[New] EMC Market Buy/Sell Portal - Suggestions/Bug Reports

This is no offence to you, just my personal thoughts: Scrap this idea before even starting it. Keep everyone the same and keep a fair market. It's another way to pay to win and if you don't pay up, you don't get seen, you don't get a piece of the pie. This will only add negatively to an already fragile economny imo. I know it takes time and effort to make this tool but don't to it like this. Donations to help run it, by all means but keep everyone on the same level.

To be fair, I was asking for feedback.

But I'm a bit confused by "you don't get seen". All information would show up. It's just a matter of when. Are you thinking from the standpoint of shop owners? All shops would be treated the same.

I know it could suck for a bottom tier user who never contributed anything, that there are some listings which you can't see yet, but you can solve this by adding some listings of your own, or you could just use the older listings. If there's no incentive at all, then the listings don't exist for anyone. So everyone loses.

If I scrapped the payment alternatives entirely and just had the tiers based on how many listings a player contributed, would that change your opinion at all? Are you against giving players who contribute data a period of time where they can use that data before others? This would apply evenly to all players.

Do you have any other ideas for how I could encourage others to contribute? Because right now the data on the site is barely usable in many cases, and that doesn't seem to be helping anyone.

Possible ideas:

for people who contribute the most data, being able to get basic analysis/suggestions/recs.

be transparent about monthly cost of service - looking for contributions as you mentioned towards cost or via rupees.

Becoming a SaaS - but people normally hate SaaS - however - treating everyone equally - everyone contributes to access

You can have tiers as you proposed, but taking away the basics for a paywall would not be recommended. Extras would be behind a paywall are alright.

If in the future a new person who uses the service for the first time, but only manages to get old data, which could mean empty shops, then they are much more less likely to get the ‘full service’ given that the free version was a waste of time, from their perspective.

Note: id' like to help using the autoreader, but unlike the shopkeeper, your site does not support 2FA, so I can't let it read my shop (or I misunderstood something)

Also, see if a paid service on your website would be allowed with EMC's rules. Thank you for the updates.

Can you please elaborate on what basic analysis, suggestions, or recs are? An example of how that would work would be great.

Since you wanted transparency, hosting for all services, including my own personal sites and some other projects is on the Ultimate Plan here which is $9.95/mo. The domain is PorkBun, $10.95/yr USD. Obviously, I don't even need to cover all of that from the market site. The hosting and domain are shared by multiple projects.

My main motivation with offering a tiered option is to encourage people to contribute new listings and data. I'd much rather everyone contribute listings and keep the site up to date, but I recognize that there are certain people for whom they simply don't have the time to contribute. That was the main reason to offer rupees or payment as an alternative.

I'm not sure how this differs from the tiered approach.

The basics would remain intact. All tiers would be able to search up items and see listings. The only difference is whether a listing would appear in the case where that listing was added in the last couple weeks. After the listing existed for a couple weeks, it would show up for all tiers.

Empty shops should be removed for all tiers. If you know of an empty shop, please PM me so I can remove it globally easily.

I'm hoping that the overall quality of listings improves for all tiers. That is the end goal.

I didn't even consider that there was a way to support the 2FA. I will have to look into that further.

For the moment, would it be possible to temporarily disable 2FA while using the Auto-Reader? You can enable it again right afterward. I do appreciate your contribution a lot!

I have reviewed all the rules and didn't find anything. The closest is the real-money trading section, which is specifically talking about "us[ing the] forums or in-game communication to buy or sell any item outside of the Empire Minecraft Community". This is clearly a service and arguably part of the community as well.

Regardless, based on the feedback received thus far, I am thinking more of having the tiers based on contributed listings at least initially. So if you would contribute X listings per month, as a reward, you get to see the new listings of other players sooner than those who don't contribute any listings.

Hopefully I understood the feedback received against the tiers correctly and this addresses it.

not sure if you store this data, but technically you could provide: ‘these are the trendiest items this past month. By item volume/ rupee quantity

You can provide these benefits to your top data contributors. Not simply obtaining latest prices & searching shops, but showing very basic market sentiment by knowing items which are being transacted the most in the past week/month.

Or you could offer information such as: There has been an uptick of 10% in cobblestone transactions versus the past week (however that is reliant on getting more transactions scans, more frequently… I see your issue….

some over complicated suggestions would be something similar to ‘Spotify’s your year at a glance’ where you provide users an overview of their own trends, or market trends of the year. (However this already ‘done’ by the shop stocking tool - don’t recall the name)

- to add to Fred, I also used this quite a lot, but stopped once I added 2fa to my account. I turned it off the past year but haven’t really been active but will probably start using once against soon enough.

