RuneScape talk:Grand Exchange Market Watch/Archive 1

Keeping up with the Exchange
I'm not sure this can realistically be kept up... JalYt-Xil-Vimescarrot 12:06, 29 November 2007 (UTC)


 * I'm not suggesting here that we are going to get all prices for every item updated every day. I'm not expecting that at all.  But what I'm trying to do is to set up a place that people can find out what the rough prices are for something they may be making, and get a pretty good idea on some ways they can make money by working some of the "in-between" steps for many of the skills.  This is particularly for things like bars, uncooked food, and other items that would be great for helping a skill to gain experience.


 * Also, we won't know if this can't be kept up if we don't try in the first place. I think we can get a huge response from the Runescape community if we get this "advertised" properly.  Word of mouth alone is likely to get many people coming here to help out.  --Robert Horning 21:48, 29 November 2007 (UTC)
 * It's going to be even harder than street prices. Blazel 19:53, 30 November 2007 (UTC)
 * How is this going to be harder than street prices? Street prices implies that you have actually performed the trade on that item regularly, and have a strong understanding of economics to identify supply and demand.  I was able to do that with gemstones and make a modest profit, but it was incredibly tough.  I never got into the ore market at all because I simply didn't have the cash to make it... and the street market was so tight that a wrong move and you could lose your shirt financially.  A little bit before the Grand Exchange I was making a very minor amount of money off of purchasing talismans from lvl-3 players, but it was more charity than actually trying to make a serious profit from them.  I bought body talismans for 10 coins each, and earned some modest money crafting them at the alter (good Runecrafting exp too!) and selling tiaras at the general store.
 * On the contrary, exchange prices are very easy to find, and can be verified by somebody who hasn't even been involved with trading that particular item. You just have to find an empty slot at the exchange and "buy" the item (but don't put any coins into the transaction) to get the price.  It took me all of about 5 minutes to update the entire Runecrafting price page... including editing the pages and putting the updated numbers in there.  This includes the talismans and tiaras... not just the runes themselves.  There is no way I could have possibly done this sort of price search on street prices before the grand exchange... and even now I think street prices that are substantially different from G.E. prices are just merchants who are scamming (for the most part... there are some valid exceptions).  Once the Grand Exchange settles down into some realistic price ranges for some of the wacked out prices (Body runes, for instance), you will only find a price difference due to "local" demand... such as selling air tiaras at Falador on world 16.  --Robert Horning 02:08, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Last Priced Date
Can I suggest including a 'last priced date' column somewhere in the tables which will let people know when each individual price was last updated. That will tell how fresh/stale a price is and roughly how accurate it is. It will also give a feel for how relevant the figures are as a whole and whether they are keeping up with the more dynamic nature of the exhange (as compared to street prices). Pointy 02:40, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
 * I'm trying to think of a method we can use to put this date in easily and painlessly. I'll have to dig through the MediaWiki help pages to see how this could be done.  This is an excellent suggestion, however.  It would also help to identify what items perhaps would need a quick check in terms of updating to something more current.  --Robert Horning 03:12, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Five tildes gives you the date... JalYt-Xil-Vimescarrot  09:22, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
 * That "works" and does solve the immediate short term problem, but it makes updating the prices something much more complex. I'm trying to see how we can "automate" the process where the date of the last page edit will show up instead of forcing the people updating the prices to have to manually delete the previous date and add the five tildas, as you are suggesting here.  And not mess that up with four or six tildas by mistake.  The goal here is to simply type in the price with one quick edit and not make this any more complicated than that.  --Robert Horning 12:23, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
 * FYI, I got this featured added in (I hope... it still needs to be "tested" to see it works properly). Instead of the 5 tildas, I'm using the "Magic word" (A MediaWiki term) of "REVISIONMONTH", "REVISIONDAY", and "REVISIONYEAR" to calculate the date a page was last updated.  I tried to throw this formula into another template, but instead it grabbed the date of the last revision of the template rather than the date of the page it was included on.  Sometimes MediaWiki can be very frustrating.  I'm using the American standard of Month/Day/Year for the date, and this can be easily changed (well, sort of) if this should be updated to a more "British" standard.  How is this used in England anyway?  "Continential Europe" is Day/Month/Year, but I think English society does things a little different.  I do think this will help to note stale numbers.  Thanks for the excellent suggestion!  --Robert Horning 17:39, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
 * English is day month year. JalYt-Xil-Vimescarrot  19:03, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I'll try to switch it to that format.  I need to fix this problem anyway, as it seems to be now returning the date that the Market Watch page was last edited, and not when the actual price was changed.  Arrrrgh!  And the documentation on this stuff is about as terse as it gets!  --Robert Horning 19:06, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Yes, the "REVISIONMONTH", "REVISIONDAY", and "REVISIONYEAR" return the month, day and year of the modification of the actual page being displayed, not the date of the included template page. For example, the price on the steel pickaxe was updated on Dec 3, but the Grand Exchange Market Watch/Mining page still shows Dec 1. This is because the Grand Exchange Market Watch/Mining page was last edited on Dec 1. I do not know of a way to get the last modification date of the template itself shown (I would love to know). 10:49, 3 December 2007 (UTC)
 * I have an open request on the MediaWiki Support desk asking for some help on this. I think, unfortunately, this is going to turn into a low-priority bugzilla request (it happens), but it certainly would be cool to accomplish.  I'm going to try and work on some other parts of the items and do some more tweaking... and try to put the Market Watch prices into the item pages.  The goal here really is to edit once and update everywhere.  --Robert Horning 14:34, 3 December 2007 (UTC)
 * As a middle-ground you could consider using 'dd MMM yyyy' if the templates support it - e.g. '01 Dec 2007'. That will avoid confusion on both sides of the ocean :-). You might also want to check if the "wikitable sortable" javascript is able to sort rows in your chosen format before making a decision. Pointy 21:40, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Updated Prices Of All Discontinued Small drops Ltr96 Rocks 00:26, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

