Specific Bot market channel?

[nigol]

A bot specific channel would be cool, then I could finally unignore them again. The list currently contains 62 bots (which did advertise on #3), and it's increasing every other week...

 

hehheh.. same here

[senkrad]

I like this idea. No adverts just requests. Players can watch if they want and respond to the requests and bot browsing would be much simpler.

 

If I use the ability for bots to filter and there are 200 bots and I want to check them all. I will need to send out 200 requests and get back 200 responses. That is 400 lines.

 

If I have 3 items I am checking I would need to send out 600 messages but I would more likely send out 200 messages and just get everything. If I did send out the 600 I would get 600 responses for a total of 1200 lines. If I only sent out the 200 for all items at 20 items a bot (presumming no formatting lines) that would be 2000 lines of response for a total of 2200 lines.

 

If I can send out 1 request and even if all 200 carry it that would total 201 lines transmitted. If only 100 carried its just 101 lines.

 

Even better if I can send out 1 command that will filter by continent there will be even less lines. Traveling between continents add cost in gc and time.

 

I would like to see from anyone who says this will increase bandwidth how they expect it will be so and provide as through a description as possible.

 

 

I would not support removing the ability for bots to advertise on ch 3. If you do not like the adverts you can Ignore them or just not pay attention to them. They are a valuable service just not to everyones taste.

 

 

As for the economy being ruined, if a competitor is way underselling the construction price of an item buy them out and resell at a reasonable rate. A buyer will not like spending more on an item if they have seen it for less but then if they can no longer find it for that price what choice do they have wait or buy at ahigher price. Which is just how the markets work now.

 

I would love to see some one driven out of business becuase they kept running out of resources. I know it is not as simple as it sounds but I would be very supprised if the whole market would take a dive from the simple explantions suggesting that it would.

 

If a bot is trying to rig the system by providing false data, then the bot would become blacklisted by the users just like any other player trying to scam others. Bots can advertise bogus prices now to affect the market.

 

I hope this goes through.

[bkc56]

I know it is not as simple as it sounds but I would be very supprised if the whole market would take a dive from the simple explantions suggesting that it would.

All I can suggest here is that it's happened before. A particular player (long timers can probably guess the name) selling at prices that most people could not compete with, forcing people to sell at a loss or not sell at all. It didn't ruin "the whole market", but specific areas experienced depressed prices such that some people were forced to abandon those market segments.

 

No one is saying it WILL happen, but is has in the past and it COULD with a system that supports finding the lowest possible prices (reasonable or not).

 

That said, I too would like a way to query many bots at once without having to PM each one independently. I can then make the decision to buy based or price, proximity, quantity, and other factors.

[sithicus]

The event you refer to happened because supply and demand were put out of balance. This is not going to happen if bots compete for prices.

 

Bots that 'undercut' other bots are not going to ruin the economy. The simple reason is that players that undercut do not ruin the market either. Prices do fluctuate, but that is natural in any market. Bot prices and player prices will become the same thing (which I think they should be anyway). The benefit you have from a bot is that you can automatically buy and sell items.

[ttlanhil]

Bots that 'undercut' other bots are not going to ruin the economy. The simple reason is that players that undercut do not ruin the market either.

Many people disagree, and think the economy in EL is not doing as well as it could. But that's not really the issue in this thread.

Prices do fluctuate, but that is natural in any market. Bot prices and player prices will become the same thing (which I think they should be anyway). The benefit you have from a bot is that you can automatically buy and sell items.

IMO, bots should sit between players and NPCs in the ranges of price, convenience, availability, price, and stock levels. They certainly used to, and it seemed to work well (without getting into the economics discusson that has been done many times before).

 

How about we don't go off on tangents (especially ones that have been done before, with an in-depth discussion which shows why the short version in other threads like this isn't realistic to look at); lets just stick to the issue of a channel for bots to find spamtargets (whether we're in the for or against column).

[sithicus]

Bots that 'undercut' other bots are not going to ruin the economy. The simple reason is that players that undercut do not ruin the market either.

Many people disagree, and think the economy in EL is not doing as well as it could. But that's not really the issue in this thread.

Prices do fluctuate, but that is natural in any market. Bot prices and player prices will become the same thing (which I think they should be anyway). The benefit you have from a bot is that you can automatically buy and sell items.

IMO, bots should sit between players and NPCs in the ranges of price, convenience, availability, price, and stock levels. They certainly used to, and it seemed to work well (without getting into the economics discusson that has been done many times before).

 

How about we don't go off on tangents (especially ones that have been done before, with an in-depth discussion which shows why the short version in other threads like this isn't realistic to look at); lets just stick to the issue of a channel for bots to find spamtargets (whether we're in the for or against column).

 

I have probably been involved in some of those discussions. The way I see it there are two reasons against this bot channel, either the increase of traffic (which is hard to predict without experimental facts) and the economic reasons.

 

It's ok with me to skip the economic part alltogether in this thread, and focus on the technical aspects alone.