I am still unconvinced on the delayed information…

scenario 1: a shop owner sees that their price is a bit too low, and updates their shop and your website with the new higher prices. Given the delay, free users will go to this shop thinking it had certain price, but it doesn’t, then they themselves update the website. Seems to create an unnecessary negative experience on the website and negative perspective on the mall.

scenario 2: let’s say an elytra supplier recently brought back plenty of elytras, the first week, your top tiered members take advantage of this opportunity and leave the shop without stock… there is of course an advantage over who has the information faster, but I’m simply trying to make the point that, over the long run, the free tiered users will have a much more empty database. Given that listings, possibly a considerable amount, will appear and disappear during the ‘delayed timer’ never making it to the eyes of potential new users who could have contributed to the database if they saw that the service benefited them. But given that they didn’t obtain any new information, based on the reduced database, they will not contribute. Effectively creating a negative feedback loop.

I think ThaKloned misunderstood the idea about the tiers: the suggestion is that members in higher 'tiers' get to see more, not get seen more by others.

Paying real money for an online service might not be explicitly covered by the rule you mention, but it is clearly intended to be covered by it (if you ask me). So yeah, that's not an option.

The membership tier system in general doesn't interest me very much, to be honest; I'm curious to see if you'll try it, though, and how it affects things. Besides hopefully clearing up some unclarities, I would rather focus on something else:

This is really cool! What did you base this tool on?

I'll have a look. I'm afraid that if I go that route I'd have to generate a new key every time I disable/re-enable it, not exactly my favourite solution.

The closest I have is volume of searches for each item per day, (which has been fixed now). The only way to get item volume/rupee quantity would be retaining all the transaction history. It's theoretically possible, but quite far from the data I'm presently capturing.

I'm still not sure the value in this information. Can you explain how someone might benefit from this?

It might be practical to provide a summary of all transactions from the rupee history. This actually could be more practical than the other items.

It seems like this is a common trend and there's good evidence that not supporting 2FA is affecting the likelihood of updating the information. It's a shame that there isn't an API which I can just tap into, so users could subscribe and feed in all their information if they choose to.

Of course, the quality of this information is less than can be gained from screenshots and data entry.

A listing only has one price. If the listing was already existing for two weeks or more, as would most likely be the case in the scenario you are suggesting, the new price will show up for everyone.

All users benefit from extra data. Most new listings won't sell out like that. If 100 listings get added to the site, even if 20 are sold out before free tiered users get to see them, free tiered users still have 80 new listings at their disposal which they otherwise wouldn't have had. I'm not sure how there's "a much more empty database". The example you gave seems like it would sell out one way or another.

Let's suppose it really was a zero-sum game and there were only entries like you mention. I am still not sure what you are arguing. If there is a limited supply of elytras sold by a lost leader shop or cheap supplier, should they go first to users who contributed less to the available listings? As in, if there's scarcity which could only benefit one player, instead of the top data contributors with a proven history of contributing, it should go to a new visitor in the hopes they might maybe contribute?

Both of your examples involve shop owners/suppliers. The main point I think you're missing is that I'm trying to encourage players to go out and visit shops and add those shops to the database, in entirety. As in, one player goes and captures screenshots of the entire shop, and another player (or the same players) goes through those screenshots and adds the pricing information. Both of your examples are of shops or suppliers adding the listings, which I think is a core misunderstanding of what I'm trying to accomplish here.

The reason that most of the shops got added in the past was because I went around and visited them myself and added all the information. This was an extensive process that took a lot of hours that I haven't had in that many years. Rupee history can help to suggest more shops, but it never provides complete information unless someone manages to buy and sell every single item in the shop. Only a few shop owners actually added their information to the site. What I can accomplish is a tiny fraction of what an active group of users could accomplish were they to take this up.

That's correct. I wish ThaKloned would come back as I really value their opinion and want to see what they might suggest would work better.

I obviously cannot speak on behalf of the intention of staff, however the "lawyer" in me clearly reads the rules to apply to "us[ing the] forums or in-game communication to buy or sell any item outside of the Empire Minecraft Community". I see each of the three underlined points as defined criteria for what constitutes a violation of the rule. Using a third party site to sell a service that is related to Empire Minecraft would seem to not match on all three of the underlined criteria.

Regardless, based on the feedback I have received, there is a strong push-back on the idea of accepting rupees/cash for membership tiers. I have little interest in rupees or cash and would much rather people contribute by adding listing data to the site. This is also easier to develop as a simple counter of listings added per user. So I can't see a downside to dropping the rupee/cash portion of the idea entirely.

For example, if a user adds listings they get immediate access to those listings. If they add 100 listings, then for 30 days they get access to all listings older than 48 hours. If they add 1000 listings, they get 30 days of full access to all listings from anyone.

This is definitely the focus I want as well.

Back when I was spending hours manually adding all the shops, I would do a process of going through the shop with the bulk adder beside the game. I would go back and forth between both windows. This process was frustrating because when the game paused, the menu could block the ability to view one or more of the signs, and I would have to adjust the view just slightly, sometimes multiple times. It also required the game to remain open, and the character to remain at some location in the shop until the whole shop was entered. I often had to do some other task in the game, and thus would lose my spot in a large mall or shop.