Tasks to get this working
I'm trying to work on a generic "template" that can be used to help update this price throughout the whole wiki. Think of it this way: If you know that the price of air runes has changed, you can "edit" the information in one place, and all of the associated pages (including the "item" page in this wiki) where the G.E. price is going to be listed will update simultaneously.

There are a few ideas I'm working on, and borrowing heavily from Wikimedia projects on how some of the templates have been used to compartmentalize the information into a sort of database.

Mainly, it is trying to get this to be easily updated is why it is taking me a bit longer to get all of this put together. --Robert Horning 21:48, 29 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Why would any page outside the item pages have the Exchange price? =/ JalYt-Xil-Vimescarrot  19:05, 30 November 2007 (UTC)
 * I brought this up in the forums, asking if this was something that would be reasonable to include here on this Wiki. I got several supportive nods, and the only detractors were those who thought it was a waste of time.  Not one person thought this would be inappropriate for this Wiki... if you disagree, please note the reason why this shouldn't be here.
 * The purpose for doing all of this is to put all of the market information together in one neat package, so you can review pricing information efficiently. Jagex could do this as well, but they aren't for some reason or another... I'm just trying to fill an information niche that could also be used to help promote this Wiki as offering something unique that the other Runescape fansites currently don't offer.  I really believe this is something that is almost uniquely qualified as something a wiki does best... in terms of a collaboratively edited list that many people can update simultaneously.
 * If you don't think this information belongs outside of the item pages...please let me know now before I waste any more of my time when you are likely to get this all deleted. --Robert Horning 19:27, 30 November 2007 (UTC)
 * I can't "get things deleted", nor did I ever say this was inappropriate. O.o I just think this won't get kept up. JalYt-Xil-Vimescarrot  19:32, 30 November 2007 (UTC)
 * To be honest, I see no reason why the prices should be anywhere but the item's infobox on its page. A user can simply go to the item's page and see the GE value there - there's no reason to make it more complicated. Oddlyoko talk 19:44, 30 November 2007 (UTC)
 * On second thought, seeing that the items are all grouped up into one page - not to mention I like how it's all presented - this has some potential. Perhaps updating every "grouping" every so often, but at different times than other "groupings" so there's not a ton of work on some price-update-day :P Oddlyoko talk 19:51, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

Why this will be kept up
I understand Vimescarrot's skeptical view that this is something that won't be kept current on all of the items all of the time. That is certainly a strong opinion on the topic, and something that certainly has some justification for thinking this may be a serious problem.

First of all, I'd like to point out that this "project" is going to be used to keep the item pages current as well as setting up a page to scan for related items. Even if we just keep the information on the item pages alone, there still is going to be a need to update the value on the item pages from time to time. This way we can get the items updated quickly...and have those who like to concentrate on certain kinds of items to be able to help participate on keeping them current.