 

If we have 200 bots now (or whatever it is) and this becomes more and more, we will eventually need some way to put order in that chaos. Decreasing allowed number of market ads is a workable (but imo bad) solution. People are ignoring them as it is.

 

I like the bot channel more than I liked the old proposal (the polling bots).

 

Or do the same thing but outside of EL (aka a place where the bots voluntarily send their inventory every so many minutes, and a search engine on that site).

Edited June 20, 2007 by sithicus

[jamincollins]

Or do the same thing but outside of EL (aka a place where the bots voluntarily send their inventory every so many minutes, and a search engine on that site).

This has been proposed before. The only way I see the external site working is if it's provided as part of the game site. Anything else relies on the goodwill and neutrality of the individual hosting it. What is to stop the host from excluding or fudging a bots reported information? With a channel, the middle man (and the reliance on his/her goodwill and neutrality) is removed.

[Aislinn]

My suggestion is this:

Submit your bot code modification application to entropy complete with specifics on what you would do and how you would do it, and why.

 

If he approves it, yay, and you can code your bot and offer the code to any other bot owners who wish to be included. You can then pick a channel (just double check to make sure it isn't taken), and see how it picks up.

 

If he says no, well then doesn't matter anyway and you are better off knowing now rather than later after 20 more pages of discussion.

[jamincollins]

Following Aislinn's suggestion, I am currently working on documenting the base set of commands for this channel. I invite anyone interested to participate. I've setup a page on my guild wiki for documenting the supported commands and a sub-page (wishlist) for discussion of desired features.

 

The wiki pages can be found here.

[ttlanhil]

The wiki pages can be found here.

A couple of problems:

- Single PM back. If a bot is selling titanium plate, and the player asks for "inv titanium", expecting to know of all the ti plate parts, you can run out of space for a single line.

- Send quantity with "want" (Which itself will be a minor issue, as 'want' is a separate command already for me ). What if the bot has no limit on how many of an item to buy? IMO, that should be optional as well.

Edited June 21, 2007 by ttlanhil

[sithicus]

Is it convenient / possible to require the bots to only send a line of less than 250 characters, or not send at all? (aka, an 'inv' or 'inv tit' would result in no reply at all since it fails the 250 character check) This way a pattern match will work if it matches a singular item, otherwise the user will have to do the spelling correctly and fully.

[ttlanhil]

250 characters

Considering that messages are capped at 160, which includes the name you're PMing... That's 2 messages worth, right there. Edited June 22, 2007 by ttlanhil

[Learner]

Is it convenient / possible to require the bots to only send a line of less than 250 characters, or not send at all? (aka, an 'inv' or 'inv tit' would result in no reply at all since it fails the 250 character check) This way a pattern match will work if it matches a singular item, otherwise the user will have to do the spelling correctly and fully.

I think many bots will respond with one line per item, because that is how their inventory works and most bots will only filter the output, so asking in that channel for inv tit will get you items*bots responses

[sithicus]

 

I think many bots will respond with one line per item, because that is how their inventory works and most bots will only filter the output, so asking in that channel for inv tit will get you items*bots responses

 

Yes, 250 characters is awkward. What I intended by this proposal would be to require the bot to produce only one item per request, or none at all. So, if the bot wants to send 5 items, it should take the first of the five items only. Or say to the player that the request must be more specific.

Edited June 22, 2007 by sithicus

[jamincollins]

What I intended by this proposal would be to require the bot to produce only one item per request, or none at all. So, if the bot wants to send 5 items, it should take the first of the five items only. Or say to the player that the request must be more specific.

This is the intent of having a specific set of commands and responses for the channel. If you check the wiki link, you will see that the inventory and wanted commands have this as a requirement so far. I've added an optional multi-match single line response format that bots could use or they can opt to send only one of the matched items in the normal format.

[jamincollins]

The command set documented on the wiki has been implemented. Freya is now running under this code on the test server for anyone that is interested, I'll leave her running there for a while. I'm currently using channel #13 on the test server as the bot command channel.

[Kedrigern]

The command set documented on the wiki has been implemented.

This documentation was very unprecise, everybody can implement this in different way and it will be working different with every bot.

 

What does mean "matches" ?

1 pattern is exact same as item name

2 pattern is substring of item name

3 pattern is posix regular expression that gives true on item name

4 pattern has at least N letters same as item name (and N=?)

5 ....

[LabRat]

I looked in the wiki.

 

I'd love to be a newbie or non-tech person trying to find something \o/

 

Bots are supposed to make things easier for humans, you shouldn't have to learn a new language to be able to communicate with them.

 

In general bots must silently ignore any malformed commands or non-command messages on the channel. Bots must not send responses such as, “I’m sorry I didn’t understand that.” or even worse, send their “help” listing. All responses must be limited to a total of a single line PM to the requester.

Perfect example - until the player sends a perfectly formed command there is no way for the player to know what a perfectly formed command actually is.

 

Or maybe you want to stay on the channel 24/7 as a sort of unpaid unqualified moderator telling people exactly what they are doing wrong..

