Market Bot

[Metraxis]

I've been impressed with kBay and the Items of Loathing, and I've had a thought that I'd like to get comments on before I start putting pen to paper and blocking out code. I'd also like to know if people think KoLMafia is the right platform to use for the job.

Essentially, what I envision is an EVE-style Market, which would allow both Bid orders and Ask orders, where the Mall is Ask-only.

A player would place a bid order with a kmail like:

Bid: 20 library card @ 444 for 4 days
And include 8880 Meat with it. Similarly, an Ask order would look like

Ask: 20 library card @ 350 for 1 week
And include 20 library cards. Either one of these would enter an order into the Bot's tables. On the other end, Buy and Sell orders are simpler in format:

Buy: 20 library card
Sell: 20 library card
and would provoke a trade request from the bot based on the orders currently pending.

With kBay's code available, it shouldn't be to hard to set up a website that would show the current orders for a given item or set of items, perhaps with a moderated tag dictionary.

Certainly, I would not be doing this for my health, and I think that with decent volume, it could be worth doing with a relatively small fee, percentage-wise, perhaps a single percent with a 2 meat minimum per item and all arbitrage profits. The big question, though, is who pays: Bidder, Acceptor, Buyer, or Seller? I'm leaning toward Buyer. What do you all think of the concept, and is Mafia up to the task?

 

[Grotfang]

Given the existence of kBay, /trade, the flea market and the mall, what problem are you addressing with this bot, exactly?

As for whether mafia is up for the task - it really depends on what you want to achieve. If you plan on making a website based interface, you might find pykol a better option - that is the system kBay and wadbot use, and I really would stress its advantages in that (especially regarding mall interactions) it gives you far greater control over the way you interact with the game.

In addition, pykol was designed with these sorts of bots in mind. As far as I'm aware, mafia was not.

 

[heeheehee]

The main problem that I see is that, as Turias mentioned (http://forums.kingdomofloathing.com/vb/showthread.php?t=154587), "When [he] first started working on kBay, [he] decided that [he] needed something more complex than an ASH script in KoLmafia."

Both of the resources you mentioned are greatly useful, and I'd love to see this in place, but right now, I just don't think that Mafia would be the right medium for implementing this.

Of course, this is probably the largest community of KoL-playing coders aside from the main fora themselves -- highest-density population of KoL coders (I guess), so you might get some other opinions.

Perhaps a bot that relays instructions to a website, somewhat like kBay? I'd guess that all the database management stuff would be on that site, as it'd be too much for a mapfile -- that would be difficult enough in itself to manage (Two maps, one for bid orders and one for ask orders, with the key being the username? Bleh.). Plus, then it'd be a real pain if the bot operator's computer crashed or something.

The biggest plus that I can see to using Mafia is that in the case the operator decides that it's too much of a hassle, he can pass on the metaphorical keys to the next willing soul. So it wouldn't just die.

Biggest obstacle, aside from the massive amount of code (community project! Yay!), would be getting enough people to use it. But then again, the Mafia community is pretty darn large, I think.

But yeah, great idea. I might be able to help out with a bit of the coding -- just let me know ahead of time. [[Regarding the buy/sell orders: Have the bot propose a trade with the items attached and the price in a note. Or vice versa.]]

 

[Metraxis]

Given the existence of kBay, /trade, the flea market and the mall, what problem are you addressing with this bot, exactly?

kBay, the Mall, and the Flea market are Ask-only exchanges, and /trade requires the presence of everyone involved. Right now, there is no good way to say, "I want to buy 10,000 tiny plastic coffee pizies @700 Meat each" then go away for a while and see if anyone takes you up on it.

EDIT: I'll look into pyKoL

 

[Grotfang]

kBay, the Mall, and the Flea market are Ask-only exchanges, and /trade requires the presence of everyone involved. Right now, there is no good way to say, "I want to buy 10,000 tiny plastic coffee pizies @700 Meat each" then go away for a while and see if anyone takes you up on it.

Sounds good. Pykol definitely seems to me the way to go, though.

Good luck!