My experience in this matter is as a Wikibooks administrator, where I spent a small bit of time working on the Runescape Wikibook and keeping a close tab on the "street market" price page that was added. At the time (about 2 years ago) this was one of the busiest pages on all of Wikibooks, with updates to the prices coming about 100 times per day or more. And that was hardly what would be called a hot spot of activity for Runescape fan sites. Without going into the ugly details, the Runescape Wikibook was deleted from Wikibooks (along with all of the other game-related material), but it still gives me some knowledge that once word gets out that something like this exists... it will be used and will be kept current. Obscure items like a half an anchovy pizza may not get updated as often, but think it is reasonable to see things like runes, ores, and maybe even abyssal whips being tracked very closely.

The worst-case scenerio is that I put together all of these pages and they have very stale numbers. Nobody wants to come along and help update them, and they simply take up sever space on the Wikia webserver. IMHO that would also imply that nobody is reading these pages at all, and that they aren't really serving their purpose, but that is irrelevant to this discussion. If that is the case, it would be worth simply deleting all of these pages and be done with it.

I don't think these pages will be ignored, and on the contrary, I think it will actually bring people to this wiki that haven't been here before. But that is to be seen and isn't a sure thing. --Robert Horning 01:44, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Direction signs
Please help correcting the texts in "direction" column into the three icons. 15:10, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

General Information
Sorry to interrupt your project, I wanna ask what is meant by "direction" ? (and also I found that you've used both "Unch" and "Unchg" for "Unchange") Xdragonaite 14:00, 9 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Direction is supposed to mean how the market went from the previous update. If the price is lower than the older price, the market is "down" on that item.  Or "up" if the price is going higher.  I haven't standardized abbreviations on the exchange yet, and the word "unchanged" is IMHO just too big for that column for how little real information it sends.  A suggestion to have the old price and the new price used for calculating the price movement has been made, and that perhaps is the solution to making this more clear.
 * Please keep in mind that this is still at a beginning stage of development for this whole project, and nothing is set in stone on how this can be accomplished. Please help me out and make this something worth participating in.  --Robert Horning 16:12, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Combination Runes
I think you forgot the combination runes. I can't add them myself since I'm not p2p ATM. 23:02, 30 November 2007 (UTC)


 * I just added the combination runes, but like you, I'm generally not P2P, so I don't have some initial price values to put into these. --Robert Horning 13:48, 9 December 2007 (UTC)


 * ELemental talisman? Rich Farmbrough, 03:20 16 December 2007 (GMT).


 * Added, although I don't have a price on it. --Robert Horning 05:10, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

great idea
this is a good idea, i use it a bit now. ps is the dow jones up or down? :P 11:32, 17 December 2007 (UTC)


 * The Common Trade Index is definitely up. And has been climbing at a very steady pace.  In other words, fears of a "collapse" are completely unjustified... at least for commonly traded items.  Finished goods is another story, but I've covered that on the forums for this website and elsewhere... and talked about by even J-mods on the official forums (but in a state of denial on the official forums).


 * BTW, thanks for the endorsement. --Robert Horning 17:35, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

not a problem, this thing is really great now, I'm a constant runecrafter, and buy ess and sell runes according to this, which I can afford to with a lot of ess and cash in reserve its helped me make extra money. Also your rares page is brilliant it helped me track my santa to its peak over xmas, i made bout 5m, i buy one every year now and this helped me track the turning point. Thank you for creating this. ;-) 12:49, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

A question
Shouldn't all the groups have an up or down symbol? and how do we calculate the market value? The pie 11:21, 19 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Ideally I would love to have some way to set this up in a real database, where we can do some calculations based on the previous price. Some suggestions have been made to me in terms of manually entering the previous price, so we could do something like (down -5) or something like that.


 * For now, the way I've been updating the "arrows" is simply looking at the old price, and as I'm performing the update, I just note the direction from the last time it was changed. Nothing more complicated, and you can do a page diff if you think the arrow direction is wrong.


 * As for how you calculate the "market value"... all you have to do is go to the Grand Exchange and grab one of the empty slots you aren't using for either buying or selling at the moment. Attempt to "buy" an item (even party hats work for this, even if you don't have the money) and just look at what the "average" price of the item is listed at the exchange.  It shows up right below the item.  In short, you don't have to be a merchant to help in updating these prices.


