Feature - Rejected Reflect lowest Mall Price in item manager

VladYvhuce

VladYvhuce

Member
I've discussed this before with Bale's OCD inventory control script. The problem with the way Mafia displays the prices is that they are sometimes WAY off from the actual lowest mall prices. This often gives me a false sense of "I could make money if I sell this thing I bought a long time ago", only to find out it's not worth selling the item in the mall after refreshing the prices in the store manager, because Mafia was quoting me an arcaic price from someone who never lowered their price. It gets rather irritating when I'm doing inventory cleaning. It happened just today when I looked at the price of my Jekyllin hide belt. Mafia said I could sell for 999,999,998. The actual mall prices before that are 280,000,000 in two different shops, and 300,000,000 in another. I think this is fair proof that the current price checking system is flawed.
 
One word: mallbots

A script is allowed to know what the 5th lowest price for an item is. Not the current lowest price.
The user, of course, can manually do a mall search and discover all of the prices.
I wasn't aware that we displayed mall prices in the Item Manager - as opposed to the Purchases frame, but if we are, I am sure it is showing the same 5th-lowest price, so as not to have to do a mall search for every item.

In any case, the lowest price is often NOT what you want to offer your items for; just because one shop is offering an item for 100 Meat, limited to 1/day, if the 2nd - xth price is 1,000 Meat, do you, too, want to mall sell your item for 100 Meat?
 
Whether we should ignore limited items when determining 5th lowest price, maybe we could even put in some complex processing so that we can show a less than 5th price if the fifth price is much higher than an unlimited lowest price.

Or of course stick to current system !
 
Well, when I said "5th price", I meant "the price you would pay for the 5th item you buy". If the lowest price has 5 available, that is the price that will be shown; we will not go look for 4 higher prices.

Items with limits count as providing the limit's worth of the item. So a 1/day milk of magnesium at 100 Meat will count for 1, and the more realistic price is what the next 4 are offered at at a single unlimited store.

This breaks down primarily (only?) when there are only a handful of an item in the mall, as in the Jekyllin belt referenced by the OP.
 
Maybe the first price over max(50m, 2*Mr. A historical price) could be used, if that is reached before the 5th price? Only things that are fairly rare would be affected, and I don't think there are too many items to misprice at 60m instead of 600m.
 
I've now written the (small amount of) code for that change, so it's mostly just a question of whether it would be a good change.
 
I think 3x or 4x Mr. A price might be a bit more reasonable. Sure, there aren't a lot of items that will end up at 60M from 600M, but there are a decent number of items in the <120M range, and those are usually reported fairly accurately since they aren't at the same really low supply.
 
I don't think any changes are necessary/appropriate. As a development philosophy we have decided to use the "fifth price" in many circumstances in order to raise the skill level required to use KoLmafia as a mallbot. If that is no longer the development philosophy then we should change "fifth price" to "lowest price".

Jick once claimed in frustration that "the Mall is not the game". If the dev team agrees with him, there is really no use case for addressing an edge case where the behavior is considered flawed by some.

IMO. YMMV.
 
I'm doubtful that mallbots would actually be used for buying anything listed in the mall over 100m. I think everyone would agree that making it harder to automatically buy a Mr. A listed at 3m instead of 30m is a good thing.
 
Veracity said:
One word: mallbots

A script is allowed to know what the 5th lowest price for an item is. Not the current lowest price.
The user, of course, can manually do a mall search and discover all of the prices.
I wasn't aware that we displayed mall prices in the Item Manager - as opposed to the Purchases frame, but if we are, I am sure it is showing the same 5th-lowest price, so as not to have to do a mall search for every item.

In any case, the lowest price is often NOT what you want to offer your items for; just because one shop is offering an item for 100 Meat, limited to 1/day, if the 2nd - xth price is 1,000 Meat, do you, too, want to mall sell your item for 100 Meat?
Click to expand...
Mall price is an option in the item manager. Click the little "square with a down arrow in the corner" button that's at the junction of on top of the scroll bar's "up" and the "Autosell" button. The options to show stuff are: "item name", "autosell" (shows autosell price), "quantity", "mall price", "power", "fill", and "adv/fill".

And yes, I'll sell the crap out of items by undercutting everyone I can, and not limiting items. If I'm moving 30 items at 100 meat each, with no limit and the next highest is selling at 1000 meat, but not moving any product, then I'm the one coming out ahead of both the person selling with limits and the person tying to sell at higher prices. My goal is to get rid of the stuff. And anything over auto-sell is pure profit, on my end.

I do a fair amount of trading, too. So, being able to quickly look up prices for a number of items is a huge bonus for both parties. I get what I want, they get what they want, and feel like they came out with a good deal. The practice has gotten me a few trading partners that have turned into online friends.

If it were only a handful of items affected now and then, I wouldn't have posted the feature request. It happens very often with items I'm wanting to get rid of.
 
VladYvhuce said:
And yes, I'll sell the crap out of items by undercutting everyone I can, and not limiting items. If I'm moving 30 items at 100 meat each, with no limit and the next highest is selling at 1000 meat, but not moving any product, then I'm the one coming out ahead of both the person selling with limits and the person tying to sell at higher prices. My goal is to get rid of the stuff. And anything over auto-sell is pure profit, on my end.
Click to expand...

Based on what I've seen from your posts, your play style is not one I would focus on for any design decisions.
 
Veracity said:
One word: mallbots
Click to expand...
VladYvhuce said:
Mall price is an option in the item manager. Click the little "square with a down arrow in the corner" button that's at the junction of on top of the scroll bar's "up" and the "Autosell" button. The options to show stuff are: "item name", "autosell" (shows autosell price), "quantity", "mall price", "power", "fill", and "adv/fill".
Click to expand...

Umm... You *DO* know who (so graciously, in their own free time wrote, and has been maintaining only the greatest thing to happen to KOL since Jick's account was created) authored KolMafia, don't you?
 
Pazleysox said:
Umm... You *DO* know who (so graciously, in their own free time wrote, and has been maintaining only the greatest thing to happen to KOL since Jick's account was created) authored KolMafia, don't you?
Click to expand...
Please remember that context is everything:
Veracity said:
I wasn't aware that we displayed mall prices in the Item Manager - as opposed to the Purchases frame, but if we are, I am sure it is showing the same 5th-lowest price, so as not to have to do a mall search for every item.
Click to expand...
VladYvhuce said:
Mall price is an option in the item manager. Click the little "square with a down arrow in the corner" button that's at the junction of on top of the scroll bar's "up" and the "Autosell" button. The options to show stuff are: "item name", "autosell" (shows autosell price), "quantity", "mall price", "power", "fill", and "adv/fill".
Click to expand...
It make sense when you use the right quote sections.
 
Just to chime in my opinion. I really like the current behavior. If there is that much difference in price between the first and fifth item, it seems to me that there's even more reason to go with the fifth.

If the behavior was the change it would upset me and since none of the devs seem to like the idea, even though it isn't a thing I usually do, I am going to take the initiative of personally refusing this feature request.
 
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