soared 15 hours ago

I did this same thing but via a google sheet, really fun either how excellent the wiki’s API is. The profit per hour shown here is abysmal - you’d make more money doing pretty much anything.

I’d like to see market-level and category-level analysis on price trends (ie all magic-combat gear is trending up, or this specific item has a lagging relationship with another).

If anyone is curious, prices may be out of date but here is my profitability spreadsheet, time inputs, etc for various things using the api. This is better than the wiki since it can take into account trade limits, compare unlisted methods, hourly upkeep costs, etc. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1iekEqInA2PwEuj1W...

You can tell likely from the methods I’m botting - turns out writing bots is even more fun than actually playing. Too bad private servers are being taken down through legal means, as I can bot there without ethical concerns.

nojs a day ago

Haha, in the heyday of Runescape it used to be possible to simply have buy and sell orders sitting in the GE for the same rare items simultaneously, and over time they’d both get filled for a profit. I guess you would call it “market making”.

  • sharperguy 21 hours ago

    I used to wake up before school, dump my entire stack of gold on the GE for bones (just the regular ones) at a few gp below average price. By the end of the day the order would usually be fulfilled. Then I'd dump them back on the market at a few gp above average price and it would be fulfilled by the morning.

    Most days it would net me a small profit, ocasionally prices would fall slightly throughout the day and I'd lose a little, but equally some days it would rise and I'd make extra.

    • Spivak 15 hours ago

      How could you lose money on a standing sell order for a higher price than what you bought it for?

      • sdwr 11 hours ago

        If the market moves down after you bought, you are stuck holding the bag. You can either a) sell for a loss, or b) keep your item, and be unable to make further trades until the price (maybe?) recovers. Remember that OP put his entire stack into this, so he can't run the spread while his item isn't selling.

      • ironSkillet 11 hours ago

        You can have unrealized losses since it's possible that the value of your items is less than the value of the goods you paid to receive them. To repeat this strategy the next day, you need to convert your items back into gold and realize the loss (or just introduce more gold via other means).

      • sidewndr46 14 hours ago

        lots of video games charge a fee of in game currency for a transaction through an auction house or other system. It acts like a sink against inflation in the video game economy

        • immibis 9 hours ago

          RuneScape did not, and did have massive inflation, to the point that some players would have trouble keeping their wealth in gold coins due to hitting the signed integer limit.

    • andrepd 17 hours ago

      You needed an FPGA to pull your orders on underlying price moves /s

  • mhh__ 13 hours ago

    This is indeed how market making works.

  • bboygravity a day ago

    This is actually kind of how the US market works with essentially 1 market maker who is by far the largest and who also happens to be the largest political donor (100 million a year to gop alone). Oh, and like Bernie Madoff, the owner of that market maker also owns a hedge fund (which like Bernie's makes completely impossible profits year after year). The hedge fund is of course a totally seperately run business from the market maker /s /s /s

    So that actually sounds quite realistic to me from the market maker point of view of how things actually work in the US.

    • postexitus a day ago

      This is actually how markets are made - do you think a second hand book shop operates any differently?

      • bboygravity 12 hours ago

        Second hand book stores take people's money and then give them nothing in return? I'm referring to naked shorting and failing to deliver perpetually.

        Sorry, I fail to see the analogy.

    • next_xibalba 16 hours ago

      You appear to be referencing Jeff Yass and Susquehanna International Group. Why are you being cagey about saying so? Their hedge fund has had losing years, whereas, as far as I recall, Madoff never reported a loss. On what information are you basing your claims?

      • mmiyer 15 hours ago

        They're referring to Ken Griffin / Citadel (Securities). Not that it makes their claims any less silly in terms of fundamentally misunderstanding how markets work.

        • bboygravity 12 hours ago

          What claim about how the market works is silly exactly and why?

          My claim was that 1 person owns the 1 major US market making business AND a hedge fund. Facts: they can control the price (naked shorting + strategic FTDs) and trade on it. Even if they can't/don't control the price, they can still front run the entire market. And even if they don't do that bEcaUsE iT's iLliGaL they legally (not ethically) do it through PFOF from Robin Hood among others.

          They do all of that and way more. Just look up the continuous massive FINRA and SEC violations and the (tiny) fines they pay for it.

          But I'm sure all is fine and dandy. I find it mind blowing why anybody would defend the biggest crook since Madoff.

          • next_xibalba 11 hours ago

            > they can control the price (naked shorting + strategic FTDs) and trade on it

            This is the bit that seems poorly substantiated and unlikely. Please elaborate. Anything evidence you can cite would be helpful.