 * For some items, we have just started to keep track of the items. I'm using a F2P account for grabbing the prices of most items, so I am only getting prices on items available on F2P worlds.  I'm not even using this account for training or much of anything at all, except for hanging around the Grand Exchange and looking up prices.  If I had more real-world money, perhaps I would use this account for looking up member prices, but for me, it isn't worth it.  I'd rather spend my time on a member account doing stuff like member-only skills or member-only quests... in other words, playing the game.  For this reason, I expect member items to be updated much less frequently than stuff available to F2P worlds.  There are still plenty of F2P items that can be added to a general market watch.


 * I hope this helps to understand what we are doing here. We do need to write a guide for how to help update these prices, and to watch for vandalism.  --Robert Horning 16:52, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Thnks but you have got me wrong. When I say market value I mean the index values on the main grand exchange watch page. And by all groups I mean how the indexs the top of the page have up and down arrows but the other groups don't. The pie 09:18, 21 December 2007 (UTC)


 * This is something that is user-contributed. The values for the indexes are automatically re-calculated when you make a change to the index price, but the arrows are something that (unfortunately at the moment) need to be "manually" adjusted or even added in the first place.


 * As for how the indexes are calculated, I'm using a "weighted average" of the prices of all of the items, under the assumption that a 5% rise in the price of an air rune is just as important to the rune market as a 5% rise in the price of nature runes. It is just that air runes are 5% the price of nature runes, so they have a different "weight" than the nature runes.


 * The whole theory and philosophy of market indexes can get real messy, although Stock market index is an excellent place to start if you want to get a basic introduction to the ideas behind it. The real point to a well-designed index is that it can give a single figure (like the Dow Jones Industrial Average) which can indicate the overall health of the market.  I'm still trying to tweak the Common Trade Index, but at the moment I'm looking for somebody to step up and reliably report the prices of several key items before I include them in the index.  Remember, this is a very new feature to this wiki.  There certainly will be some things to try and fix, as is true with nearly all similar wiki projects that never are quite completely finished.  Your contributions to making this better are always appreciated.  --Robert Horning 13:03, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Ok, does that mean I can add up/down arrows to the other groups on market watch?

The pie 01:16, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Last price column?
A thought - d'ya think a "last price" column would be helpful? Or would it just add too much to the price editing process?

Example: I'm currently in the market to buy some, say, glory amulets. I check the Market Watch for the current price and see that the price has declined in the last day. But how much has it come down? If there had been a 10% price change from yesterday, this tells me that the price is unstable and that I might get a better deal by waiting a few more days. However, if the price has only nudged a few gold pieces downwards since yesterday, then I conclude that waiting won't make much difference and would want to buy them now. Conversely, a rapidly declining price would tell sellers that it might be in their best interest to unload their goods now. --Nightshade1862 02:25, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Changes
It took me a while, but I managed to make some changes to the system of templates used by the market watch pages:


 * There are now parameters for last price and last date on the exchange item pages. Since the vast majority of pages don't yet use these parameters, they are optional for the moment, and there is no last price column on the tables yet. Additionally, the direction parameter is made redundant by last and last date, if used (more on that below).
 * If an exchange page has the last price and date given, direction arrows will show up on the table based on the change between the prices. 0 change = unchanged arrow, 0-2% change = one arrow, 2-4% change = two arrows, 4+% change = three arrows. These values can be adjusted if need be.
 * As a side effect of this, exchange pages that are moved over to the new format will need to omit thousands separators in the price, due to the use of expressions in determining the number of arrows to display. To accommodate, whenever the price is displayed through the GEPrice or GEItem templates, the thousands separators will be added there.
 * Whenever expressions are used to manipulate prices through GEPrice, they will need to use the syntax   to remove the formatting. This includes the price indices, which I've changed for this.

