Pricing (Scripts and Notes)

[AsBest]

Don't think I have forgot about this

Thanks for this

[woogerboy21]

Don't think I have forgot about this

Thanks for this

Done... check out this post for details.

[woogerboy21]

woogerboy21: could you please gather the latest versions of all your price scripts. I'll include them into next public release (planned next week, so you have some time to polish your work).

Alright I have conformed all the code between the pricing scripts and verified they capture pricing pattern data per site as well as update the log's and progress bar in the ui. All the scripts can be located here.

I can already tell that certain sites are just going to be a pain.

I got to thinking though, are you sure you want to include custom pricing scripts in the full release? I could go either way but I have not recieved much feedback as to any problems so either things are working GREAT or no one has really bothered to verify prices are being collected properly. Not that I don't have faith in my pricing scripts, I just dont want someone to get upset at your work if something of mine causes someone problems.

Its up to you

[rjp14]

Great work on the scripts and thanks for all the time and effort your putting into them.

As for testing I'll do some Q and A on them and let you know. From what I've seen so far they appear to be accurate but I'll give it some looks today and confirm this.

[woogerboy21]

Great work on the scripts and thanks for all the time and effort your putting into them.

As for testing I'll do some Q and A on them and let you know. From what I've seen so far they appear to be accurate but I'll give it some looks today and confirm this.

Thanks. Just an FYI, I'm really not comfortable with the patterns for the 3 sites you requested yet. Though they work I am not confident the foil pricing patterns are correct. Specifically cause the sites are, what you might say, dynamic sites. What I mean by this is each site for starters only shows cards from sets that they have cards of quantity in. So when defining each URL string for each set available in the database site such as www.oldschoolgaming.net didn't have any links for ALOT of the sets. On top of that when there is a site link available for a set the number of pages various based on what type of cards are available. So for example if you look at the 3 sites, the basic structure is the same when you go into a specific set page link. But if you compare the sites you will notice they have multiple listing for a card based on card specifics. Ex: www.oldschoolgaming.net shows M11 Acidic Slim Unplayed, as well as M11 Acidic Slim Unplayed Foil. This is an obvious structure how ever if you look at the back end there is the possibilities for other card listing condition types. Take for example www.channelfireball.com's M11 page. Everything looks similar. Now compare it to there M10 page. Notice there is a "Japanese" conditional form available on cards such as Ajani Goldmane. I just noticed that last night when working on standardizing the code. The current channel fireball script does not take this into account and expects the first value past the first '$' to be the non foil value and the second value past the second '$' to be the foil. So in the case of the Ajani Goldmane price presented in the MA application for channel fireball the non-foil price is correct were as the foil price is not.

This leads me to my original point about the number of pages per set. Based on how many conditional statements there are for each card will either expand or contract the number of pages on the sets page. Right now I just took the sledge hammer approach and defined 14 pages for each set across the board. Some sets might not have that many pages and if so it causes the time to download and compute all the prices for all the sets to increase. But if you use a smaller value and the site owner adds more information into there inventory you will begin missing cards since you defined the number of pages to be 6 (say this number is what it is in august) but in September there might be 7 pages.

I am working on updating the last few sites scripts to recognize non-foil and foil price lines more accurately but given the number of dynamics involved for these sites I would be confident on the non-foil prices are accurate but the foil prices take with a grain of salt. I haven't figured out a way around it yet. It seems that if I attempt to pattern match from the name to the word "FOIL" for example on the site the ma application crashes. I haven't figured out if its cause another bug or if the pattern ends up to be just so large.

[rjp14]

I'll keep that in mind as I look at them.

@ Goblin Hero

Would it be possible to add an update all button please? Since we now have a number of pricing sites to choose from this would be a great addition.

And would there be a way to run this in the background? As when you update you can't continue to use MA. (It's kinda bothering me. If there's a way to do this that would be great if not I'll need to run these when I don't want to use the program.)

[woogerboy21]

I'll keep that in mind as I look at them.

@ Goblin Hero

Would it be possible to add an update all button please? Since we now have a number of pricing sites to choose from this would be a great addition.

And would there be a way to run this in the background? As when you update you can't continue to use MA. (It's kinda bothering me. If there's a way to do this that would be great if not I'll need to run these when I don't want to use the program.)

Oh my, updating all prices from all pricing sites would be..... AMAZINGLY.... long...
I do like the idea of the price updates occurring in the background though.

[rjp14]

Haha tell me about it. I've been doing it today as part of making sure the scripts are working correctly. But it would be nice to press once instead of selecting the next script and pushing update again

[woogerboy21]

Haha tell me about it. I've been doing it today as part of making sure the scripts are working correctly. But it would be nice to press once instead of selecting the next script and pushing update again

Another thing I noticed, so far using the http://www.oldschoolgaming.net site the downloads seem REALLY slow. Its like this with or without any pattern logic so either one of two things are happening. 1. there site is just slow. or 2. the geturl function in the app has something going on with it specifically to these types of sites. It eventually downloads just takes a real long time.

edit:
like up to a minute or so to download url data per page.