I then started a slightly easier process of capturing all the screenshots ahead of time. This meant that, at any time in the future, I could just shift through the screenshots and not have to worry about the pause menu. Other than the brief time to get the screenshots only, my character could be anywhere doing anything.

The new feature is simply my long-standing goal of creating a system similar to the one I used myself, but for public use. Screenshots can be captured at any point, by any player, and then uploaded (only by me so far). The new feature combines the screenshots with the bulk adder to enable a user to quickly add all the signs for each screenshot. The completion of a screenshot is tracked, so the user won't see it a second time. In case a shop itself is screenshot twice, the listing would get pulled up right away if the bulk adder selected the same item. It also only updates the information if there isn't already newer information, based on the timestamp of the screenshot itself.

The challenge is getting lots of players to help out so we can get all the shops added. So if not a tier system in particular, it would interest me to understand what might motivate you to help once the tools are online.

I'm not sure how long it takes to generate the new key, but I am assuming you might only do this once a month or even just once for the moment.

It sounds like I will need to figure out the 2FA support. This will take some time to figure out. But maybe it can be solved before another month passes so you wouldn't have to do that a second time.

Here it sounds like the information on the signs has to be entered into some database manually, whereas in the post where you announced the feature it sounded like this is done automatically. Which of the two is the case?

I'm curious about one thing. If I choose not to participate in your data gathering project do you have the ability to scan my rupee history for purchase (price/quantity sold) history?

Azoundria will be more clearer on this, but from my experience...

This website/application, basically logins into the forums in the background momentarily in order to go through the rupee history page.

When it is scanning, you can see at which page it is scanning, and can limit the search to, for example, the most recent 50 pages in the rupee history.

That is the only way for the system to know your whole rupee history.

If you don't give your sign-in information to provide data, there are two ways for the system to have your shop signs

1. If a person who you traded with: You either used their signs, or they used your signs, uses the system.
-> This means, that the second person provided a partial rupee history 'belonging to you'

2. This wont give rupee history, but I recall there was a way to manually add shop signs into the database manually, without needing to scan the rupee history. However this is just that, a manual form you fill in.

The understanding of the data collection seems to be accurate. Thanks Tuqueque.

Data still has to be entered. The process has been designed to be as fast as possible. The user is presented a screenshot and can type a few letters to find the item. Price/quantity information from the database shows up automatically if it's already present, and just needs to be updated to complete that screenshot.

Previously: A user (almost always me) would have to spend an hour or so going to a shop and standing in front of every single sign and manually entering data. The pause menu would get in the way of viewing the sign most of the time. There's no way to do it without a client open. If the user had to do something else in the middle of that hour, then their position would be lost. It was very easy to lose track of what had been done already.

Now: One user (me or anyone else) can spend as little as 5-20 minutes capturing screenshots of a shop with the client open. Then any user(s) can fill in data quickly without having to boot up any client at all. The new entries come with screenshot and timestamp attached.

Once it's all hooked up, searches for an item will show up with verified residence/username information and screenshots, which can help supplement for those situations where the rupee history reader massively fails:

• Items which no players have bought/sold yet. (Most listings are this.)
• Items in shops which aren't well known, so nobody has yet used it much.
• Listing is assigned to the user's main residence, but this is not where their shop is.
• Player who owns the shop has multiple shops on multiple residences.
• Shop is very difficulty to find or navigate, even if it's on the residence.
• User does a one-time purchase/sale based on a lottery or other temporary deal.
• Player has their shop on the residence of another player entirely.

Screenshot data solves all these problems, if we can just figure out how to motivate players to capture and process the screenshots. If more data is provided, more data will be available for everyone, and it will be more accurate.

How it might work:
(1) Logged out. You search up an item. Most listings will show up, but a small number are hidden and can be enabled by logging in.
(2) Tier 1. You search an item. Most listings will show up, but some are still hidden and can be enabled by entering 10 screenshots.
(2) You enter data from 10 screenshots. Now you're tier 2 for a few days.
(3) You enter data from more than 10 screenshots. Each screenshot extends your time as tier 2.
(4) You enter data from 100 screenshots. Not you're tier 3 for a few days.
(5) You enter data from more screenshots. Each screenshot extends your time as tier 3.
Now, as long as you keep contributing you stay tier 3. If you let the time expire, you drop back down.

I think what I want to do to gamify it more is to have the time increases be somewhat random and every so often you get a big boost to your time. I also think a high score list could be useful.

I do appreciate the feedback so far. Obviously, it's a lot of effort to build this system, so if the overwhelming response is that the current level of information available on the site is better than having a tier system, it's better to spend that time and effort updating the listings manually myself.