Thoughts? Skill 05:19, 23 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Well, that addresses my point about the last price (see above). Sounds good. --Nightshade1862 05:34, 23 December 2007 (UTC)


 * First of all, I would like to say that the idea of a last price and last date added to these templates is a good idea. My only real concern about adding these fields is more on the "ease of use" in terms of updating the prices, but I'm certainly willing to take a "wait and see" approach on that point.  The benefit is certainly worth the extra effort.  For myself, I still want to get rid of the date field altogether, but that appears to require some fundamental changes in MediaWiki to get the dates to work "automagically", or in other words be pulled directly from the server.
 * I'm going to do an update for the kiosk items (everything that shows up on the various kiosks that surround the Grand Exchange), and I'll try to incorporate these changes into that round of price updates. Again, thanks for the help!  --Robert Horning 01:52, 24 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Having done some updates using these new fields, is there a way to get a subst template to set the old price and old date into the "Last" and "Last Date" fields, set the "Date=" to automatically be 5 tildas, and leave the new price area empty? I'm thinking something like the preload page for new prices, but with the other fields transferred over somehow.  Basically, the current way of updating prices is a huge PITA and I have been required to do at least 3 passes (sometimes 4) in order to get all of the information correct.  this is something very easy to mess up if you aren't careful.


 * One other huge area that needs to be added here, somehow, is dealing with the price ceilings and floors. I thought originally that Jagex was a little more sane in terms of the relationship of the floors and ceilings to shop prices (price for store stock) and alch values.  I couldn't have been more wrong, and it seems to be simply nuts on how it all works.  One guy who is posting on the official forums has found a way to make over 500k/hr just by taking advantage of this whole mess Jagex has created, where he is buying stuff on the GX and selling it at shops who buy for high alch prices.  BTW, no response from Jagex as to the logic of this or how the prices really are set, other than some vague references that are obviously contradicted by GX prices themselves.


 * Anyway, I can identify some floor and ceiling prices for several items... as the prices have hit one or the other. Sometimes the price drops or rises away from these values temporarily, but the economic situation pushes them right back to the floor or ceiling very quickly.  Regardless of if you like this idea or not (I hate it personally), it is useful somehow to know what these values might be if they are hit, and how it affects your ability to buy or sell that item.  Obviously an item price hitting the floor means you simply can't sell the item easily, as you can't offer it any cheaper.  Hitting the price ceiling means nearly unlimited demand for an item, but you can't buy them no matter how hard you try (or you might get a few every now and again).  A few items are set at both the price floor or ceiling, or have such a narrow trading band that it isn't even worth looking at for using the GX on that item.


 * The question I'm raising is if this sort of information is worth recording? I'll also note here that I've spotted Jagex tinkering with these floors and ceilings, so these values may also adjust from time to time.  I'm talking a hard minimum price or maximum price here, not just the +/- 5% trading range that does adjust from day to day.  --Robert Horning 02:57, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

AHHH IT'S BROKEN
The template has gone CRAZY... I'm not smart about advanced templates and things like that, so I can't really help. I hope it will get sorted out soon --  19:15, 29 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Oo, I think it's fixed now. --Atlantima 20:44, 29 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Sorry about that. I really need to move these "tests" to my user space first, so they don't have as much of a significant impact when they are widely used like this.


 * I've been trying to automate the process of updating the index direction arrows, which required digging down and working with the basic template schema of this whole system. And in the process I forgot a couple of parenthesis.... which is really hard to trace down when you are debugging these advanced templates.


 * Again, sorry about the inconvenience when you were trying to use these pages. I'll try to be more careful next time.  --Robert Horning 04:46, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

Removing Exchange items from Mainspace edits?
I have noticed that edits to those pages show up under mainspace edits when the "Recent Changes" page is visited. Due to the frequency at which those pages are being edited and the fact that updating prices add to your total mainspace edit count, some users have neglected to mark edits to these articles as minor. Therefore, removing the exchange templates from the mainspace will be very useful, not only clearing up the recent changes section but also preventing abuse to gain high edit counts. It should not be a handicap to users contributing the wiki for the sake of helping other players. Doomedrusher|Talk| |Contributions| 21:28, 31 December 2007 (UTC)


 * The problem and the huge question is what namespace should the Exchange items be moved to? It was suggested originally that they get moved to the "Template:" namespace... but as you pointed out they are a very frequently edited item... completely unlike most edits in the Template: namespace.  Shifting these out of the main namespace as a short-term problem is only going to shift this same administrator monitoring issue (why I'm presuming that you bring this up at all in the first place) to some other part of the wiki.  Most templates should be edited... well, almost never once they have been "debugged".  There are several templates that are being used like traditional templates on the Grand Exchange as well, and it would be nice to keep them separated from the Exchange items.


