Buyer/Seller Rep

[awimer01]

I don't know if any of you do this or have done this or even knew this happened. It happened to me today, an I'll be honest, I was pleasantly surprised. I sold someone a Ikky B Club, and part of the deal was helping my buyer find another item. Didn't see any harm in it, so about 30 minutes later I saw one flash in EC, I contacted both the seller and the buyer, arranged a meet, and in a flash I had helped 2 people get what they wanted. The buyer tipped me 100pp!

I was floored. I hadn't really thought about that being a relatively low risk yet somewhat lucrative thing. Granted it was a simple donation (a most appreciated one!) but I was just wondering if this kinda thing happens a lot?

Akkarin

[Slave]

A lot of people spend a lot of their time in EC. Their activities range from market speculation to casinos. If you can find a niche for your services, and there are a lot of people who would rather fight monsters, have fun and make your fortune doing it!

[Swish]

Add in the use of that auction tracker and the EC forum here, and there's a lot of potential ways to source items for people - good luck with it, I wish I had the time and patience I'd love to give that kind of thing a try :)

[username1337]

I don't know if any of you do this or have done this or even knew this happened. It happened to me today, an I'll be honest, I was pleasantly surprised. I sold someone a Ikky B Club, and part of the deal was helping my buyer find another item. Didn't see any harm in it, so about 30 minutes later I saw one flash in EC, I contacted both the seller and the buyer, arranged a meet, and in a flash I had helped 2 people get what they wanted. The buyer tipped me 100pp!

I was floored. I hadn't really thought about that being a relatively low risk yet somewhat lucrative thing. Granted it was a simple donation (a most appreciated one!) but I was just wondering if this kinda thing happens a lot?

Akkarin

This is essentially what all the mules/vendors in EC are doing. They buy many items at low-ball prices then spend time in EC selling those items at higher prices - essentially acting as the middle man for buyers and sellers. The "tip" is more of a "fee" and it's the difference between the cost of buying and price of selling. The plat made per hour is this case is the total platinum earned from sales minus the total platinum earned from purchase of stock divided by the number of hours of playing in that session. In this case, just like in real life, being connected with the right players to provide you with cheap goods to resell is key to success when playing the P1999 market.

The hardcores also do stock-like analysis of the prices of goods, forecast change in price based on known upcoming changed/nerfs to items, generate supply/demand curves, collude with other major hardcores to price fix, etc.

[username1337]

With the simplicity of writing mouse/keyboard input bot programs, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the hardcores were entirely automated and responding to parses of the log file. The only minor complications are implementing intelligent enough NLP algorithms to handle players sending tells trying to buy a good and being able to recognize what they're interested in and how much they're offering (and generating appropriate responses) and then implementing a character recognition from image algorithm to handle decisions on where to click the mouse based on this information. Quite an interesting machine learning application.

[tristantio]

With the simplicity of writing mouse/keyboard input bot programs, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the hardcores were entirely automated and responding to parses of the log file. The only minor complications are implementing intelligent enough NLP algorithms to handle players sending tells trying to buy a good and being able to recognize what they're interested in and how much they're offering (and generating appropriate responses) and then implementing a character recognition from image algorithm to handle decisions on where to click the mouse based on this information. Quite an interesting machine learning application.

I hightly doubt that is happening, but I could be wrong.

While parsing the text is easy (my auction tracker does it from the log files to add the item links - the wiki one does it to pull prices related to items) having an image algorithm as you mentioned sounds like it would be nearly impossible to write since some items share the same icons when put in trade windows - although someone writing those "easy" mouse/keyboard input programs to detect where to click on the screen could probably just mouse over the icon area, run OCR over the item hover tip and approve/deny the trade based on what else is in the window, amirite?

Edit: A simple implementation to avoid having to stare at the screen however would be to turn on /log and have something (grep) parse for messages to you and when encountered send off an alert via text, IM or email - although repeating your /auc would require external macroing which is illegal in p99 tos.

[Grozmok]

lol

I log on my mule when I can't give the PC 100% of my attention. I hit the WTB macro button in the UI every so often. If I see an item I want/need or an item that is a blow out price, I'll scoop it up.

Simple as that, really.

[username1337]

I hightly doubt that is happening, but I could be wrong.

While parsing the text is easy (my auction tracker does it from the log files to add the item links - the wiki one does it to pull prices related to items) having an image algorithm as you mentioned sounds like it would be nearly impossible to write since some items share the same icons when put in trade windows - although someone writing those "easy" mouse/keyboard input programs to detect where to click on the screen could probably just mouse over the icon area, run OCR over the item hover tip and approve/deny the trade based on what else is in the window, amirite?

Edit: A simple implementation to avoid having to stare at the screen however would be to turn on /log and have something (grep) parse for messages to you and when encountered send off an alert via text, IM or email - although repeating your /auc would require external macroing which is illegal in p99 tos.

Your EDIT solution is a good legal alternative. Use data for average sale prices and send e-mail or text message if parse of log detects item being sold for a certain number of standard deviations from that average.