Okay, my main idea was polling them like regular players do, by pm.
What is the reason people don't like polling? Is it because they are afraid their prices aren't good enough, or do they have other reasons? Because if that's the reason they should have no worries as I'm not going to show any prices if they don't want to. If the reason is that they are 'busy' when my bot is polling theirs... Then the solution is to poll them less often. I mean, my initial idea, once an hour, is not 'much', and if the inventory items (not talking about amounts here, as that's irrelevant in my case) of a bot didn't change much / at all the last few polls, then the time between polls will increase to (finally) maybe once a day.
Other solutions would be:
- agreeing with bot owners, one by one, if it's allowed to poll them (resulting in inaccurate information, as not all bots are listed)
- getting inventory from a website feed (given that this website shows up-to-date information)
- setting up an API service where bots can submit their inventory changes (requires additional programming on bot owner side, not very likely to happen, but it would be useful to anyone wanting to do something with trade bots, as the update traffic is then gone from the pm's)
Okay, too much server traffic, that seems to be reasonable argument. Let me take that one down! One poll to one bot takes about 1 KByte of traffic. Average of around 500 bytes. To compare that to a message in a channel, let's say an average line in the chat is 50 characters (probably more)? If 10 people are in that channel, then, to deliver that message to all the people in that channel, it generates the same amount of traffic.
Let's assume, based on Usl's information, that there are 165 potential trade bots, and say that for 75 % (not sure if that's a reasonable estimate, percentage is probably even higher) of these bots, the inventory items (so what's being sold / bought, not the amounts of them) do not change every hour. That means, that 25 % of these bots, that's 41 bots, will be checked every hour, and the rest (124 bots), say once a day. Given a poll is 1 kByte, that will generate 41 bots * 24 hours * 1 kbyte + 124 kbyte for the other bots = 1108 kB traffic a day. That's an average of 13 bytes / second.
An average client connection generates:
100 bytes traffic / second (idling in a non-busy area)
300 bytes / second (idling on isla prima)
500 bytes / second (walking and fighting on isla prima).
So I think that additional 13 bytes / second would not be a problem for the server (correct me if i'm wrong!)
In worst case, say that all bots are checked every hour (will not happen, but assuming that...), it will generate a max of 124 * 24 = 2976 kByte traffic a day, which is 34 bytes / second, still a third of the traffic that one client generates when idling!
So I think too much traffic is not a problem here.
It's up for people to use it, and if it's good, people will tell each other. I can only hope that bot owners won't have problems with this bot. It's not as dramatic for them as rraissa is (which is comparing prices, thus sending users to the cheapest bots, i can see bot owners being pissed off because of that). It's just meant to be useful, telling people who are new to the game, or people with a bad memory, where they can get their ingredients for, say a potion, or something they want to manufacture, quickly. New players will also find it useful to ask the bot how he can get to a specific place I hope. I mean it's just an idea, I don't know how it will work out, and if it's failing, then it's failing, you can try to improve from that point, or give up when it's completely failing, but at least you tried!