 * When I started this, I envisioned a genuine "Exchange:" namespace, but I wasn't aware of the Wikia rules about this issue. MediaWiki allows you to establish over 100 different namespaces, but Wikia only allows you two additional namespaces.  I don't know for certain if this is a hard and fast rule, or simply something to keep groups like this wiki community from creating dozens of namespaces that will seldom be used.  Regardless, I can see these pages becoming an issue in nearly any namespace other than their own.


 * As far as the "high edit counts" are concerned.... yeah, I suppose this is an issue for those who like to compare things of that nature. What is considered a "minor" edit and what isn't is often very relative.  For myself, when I'm updating a whole bunch of items at once, having to add the extra click to mark a "minor edit" is really a PITA.  I'm trying to come up with a 'bot interface to help out here on this issue, which could help out in terms of adding the minor edit mark and could be filtered out in terms of being a 'bot edit (assuming that you can trust the 'bot making the changes).  I don't want this to be a one-man effort here, but instead to be a community effort which could allow even wiki novices to help join in the action.  --Robert Horning 13:55, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

All the available namespaces other than "Main" have been assigned to a very large category. It could be a problem, since if the 2 namespace restriction is indeed a hard cap, it would be impossible to crate an "Exchange" and "Exchange talk" namespace, since we have already used those two for "Runescape" and "Runescape talk". It's a genuine problem. The suggestion of a bot is a viable idea, since with little programming the bot can be prompted to update the Exchange prices. I could see a bot being programmed as follows, in PseudoC++:

Include and and other used stuff Declare all variables and strings

int main { Input number of articles to edit and store that to variable numoftimes Set counter = 0 Do the following until counter equals numoftimes {    Prompt the user to input article name, store to array articlename, element counter Prompt the user to input market price for that item, store to array itemprice, element counter increment counter } Set counter = 0 Do the following until counter equals numoftimes {    read element counter of array articlename, store to string temp store the following to string URL after concatenating them to each other: {         http://runescape.wikia.com/index.php?title=Exchange: temp &action=edit }    replace address bar content with string URL wait until page loads find "|Price=" string in text box replace all content in the same line after that string with element counter of array itemprice check "This is a minor edit" checkbox click "Save Page" button wait until page loads increment counter } return (0) }

Doomedrusher|Talk| |Contributions| |Edit Count| 14:26, 1 January 2008 (UTC)


 * The only real problem is trying to get the prices themselves. Ideally, I would love to get some sort of RSS feed from Jagex that would give a daily update of prices... but then I wouldn't need to make this a wiki project either.


 * I did toy with the idea of updating the MediaWiki:Common.js file to help provide a specialized editing interface for updating the Exchange items. It may be something to try and follow up on... as it would allow even new users to update the prices quickly without having to screw up the template heirarchy.... and hide the gruesome details on how the prices are being kept as a psuedo-database.  This editing interface could also "force" all of these edits to be marked as a minor edit.  This approach also removes the requirement of having to "download" a special C++ application or trying to figure out differences due to operating systems and other such BS.  I'll have to experiment elsewhere first before something like this is rolled into the main server script, but some collaborative experiments on this certainly could be put together.


 * Anyway... just some thoughts on the topic. And thank you so very much for your feedback on these issues.  I do want to seek some sort of resolution on this particular issue, and I know that you aren't alone with these concerns.  --Robert Horning 15:02, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

If Jagex allowed macroing for non-profit purposes, there is a way to find out the market prices for all listed items. Since the search engine lists every item starting with the search term in alphabetical order, entering A would give you all items starting with A, entering B would give you all items starting with B, and so on. So, it's feasible for a macro to be made that checks the market price for every item on the Grand Exchange, and it can be set to loop and store data. At the current rate that items pop up, checking 1 price takes about 7 seconds minus the scrolling, and the macro can be set to go "back" and cancel the offer and start again. Just a thought. Doomedrusher|Talk| |Contributions| |Edit Count| 15:19, 1 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Unfortunately, that is against the formal "terms of service" agreement. I understand why you started that suggestion with an "if", but I don't want to encourage breaking rules... even for something so innocent and ordinary as scraping prices from the Grand Exchange by directly sending ip packets to the Jagex servers on a custom client.


 * Yes, I've seen that software, and as an intellectual exercise it would be fun to dig into them some more. I've also seen some pretty interested "Runescape" server code that attempts to simulate the official Jagex servers... but allow you to "own" your own private Runescape-like world.  IMHO, I don't completely understand where Jagex can legally stop you from exploring the algorithms and message packets being sent to and from the client to the Jagex servers, but I can understand the issues in terms of directly manipulating the servers that Jagex does own, and on that point Jagex can stop you from a legal perspective if you are messing with their servers in an unauthorized fashion.


