Tree of Savior Forum

Market Range Algorithm

Suggestions Game
#1

Dear Developers,

My day job involves modelling financial markets. I would like to contribute my relevant experiences in programming and market movements to improve the market system.

I understand the rationale for implementing the market floors and caps. However, it hinders the players’ gaming experience significantly. Therefore, I have a suggestion that could possibly be enhanced in complexity, based on your team’s preferences.

Basic Methodology:

  1. Compute mean of prices for each item based on historical prices
  2. Allow x standard deviation away from the mean. Example: 1 standard deviation allows a tighter control over the prices.
  3. Recalculate the mean and apply the standard deviation again (Allows a dynamic cap and floor that moves with market prices)

Benefits:

  1. The x standard deviation allows the developers to control the amount of market restriction
  2. Having a dynamic band allows the fundamental prevention of excessive prices, while still allowing free market movements determined by the player base
  3. RMT transactions or suspicious activity will create outliers outside of the determined standard deviation. A simple plot of the data points will let you determine it easily and trace the users. If the standard deviation is set as the cap or floor, the market system should not allow such outliers to occur

Costs:

  1. Might be computationally intensive, since I do not know how your system works. Personally, it takes me 1 min to calculate millions of data points. You can reduce computation costs by taking only the first million points instead of the whole historical series
  2. Might be oversimplistic view of the market. But I feel it will still work better than the current system

I hope you can take my suggestion with serious consideration. The current market system makes having silver relatively useless, as you cannot purchase anything off the market. A purchase renders everything untradable, while items get penalized with 1 potential. For new players to enter the market at level 180+, they essentially have to wait for a valuable recipe/item to drop in the dungeon before they can make a 1-to-1 trade.

If you have any concerns, feel free to PM me or reply me here and I can offer possible solutions.

Thank you.

Regards,
Pearls

@STAFF_Ethan @STAFF_Max @STAFF_John

P.S. Apologies for tagging you guys! I hope the staff can forward this to the relevant parties!

#2

Now do you know how much a pain in the ass is to put all this you wrote in computer language?

What you just described is pretty much used on the software you may be using on your job.

#3

Takes me 1 hour to do it on C++ for 1 data set. Generalizing it to all items make take 2-3 days. Good thing is that it will be automated after you develop it so it has lower maintenance costs

#4

On a game that is not viable tho, or we would be seeing it on most if not all games that have marketing system, i think it would be mostly because they would have to hire someone on your field which probably have some high cost.

#5

Lol OP, how can you expect this to mean anything :stuck_out_tongue:
I mean, I read until 2) because I’m tired and it was enough to know that you were knowing what you were talking about :slight_smile:

But the guys that coded this market range algorithm ?
They have no damn idea of what they are doing. And they don’t care. 19K Dilgele prices were proof of that. The fact that players cannot list items at the prices they want is too.

You just don’t start coding such a thing without looking how it would work in practice.
Seems like theses guys never did that.
And imo, coding such a thing requires too much devtime when the game is plagued with so many bugs.

Anyway, I doubt the concerned parties will read or take into account your suggestion :slight_smile:
Whole market range algorithm should just be ditched…

edit :

^ this

You can’t say that. Letting a market algorithm going rampant ? Without anyone looking for him ?
Wow !

#6

I understand that, which is why i tried to suggest the simplest banding methods

@Nirimetus I am not sure if it will not be viable in a game, because to my knowledge, games rarely implement market restrictions like this. Hence, they do not need to implement such measures to impede free market movements =/ This is just my opinion

#7

Of course they can monitor it as well! But the algorithm is simple enough to ensure their cap and floor is still working based on player determined prices.

I was debating to write this suggestion or not. But I came to the conclusion that trying to offer some solution may be beneficial for all of us in the end, even if it works or not.

1 Like
#8

I know you mean well, i am not bashing your suggestion in any mean.

As for the actual situation on the game market, that is some bad decision from IMC, i am not sure how this will end, if they will keep these restrictions, or they are using it to find some concrete or at least good solution.

I am still waiting for them to wake up and do what is needed instead of all these half useless patches (i say half because half is related to bug fixes).

#9

Thank you for your kind words!

It is just from my personal experience. I had like 10m silver but I cannot buy any recipes to make my own gears, due to many recipes having the floor/cap issue + untradable after buying off market. Items are at least functional in the market. I had to get a manamana recipe before being able to actually “enter” the recipes market. (i.e. trade 1-for-1 barter trading)

I feel really bad for new players who cannot enter the market as well =/ I hope they can negotiate a central ground between battling RMT/bots and player’s gaming experience

1 Like
#10

That is one of my problems, i posted this on other thread about the report function.

A couple of weeks ago, i tried to sell some Chain Boots (Lv 15) for 1k and the system didn’t let me and changed the minimum price to 300k, i did a search and saw a bunch of the same item with prices ranging 900k-1.5mil, obviously GS business, i gave up and sold to the NPC lol.

It was a junk item if you think about it, but there are some other stuff that are expensive, and with these limitations, i can’t be sure of what is the right and wrong pricing anymore, at least not based on market.