Edited June 28, 2007 by LabRat

[Llywar]

In general bots must silently ignore any malformed commands or non-command messages on the channel. Bots must not send responses such as, “I’m sorry I didn’t understand that.” or even worse, send their “help” listing. All responses must be limited to a total of a single line PM to the requester.

Perfect example - until the player sends a perfectly formed command there is no way for the player to know what a perfectly formed command actually is.

 

 

Hmm - as long as responses are sent via PM I don't think help messages will be a problem. However, responses should be limited to 1 line. Otherwise the user will get spammed with 5000 lines of "help" - with responses from various bots intermingled. Maybe the addition of a probability multiplier should be encouraged - ie a bot has a 10% chance of sending a help message (keep in mind that that virtually guarantees a response with 100 bots on-channel).

 

Another issue is that because of implementation differences one bot might understand a command, and another might not. So, there are two ways to handle this and pros and cons to each. If non-understanding bots stay silent the user gets uncluttered reponses from the bots that do understand. If non-understanding bots reply then the user is aware that he didn't get all possible responses.

 

Oh, if optional commands are to be supported then bots should avoid responding with help to anything other than "help" or something similar. Otherwise the use of optional commands will always generate errors from bots that don't understand them.

 

Another option might be to have bots announce help on the channel VERY INFREQUENTLY - since the help messages will be similar no matter who is advertising. Maybe one message per 24 hours - which becomes a message every 15 minutes if there are 100 bots online.

[Aislinn]

Or maybe you want to stay on the channel 24/7 as a sort of unpaid unqualified moderator telling people exactly what they are doing wrong..

O.o unpaid? You mean all this time I've not been getting my salary? *Goes to find radu*

 

No, mods do NOT get paid...

[jamincollins]

The command set documented on the wiki has been implemented.

This documentation was very unprecise, everybody can implement this in different way and it will be working different with every bot.

 

What does mean "matches" ?

1 pattern is exact same as item name

2 pattern is substring of item name

3 pattern is posix regular expression that gives true on item name

4 pattern has at least N letters same as item name (and N=?)

5 ....

Feel free to help document the command set and clear up any areas you feel are too vague. As for the intent and current implementation of "matches", it is a simple substring of the item(s). While regular expressions would be nice, they are far beyond the average user.

 

I'd love to be a newbie or non-tech person trying to find something \o/

 

Bots are supposed to make things easier for humans, you shouldn't have to learn a new language to be able to communicate with them.

 

In general bots must silently ignore any malformed commands or non-command messages on the channel. Bots must not send responses such as, “I’m sorry I didn’t understand that.” or even worse, send their “help” listing. All responses must be limited to a total of a single line PM to the requester.

Perfect example - until the player sends a perfectly formed command there is no way for the player to know what a perfectly formed command actually is.

 

Or maybe you want to stay on the channel 24/7 as a sort of unpaid unqualified moderator telling people exactly what they are doing wrong..

I realize you are dead set against this and nothing I or anyone else says about it will change your mind. However, what makes you assume that this won't be documented in a more straight forward fashion for end users in some way? Right now the implementation is a proof of concept of the bot side of things. The user documentation will follow, assuming we get approval to put this on the production server.

 

Beyond that, the commands in use aren't rocket science. In their most basic supported form, they are:

 

@@chan inv pattern

 

@@chan wanted pattern

A number of bots already support similar commands.

[Guest baneazaghal]

Hm... Well, it's not like they need to learn C or C++. The commands specified on the wiki are not hard to remember (keep in mind that the wiki is probably made for programmers, I'm guessing that there will be a wiki help page for players that shows concrete examples and doesn't use regexp ). If the channel gets the official blessing from the devs/mods, we might ask them to put a welcoming message for the channel (something like "type /bot_name help for more information on commands" or maybe an URL to a page with explanation).

[Kedrigern]

Feel free to help document the command set and clear up any areas you feel are too vague.

But where ? Your wiki is read only, even for registered users.

As for the intent and current implementation of "matches", it is a simple substring of the item(s). While regular expressions would be nice, they are far beyond the average user.

NO!

 

We need to decide exact syntax before anyone try to implement anything, if not everyone make it different, and every bot will give differen result, one big mess on the channel.

 

So there must be said "substring" and then everyone implements it. No one make more, no one make less.

 

Or there must be said "regular expression" and everyone implements it.

 

Consider that people are using different languages writing their bots: prerl and python implementation of this will be easy but what about c or qore ?

[sithicus]

ummm the player side syntax can be as easy as ##inv fire essence. Spelling things correctly is not that hard. Bot owners can choose to only react to exact spelling if they wish. It's all bells and whistles to do more than that.

[Learner]

 

I think many bots will respond with one line per item, because that is how their inventory works and most bots will only filter the output, so asking in that channel for inv tit will get you items*bots responses

 

Yes, 250 characters is awkward. What I intended by this proposal would be to require the bot to produce only one item per request, or none at all. So, if the bot wants to send 5 items, it should take the first of the five items only. Or say to the player that the request must be more specific.

FYI, sending a 250 char char message to the server is sure to get your bot disconnected and if it keep it up, banned. That is well over then message length limit the server allows.