I was thinking that the market could be updated in such a way where players can see how much an item would approximately be worth and how often that particular item is selling based on the statistics of people buying. Meaning that the market would display how much an item is "really" worth currently based on how often it is put into the market, what price it is put at in the market, and how often it is bought from the market as well as the torishop. Making it a bit easier on the players who sell their items often to find a good price to buy and sell at in order to make their profit, also making it easier for the consumer to know how much they could be buying this item for. For example: an orc force is 150tc in the torishop but since it is currently out of stock, it is being sold in the market in a minimum of 395tc. So this market tab system takes in consideration all the orc forces in the market, the lack of orc forces in the torishop, how many people are actually buying the orc forces and creates an approximate price range from minimum to maximum amount that this item "should" be sold/bought at.

I realize the Items forum is the prime place for marketing players to do their business, but as far as I can tell there is also heavy usage of the market itself in order to get better deals that they might not make if they had posted a thread and got their price haggled down. It also may be beneficial to be able to add rarity of the item in circulation to the mix of this approximated price formula. So that even though there isn't a huge demand in void forces because most people don't have the qi, it is still worth a large amount do to there not being as many void forces owned.

So, a summary if this is tl;dr - I'd like to see a system integrated into the current market system where a player can tell the approximate 'street' prices of an item based on: how many people own it (rarity), how many people buy it straight out of the market, how many people sell it, what price is it being bought at more often, etc.

The one downfall I see of this currently is that it is a lot of effort to make this efficient, probably a lot of coding, or maybe even so much effort that it's not even possible with the amount of work force that toribash has with the ability to do this. Anyway, just a thought, feel free to shoot holes in my idea as you see fit, or point out any flaws. Also point out any grammatical mistakes D8

as you stated it just seems like too much work and really for only an estimate
if anything was added close to this it should be the simple "starting at x on the market"
or something along those lines

also, as you know, many people trade items as bulk, or as duels/prizes
so keeping a tab on trading and street price would be really hard and genuinely confusing using only code
the only sure fire way to get an estimate is to have some sort of human marketeer to regularly update their street value

seems all too unnecessary

Even though the price range would be just an estimate, since it is being found mathematically it is more reliable than someone telling you, "this is a fair price". By price range I mean this method would produce the following: orc force 100tc-200tc. Showing the player how much that item is worth averagely (implying they can do quite simple math). They will be able to see the lowest possible price that people will sell/buy this item, and the highest possible price people will sell/buy this item.

This works for bulk items quite easily because all you really have to do is add up the average prices in that bulk. For example: Full 128 textures. The market method gives the approximate price for each one of these items (for the sake of the example we will say 1000-1500tc) so it really just depends on who you are dueling what the price will be. Since a lot of duelers are quite greedy they will probably consider each individual texture at their highest approximated price, add it up, and that's the price of a full 128 texture set being dueled.

I think you know that humans aren't as reliable as a machine when it comes to math and even estimates. It's impossible even for all the active, intelligent members in toribash currently to get the approximate price for each item in the game, even if they only had to update it every month (because prices do not change drastically in a quick amount of time too often).

yeah, but i feel as if there would be too many factors to take note of to produce a valid estimate
even if you took note of only safetrades there will still be too many outliers for the system to be valid
at that point i'd rather go ask ferras and to my knowing, even if computers are more reliable, a human could give me a better range

The only factors I know develop an accurate price are, how many times that thing is being sold for that price, and what that actual price is. I have not yet discovered how to incorporate rarity and torishop price, but it shouldn't be a problem to figure out when I have more time on my hands.

From the small amount of data Fish gave me to experiment with, it gave me a wide, but accurate price range of an item. With much more data I could produce an extremely accurate street price for any item. It's real time because as new data is coming in, the math is still happening so it will actively show price changes.

Are there any other extremely important factors I am missing? I'm not taking into account what people sell there things for in safetrade, or on the item forum because that isn't a static price, it's the price they themselves came up with.

hm, so the only stats you're looking at are the game's market
i guess that would be 100% useful and pretty cool just to see it at work
if you need any more ideas pm me or something cause i got a lot of free time
what would make it even better would be a monthly market board price as well
might over-complicate it all but if it was my job i'd be happy to do it
idk if the "Supported" statement does anything but i hope this is used soon after being refined

why not just re-introduce market graphs? it will add alot more predictability, you know, trends?

Because I don't want to predict how much an item will be worth based on trends. What I want to do is tell exactly how much an item is worth. The minimum amount that it will be probable to sell at, and the maximum. It's just math and it all depends on how often the players buy from the market. Correct me if I'm wrong but trends would only find what items are being bought more, which is useful. This method is "predicting" based on facts. This item has been bought for this amount. It tells you around the lowest you should buy or sell an item.

An example with the data Fish gave me (this is a small amount of data mind you, and I will be using the full data given to work out some better numbers when I have time): the market would tell you that currently a Supernova Force should be sold from 10811tc - 18975tc and that the majority of users have purchased Supernova Force at around 13432tc. Though for everyone's sake, if this is implemented I'd just round up to the nearest hundredth probably. Plus, with new data the rates would change based on the economy so to speak, so if people begin selling the item for lower universally, the approximation that the market tells you will change

I hope I'm not being confusing it's really late as I'm typing this D8

this is exactly what you can tell by this graph


this shows the price trends

anyway, more about it here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candlestick_chart


not sure about base line, as we are talking about marketing and considering how static tb is, i don't think baseline should be used at all, except may be torishop price

Okay, this seems like the same thing I guess? If it is the same thing how is this easier than what I've done already or more accurate? Would you intend to use a different graph for each item? I think that would be a little confusing to figure out for the majority of users. Plus, I'm not sure if that method can factor in rarity of an item that I am basing off the amount of qi that the general public has. Wouldn't this show that price of a Void Force is constantly going down because it's not really being bought often, if it is based on trends?

I'm open to new methods mathematically that may be easier than the way I've used in the example but I don't know about showing everyone a chart for each item, or even the result of the chart since it cannot judge things by it's rarity. Plus, this chart seems more useful if you are wanting to look over long periods of time which isn't the case. The way I'm proposing would update a price range all the time simply based on the math of for how much people are buying and selling and how often they are on certain prices.