CanuckMonkey

Voted: Knight

Ok, I have a question, which may seem a bit weird...

(A) If an item has no current listings on the marketplace, but it is a craftable item for which I have already learned the recipe (and so could easily craft one myself), is it reasonable to enter the price I would list it for if I crafted and sold one?

(B) If (A) is not acceptable, what if I *do* craft and list one--can I then enter the price I listed it for, as someone else would?

And the mind-bender: (C) If I do (B) and then immediately cancel the listing, the end result to an outside observer would be indistinguishable from if I did (A).

The only actual difference would be that I would now have at least one copy of the item cluttering my inventory, but I would also have entered a price for it and thus removed it from the "list of items that have gone the longest without an update" used by the queue. The latter is a benefit to anyone using the queue, which I think is a point in its favour.

Of course, all of this only works if the price I enter here is really what I would list the item for--which I would generally determine by looking at the prices of other similar items, the cost of the crafting materials (and market prices of those materials), and the price history shown here on Trovesaurus.

So, what are your thoughts on this type of situation? If you insist that I use method (B), I may still do it--at least until I run out of inventory space!

 I think I may have just found a more convincing argument in favour of allowing decimal prices to be specified and stored as such: primal blocks. At the moment, the cheapest Primal Orange on the Marketplace is a stack of 9999 for 222 flux, which works out to a price of 0.0222 flux per--which is rounded by the database as 0 flux.

Of course, I don't think most people will care to track or check the prices of Primal blocks, but I started thinking about them because of other blocks that came up, with prices more like 0.75 flux each.

I don't know how hard the programming would be to do this, but I think the ideal thing for displayed results would be to show 2-3 significant figures (and for items whose price is already more than 10-100 flux, no decimals at all).

A couple more things: the price listings should probably be changed to display one decimal point, which can matter a lot for low-price items (e.g. I just entered 3.9 for Radiant Shard but it shows up as 4). With something like shapestone, most of the price variation is only seen in the first decimal position!

Also I had an experience similar to what solar_eclipse_ mentioned below--after specifying that Shadow Air Gem Boxes are not tradable only 18 hours after the first time I noted it, it came up again immediately in the queue and I was able to specify "not tradable" again only seconds later.

The changes to the queue seem to be working for me but now I am having a new "problem": the queue is giving me items I updated 18 hours ago, and if I go to the item's page it still says that I can't update again within 24 hours but when I enter a price via the queue it still accepts it (and it does show up on the item's page when I refresh). For an example, see the Costume Mystery Box.

I'm not complaining, but I don't think this is intended behaviour! (Although that said, I was thinking the other day that even 24 hours might be too long, and something like 12-18 hours might be better--in part because it would mean that an individual's updates wouldn't have to get later in the day on each subsequent day.)

I am thrilled to see this as a monthly thing, and also to see that items are now available to have prices provided. I expect to make a lot of use of these, both in entering prices and checking them for my own marketplace activities!

I'm also glad to see that you've got a way to identify non-tradeable items now, this is great.

I would still love to see some more improvements with the usability of the queue. Right now I quickly get to a point where I get the same 10ish items over and over, all of which aren't currently listed on the marketplace (but which are tradeable).

One option would be a way to specify "no listings at this time", which would be great for clearing out those items that rarely get listed (I'm looking at you, Ganda!)

One other thing to look into: earlier today I was using the queue, and I was getting only the 10ish items as mentioned above, but I hadn't entered any prices for ANYTHING in more than 48 hours. As I understood it, this should mean there would be 50 different items (those with the longest time since last update) being cycled through, and all 50 of them should have applied to me since I had no entries within the last 24 hours, but I was only seeing a small number coming up repeatedly. Did I misunderstand how the queue worked, or is something not working right?

Thanks for another great contest! Looking forward to the next one!

Oh my goodness, I am so glad this was mentioned in the August summary post. As a web design fetishist, this page makes me feel all tingly. :-D

I'm going to have to go update my leaderboards guide soon, using some of this!

At the time that I'm looking at this, I see that there have been 368 total votes with a net result of +362. I don't know why, but it amuses me to think that three people have downvoted this. :-D

I love the goofy look of the familiar, it serves as a great counterpoint to the seriousness of the Dracolyte. I'm glad that stayed the same between the two versions!

I also like the symbol in the stone on his belt, although it's driving me nuts because it reminds me very strongly of a fire symbol from something else and I just can't place it. (I looked at a whole bunch of images through Google trying to figure it out too!)

I didn't realize that the face represented the end of his change back from dragon form--I just thought it was a cool looking half-mask. Either way works for me!

I'd like to see some more tweaks to the styles of the headers--specifically, the font in H4 seems to be larger than H3--maybe not a larger point size, but the letters rendered to the screen are slightly larger, whatever the reason.

Just to make sure I wasn't imagining it, I screencapped a couple of headers from my Leaderboards guide and compared some letters in an image editor, and the lowercase e is 1 pixel taller and two pixels wider in H4, while the lowercase n is 1 pixel taller but the same width. (Results may vary by browser and OS!)

In any case, I find it harder to recognize the organization structure of a document when different header levels have similar font sizes, and I think it would clean up the appearance of various articles if this got tidied up!

Can I ask that the prices for Momoonga be deleted from the database? Momoonga is not tradable, so all of those entries must be made up anyway, and it is irritating that the queue function keeps giving me Momoonga (which I assume happens because there are existing price entries).