this would violate any sort of "Not Classic." rules, since it exists outside the game and at that point in time theoretically someone -could- have set something like this up. Let me know if this would be against any sort of server rules though.

[Kich867]

only if you name it Auction Tracker (tm)

Kich's Auction Tracker (TM) All Other TM's Prohibited?

[mgellan]

Things I Haven't Worked Out Yet:
- How to get a database of the items in the game.
- How to distribute the application (be it a web-app or a .exe).


You can download a Velious era database from Project EQ (PEQ)... probably pretty wrong but not as wrong as more recent PEQ databases that have post-Velious modifications to items included. You could ask Nilbog for a dump of the items table from P99 but unlikely he'd be willing to part with it since it was a lot of work to make it right.

I would have thought a web site was a no brainer, who distributes stuff as web-apps or .exes anymore? If you want it to run disconnected use HTML5...

Regards,
Mg

[Thatt]

I've been working on a similar app, and the biggest drawback is the incomplete equipment list; I was planning on solving that by writing a web service that returns the database of your equipment query in xml, so users can contribute until the database is complete. Once that's working, the logical next step is allowing users to mark items in that database as "for sale at this price" or "buying at this price", and connecting users outside of eq when a match pops.

If you're solving that problem before I get to it, it's in all of our best interests that our individual apps hit the same database, so we're not fragmenting the "auction house" as it were, because it's only useful if there are other people connected. A website is the obvious primary consumer of such a web service, but I'd still like access to it within my app.

That being said, if I get there first, I'll expose my web service to you.

[Kich867]

You can download a Velious era database from Project EQ (PEQ)... probably pretty wrong but not as wrong as more recent PEQ databases that have post-Velious modifications to items included. You could ask Nilbog for a dump of the items table from P99 but unlikely he'd be willing to part with it since it was a lot of work to make it right.

I would have thought a web site was a no brainer, who distributes stuff as web-apps or .exes anymore? If you want it to run disconnected use HTML5...

Regards,
Mg

Sorry, web-app and website are synonymous to me.

Thanks, I'll check out that velious database!

[Kich867]

I've been working on a similar app, and the biggest drawback is the incomplete equipment list; I was planning on solving that by writing a web service that returns the database of your equipment query in xml, so users can contribute until the database is complete. Once that's working, the logical next step is allowing users to mark items in that database as "for sale at this price" or "buying at this price", and connecting users outside of eq when a match pops.

If you're solving that problem before I get to it, it's in all of our best interests that our individual apps hit the same database, so we're not fragmenting the "auction house" as it were, because it's only useful if there are other people connected. A website is the obvious primary consumer of such a web service, but I'd still like access to it within my app.

That being said, if I get there first, I'll expose my web service to you.

I like Mgellan's idea of just downloading the velious era PEQ database. We could then just have users send in errors as they find them if they arise. Be it a wrong item, an item missing, etc.

[Rooj]

Where's all this auction stuff coming from suddenly? We already have EC tunnel, EC tunnel forums, and ahungry (although more people need to start using the plugin for it). Shit's weird.

[Kich867]

Where's all this auction stuff coming from suddenly? We already have EC tunnel, EC tunnel forums, and ahungry (although more people need to start using the plugin for it). Shit's weird.

Personally, was just inspired by a few posts. Many things for Auctions here seem to be log parsers. And I thought, "Log parsers don't seem like an adequate way to check for people selling things".

You have to be online and watching it, or leave your client on at all times in EC. People are less likely to sell more menial items that aren't worth a ton if they can only auction items via in-game chat (I think at least).

Something like this would allow people to sell more stuff, they can toss up anything of any value.

It'd also be easier to find exactly what you're looking for if people actually end up using it / it's a makeable thing haha.

[Man0warr]

Someone made an Auction House website recently that didn't get much use.

http://ectunnel.org/

[tristantio]

My site (http://ahungry.com/eqauctions/) doesn't require anyone (beyond 1 person out there in the world) leave their client running.

It scans the local log, uploads to my server, and allows people from anywhere to view and search it in real time.

From there, you go to the site, search for your item, see who is selling it and message them when they're around in game.

For awhile I had an input box for users to enter their WTB/WTS directly from the web (and it would be intermingled with the /log data) but most users did not use it (and someone was putting junk in there) so I removed it for the time being.

Also has things like searching for items based on stats etc. which will narrow it down to items which match (and include their matches in the EC tunnel chat).

Try it out! (or if you like registering + posting on a forum type thing, try that ectunnel.org site as it sounds like exactly what you made).

I've been noodling the idea of upgrading the p99-patcher + realtime map application that I wrote to have Ahungry EQAuction Logger tie ins, but haven't done it yet.

[Kich867]

Try it out! (or if you like registering + posting on a forum type thing, try that ectunnel.org site as it sounds like exactly what you made).

I've been noodling the idea of upgrading the p99-patcher + realtime map application that I wrote to have Ahungry EQAuction Logger tie ins, but haven't done it yet.

Hrm, I haven't actually made anything yet it was just a gauge to see if people would be interested. I'm getting the "no" vibe given that there have been other tried and failed attempts at this apparently =/.

[Thatt]

I didn't realize people had already tilted at this particular windmill. I guess I'll leave any peer based auction functionality out of my app.

[tristantio]

Never hurts to innovate!

I think the biggest impediment to a web based auction tool similar to forums (with posting etc.) is people are often too lazy to register for a site (even if its a super simple registration) so avoid requiring any type of registration would help.

Then if you have something that automates between game and your website (via reading /log for instance) you'd probably have people use it.

If I could, for instance, have any app I ran locally scan for my own /auctions (vs general /auctions) and parse it out + make a web based post for them without having to post on the web, it'd be useful.

[Nubben]

Where's all this auction stuff coming from suddenly? We already have EC tunnel, EC tunnel forums, and ahungry (although more people need to start using the plugin for it). Shit's weird.

People who are into development (either as a career or just a hobby) enjoy doing projects related to their current interests. In this case, their current interest is EQ/P99. Doing hobby projects like this can help you stay sharp, or even better, can be a good way to learn a new thing or two (or even a new language!). I bet a lot of these people are doing these projects for those reasons, and decided to share just in case other people find their work useful. I doubt that any of these people are trying to come up with the next big thing or change the way the game is played.

[Thatt]

People who are into development (either as a career or just a hobby) enjoy doing projects related to their current interests. In this case, their current interest is EQ/P99. Doing hobby projects like this can help you stay sharp, or even better, can be a good way to learn a new thing or two (or even a new language!). I bet a lot of these people are doing these projects for those reasons, and decided to share just in case other people find their work useful. I doubt that any of these people are trying to come up with the next big thing or change the way the game is played.

Bingo.

[salimoneus]

People who are into development (either as a career or just a hobby) enjoy doing projects related to their current interests. In this case, their current interest is EQ/P99. Doing hobby projects like this can help you stay sharp, or even better, can be a good way to learn a new thing or two (or even a new language!). I bet a lot of these people are doing these projects for those reasons, and decided to share just in case other people find their work useful. I doubt that any of these people are trying to come up with the next big thing or change the way the game is played.

Pretty good summary!