 * It is for this reason why an RSS feed provided by Jagex would be preferable, as it can be automated, throttled (Jagex can put this on a whole different server and control bandwidth on that server so it doesn't overwhelm the rest of their servers), and doesn't really give any real advantage to any other player. A "side client" could be used to look up items and find prices on the Exchange without having to access the Runescape servers directly.


 * With this, Jagex could also provide nearly all of the same information on an ordinary HTML web page... for those players who may not be quite so savvy about how to interpret RSS feeds. In fact, the RSS feed would mainly be there to work with the heavy users of this data to lighten the server bandwidth.  A full GE price dump would be between 300 Kb and 900 Kb of data as an RSS feed.  Not exactly chump change, but trivial compared to other items on their download page.  An HTML page would be an order of magnitude over that, but then again they could put together some sort of navigation like I've done here with the market watch to allow users to concentrate on certain skills that they are interested in at the moment.  You don't need to know about construction supplies if all you are interested in is the price of lobsters.


 * BTW, if we had a data feed that was for "non-profit use only"... we couldn't really use it here on this wiki. I know it is splitting a fine hair here, but the GFDL requirements that we are using here prohibit a non-commercial use only type license on anything added to this wiki.  This isn't to say that anybody here who is contributing or reading this wiki can ever make anything of a profit off of this content, but not making a profit isn't the same as being non-profit.  --Robert Horning 17:05, 1 January 2008 (UTC)


 * What if a user created a data feed? 69.5.147.175 04:40, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

Doomedrusher|Talk| |Contributions| |Edit Count| 17:10, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

Some "bugs" or questions about the arrows
I want to ask if it is okay to have more than one arrow for an object template. Example: fire tiara(triple "down" arrows), rune essence (douple "up" arrows) 13:22, 1 January 2008 (UTC) I have checked Template:ExchangeItem. I know where and what is the problem I saw. Well, should we indicate that double or triple arrows mean that blah blah blah E.G. the two arrows mean the difference(x) is x >= 0.04, one arrow means the difference(x) is  x <= 0.02


 * A nice "English" explaination of this perhaps should be explained. User:Skill set up this template in this way to help explain not only that there is a price direction, but how strongly the price has been changing.  If the "average" price change is greater or less than 4%, three arrows will show.... two arrows mean a price change of more than 2% per day.


 * In other words, you should pay very careful attention to those items that are changing very rapidly, and they can significantly impact how you are using those items. Now to just get this written down somewhere....  --Robert Horning 14:00, 1 January 2008 (UTC)


 * It seems to me that using arrows is a bit whacky. You have a specific bit of information, a percentage of change from one update to the next, and it gets turned into less information by transforming it into the simplified "arrows". A plus or minus followed by the difference in GP is much easier to understand and use, and more readily available. The other problem with a change indicator like that for each item is that lately the items have not been updated every single day. I think a good standard would be to note changes compared to the value when the item was last updated. Whether that was an hour, a day, a week or a month ago, it would still be true that the price had gone up or down. The relevancy of a particular item's market value (reflected against the reputation of the wiki) can be shown through the loose updating of values according to when somebody's interested and does so rather than regimenting regular updates, which should ease the conscience of anybody who doesn't manage to update as frequently as they would like to (for whatever reason). In any case, if there is no change in the item's price since the last update, then it's quite simple, that procedure asks the editor not to make any change at all but let the item stand as it does with the date of last update still intact, indicating how long the price has been stable. The arrows are just an added complication that actually result in less overall information getting across. GabrielAPetrie 21:11, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

This article..
Who's the crazy guy who came up with this huge idea? Salutes to him/her. Now, I'm not familiar with how commodity exchanges work, nor economy in general. Can someone write some short explanation on how to interpret some of the data given? For example, what does "index" mean and how was that calculated? Also, weren't Jagex planning on doing something like this? Maybe they'll put a graph up on the website. When they do, this project could instantly become meaningless. 17:49, 2 January 2008 (UTC)


 * I desperately need to create a "FAQ" page that can explain the indexes and other features of this page. It is on my "to do" list, but I haven't been able to get around to it yet.  If you want to help with starting a stub, I'd be more than willing to help in writing that page.  Or I'll just start up a stub about it real soon.