            Also, Citadel’s HF has definitely had down years.

          • mmiyer 12 hours ago

            You should be happy that market makers like Citadel Securities exist. Payment for order flow is why commission free trading can exist. Citadel Securities, Virtu, Hudson River Trading, Jump Trading etc compete in a negative sum game which reduces the bid ask spread on various assets (i.e. make them cheaper to trade for everyone).

            Also lol that a hedge fund with about 1% of total hedge fund assets controls prices. What do you think the other hedge funds and trading firms are doing?

            • immibis 9 hours ago

              Presumably (s/he thinks) the other hedge funds are not also market makers.

kayson a day ago

This reminds me of when World of Warcraft had a mobile app that allowed you to both browse the auction house and list or buy items. The API was pretty trivial to reverse engineer, making it easy to write an auction house bot. I never got as sophisticated as any ML algorithm, just snagged grossly mispriced items and bought/sold based on the last week's price range; it was mostly about volume. Made a tidy profit, bought my 1mil gold mount then gave up. The app was taken down soon after, no doubt in part because I'm sure I was not the only person doing this.

  • bongodongobob 12 hours ago

    WoW never cared about playing the market, it was probably taken down due to the way it was implemented. To be an external app, it probably had accounts idling and refreshing the AH and pushing that out to the app. I used the Auctioneer in game addon for a decade.

alex1138 17 hours ago

I'm not sure you can say enough good things about RS in general, aside from the very legitimate complaints the community has about the ownership, but basically it's a 20+ year game that's still getting updates, still getting new weapons and quests and level caps

knuckleheads 13 hours ago

I did something like this on Hypixel for a month or two. Watched the prices for inputs to various crafting recipes as well as the craft recipes output prices themselves on a loop, and whenever it hit a certain profit level, play a chime and I would go run some crafts. Easy enough to pull the info off of https://wiki.hypixel.net , and https://wiki.hypixel.net/Travel_Scrolls were the ones that most often had good returns. You needed a certain skill/level to make them, so the prices didn't even out too fast. Got tired of it eventually as the game wasn't so deep, but it's fun to mess around with for sure.

  • mhh__ 13 hours ago

    Arbitrage much more fun when r=0

naming_the_user 14 hours ago

I made approx 1K GBP as a young teenager trading in RuneScape prior to the introduction of the GE.

Haggle people down to say 6 mil for a party hat I'd sell for 6.5, repeat, when I quit the game I sold it all on eBay, my mum was rather surprised when the money came in.

Hourly rate? Awful.

I very much doubt that I'd be where I am today without that experience though.

  • dleink 13 hours ago

    What line of work are you in now?

    • naming_the_user 7 hours ago

      Entrepreneur, multiple income streams, software is one of them.

beoberha a day ago

Sorry if I’m just bad at reading comprehension, but what exactly is being modeled here? It sounds like the author is just getting price data not unlike a candlestick chart. What I don’t understand is if the trading is happening within the 5 minute windows he mentions or if model is finding patterns across timeframes?

  • Frummy 21 hours ago

    So I don’t know this stuff so I’ll stochastically parrot a reply here of my understanding of what I just read.

    The ML model is trained on the price spread and volume data collected with the cronjob every 5 minutes and stored in a database, and the trades with their respective data, but on previously collected data from 63 days up to 14 days earlier and then validated on the remaining later 14 days of data, apparently to not have temporal leakage which I googled and means unintentional backflow of training data which screws up the prediction. So to answer your question the model finds patterns over multiple weeks of data, to rank the best trading choices in the present moment. Then the java component executes the trade in-game with the player character.

    What I personally don’t understand is if this data collection and training is rolling continually, or if he let it be trained one shot and then it’s smart enough to remain profitable. Don’t entirely understand the 49 day training, 14 day validation thing either.

    • partypete 17 hours ago

      That’s right - I retrained the model every 7 days. These experiment results are from the most recent one-week period.

  • partypete 17 hours ago

    The training data is composed of the bot’s previously executed trades from the last 63 days joined on the price/volume data. So the model discovers patterns in the price/volume data that have historically lead to well-performing trades. The dependent variable is gold/second generated from a historical trade.

    • beoberha 6 hours ago

      Thanks! But how was the bot running before the training data existed? I think that’s what I was missing. The baseline?

noitpmeder 15 hours ago

Has anyone done similar experiments with EVE's marketplace?