 * As to if Jagex is going to do this or not... yeah, I suppose I'm working on this because Jagex refuses to provide this information to its players. Jagex claims that they will eventually have some more information on their website that covers the Grand Exchange, but they don't have it there yet.  In addition, there are some really cool statistics and user help pages that can be added that combine this information with experience point calculations and other features to help you in your Runescape character development.  I'm hoping that these pages can be complimentary to the whole website.


 * If you want to see something real cool, check out the main user page at User:PointyBot where there are some graphs that show some of the prices of many different items on the Grand Exchange.... this is but one more direction we can go to really improve this interface and make this information something useful.


 * In regards to the indexes.... the calculations get perhaps a bit fancy, but their purpose is really just to get an "average" price of a whole bunch of items and to show broad changes in prices rather than to just track the price of an individual item. Again, I'll have to add some info on this with a FAQ page, but if you want the Wikipedia version, check out Stock market index.  I'm trying to apply this idea to the Runescape economy.  --Robert Horning 16:46, 4 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Jesus! That is awesome. seriously, all these neat features added at the second part of last year is really something that I couldn't even have thought of. I get the idea that there are a huuuge amount of mathematical formulas and scripting involved in this one project only. [[Image:AuroraSig.png|I'm buying addy ores 1k ea]] 15:27, 8 January 2008 (UTC)


 * What about using something like this for tracking the prices of each product? Maybe there are better plugins or programs for this purpouse, but anyway, would be great to follow the prices progression with a graph, it's more intuitive. [Wiharr] 00:33, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

gold bars
just to answer a question a few people seem to have, the 210 coins floor on gold bars is based on its high alch value, a smithed gold item eg helm or bowl alchs for 420 coins, 210 is half that value. (bowl and helm require two gold bars, so according to that high alchemy one gold bar = 210gp) 11:20, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

Faster Edits
After editing an item's price page, I need to go back to the GEMW subpage (herblore, farming, etc) so I can enter another price point. It takes a while to load all the template pages and images each time, which slows down my editing. Is there a way to go directly from an edited item page to another item that needs new price information?

Something like a link to "Edit Next Item" after you save an item's price, but that would require each price template to know which item comes next. That won't work.

The special:random function does not limit pages within the /Exchange group, so it cannot be used to pull up a random item page to edit.

There is a list of item pages that can be found at: http://runescape.wikia.com/wiki/Special:Prefixindex/Exchange But this is not sorted by last date or item type. If we could get this page with date of last edit, sorted by oldest first, it would be a quick way to move from editing one item to another, and prioritize those items that are most out of date.

Any ideas? Am I missing something? Jimmetzler 19:35, 8 January 2008 (UTC)


 * I've been trying to figure out how to update the content in the edit page in the first place "automatically". I've actually written the template so it will work with the information and automatically add in the five tildas for "today's date", and switch the previous price and date with the last price and date.


 * The only problem I've encountered is trying to get the page to "preload" the text into an existing page with text. The text renders exactly as I want it to (with a few minor tweaks that I can overcome) if I render all of the information to a completely new page, but from what I've seen MediaWiki won't allow pre-rendered text to be put into the edit window of some existing text.  If anybody knows MediaWiki better than I do, please offer a good suggestion (besides joining the MediaWiki dev team.... which does look appealing at the moment :)


 * One thing I do when I'm editing a whole bunch of prices at once is to open all of a certain type up as a dozen or so tabs in Firefox. As I've fixing up the information (aka replacing the Last and LastDate with the old prices and adding the 5 tildas for the new date), other pages are loading at the same time.  This way all I'm doing is hitting the Grand Exchange for the price, clicking on the tab with the item I'm updating, hitting save, and moving on to the next item.  I can update about 1 price per minute (including shifting the old prices around) doing it this way.  It isn't perfect, but it does allow semi-rapid edits.  Yes, I would like to speed it up, but it has to be clumsy for a little while.


 * I could try to whip up a C# app that would allow more rapid updates. If I targeted Mono as a platform, could be used on a Mac, Linux, or Windows with varying degrees of success.  If there is some interest in getting this going, let me know.  --Robert Horning 00:06, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

sorry
sorry i'm new to this how do i state the time that i post it; if i sign it with the timestamp then it has my name. I don't want to manually look up the time for every single thing i edit. --Duckisking 01:51, 6 February 2008 (UTC)