[woogerboy21]

Haha tell me about it. I've been doing it today as part of making sure the scripts are working correctly. But it would be nice to press once instead of selecting the next script and pushing update again

Oh another thing you might want to know. If there is just a grouping of sets you want to collect rather than all of them for a pricing script you can do one of two this. You can commend a single line out using '--' or comment a block of code out using '--[[' to '--]]'.

example single line comment:

Code: Select all

--{foil = 0, nfpc = 14, fpc = 14, id = 769, url = 0, foilurl = 0, set = "Archenemy"},


example block code comment:

Code: Select all

--[[
{foil = 0, nfpc = 14, fpc = 14, id = 761, url = 0, foilurl = 0, set = "Magic 2011"},
{foil = 0, nfpc = 14, fpc = 14, id = 761, url = 0, foilurl = 0, set = "Planechase"},
{foil = 0, nfpc = 14, fpc = 14, id = 761, url = 0, foilurl = 0, set = "Rise of the Eldrazi"},
--]]


With those two types of comments you can eliminate either a set or grouping of sets that you don't care about.

[rjp14]

ABUGames - Like you mention the played issue. The script appears to pick up the played prices on this sie whenever they are available. Other then that it appears to be working correctly.
Channelfireball - Bogardan Hellkite shows up as $5.00 for the regular price however this is actually the foil cost. It's real cost is $1.17.
- This mistake is repeated everytime the condition is set to foil. (Confirmed with Captain of the Watch) (http://www.channelfireball.com/catalog/ ... c_2010/279)
Gamingetc - This script appears to be working correctly.
Magictrader - Appears to be working correctly. As an asside I kno you have left the option to edit the scripts yourself. How about instead including all the scripts and indicate what each does in the manager. Just a thought.
mtgfanatic - Has an error when parsing foil cards. This only occurs when the card has an ' in its name. (eg. Demon's Horn)
Oldschoolgaming - This script appears to be working correctly
starcitygames - This script appears to be working correctly
tcgplayer - Appears to be working correctly. Would be nice like magic trader to have allscripts built in. (Also no foils, you may have mentioned I'm just copying my notes from notepad ++)

@ Goblin Hero

Would it be possible to create a way for only certain prices from certain websites to be factored? This would be beneicail to go with my above thoughts on multiple scripts on some sites.

eg. I want to see the min results for ABUgames, gamingect, and magictrader.

[rjp14]

@Goblin Hero

Woogerboy has a also made me wonder if it is possible to do something so that the scripts only look up certain sets within MA itself.

I know I'm asking to make things more complicated however in the end I think MA would be better for it. As these scripts are taking a long time to process now.

And yes commenting out what I don't want is easy just not practical

[woogerboy21]

ABUGames - Like you mention the played issue. The script appears to pick up the played prices on this sie whenever they are available. Other then that it appears to be working correctly.

Should be fixed, please verify.

Channelfireball - Bogardan Hellkite shows up as $5.00 for the regular price however this is actually the foil cost. It's real cost is $1.17.
- This mistake is repeated everytime the condition is set to foil. (Confirmed with Captain of the Watch) (http://www.channelfireball.com/catalog/ ... c_2010/279)

I will disable the foil pricing in the next release here shortly. I would rather have the non-foil prices functioning properly and circle back to the foil prices.

Gamingetc - This script appears to be working correctly.

Now refined non-foil and foil pricing recognition. Should be more accurate now!

Magictrader - Appears to be working correctly. As an asside I kno you have left the option to edit the scripts yourself. How about instead including all the scripts and indicate what each does in the manager. Just a thought.

Could you give an example or slightly better explanation? If you are referring to the manage price screen in the application I have no way to modify its appearance. It only accepts minor LUA script and processes what the scripts say. The most I can do is set status bar information.

mtgfanatic - Has an error when parsing foil cards. This only occurs when the card has an ' in its name. (eg. Demon's Horn)

Should be fixed, please verify.

Oldschoolgaming - This script appears to be working correctly

Now refined non-foil and foil pricing recognition. Should be more accurate now!

starcitygames - This script appears to be working correctly

Alright got 1!

tcgplayer - Appears to be working correctly. Would be nice like magic trader to have allscripts built in. (Also no foils, you may have mentioned I'm just copying my notes from notepad ++)

Yea it doesn't support foils. It does support any of the 3 pricing schemes (high / med / low). You have to update a variable in the script to select which one you would like. I could create separate script with name labels that say something like "TCGPlayerHIGH" or "TCGPlayerMED" for example and you would have the option of selecting which price scheme but keep in mind they are separate scripts which would require separate updating when it came to updating the price data through the price manager. Also is there a foil page for there site? I didn't see one.

[woogerboy21]

Alright think I'm done with the updates for a while to the pricing scripts. Unless I have a Eureka about channelfireball or there is a major problem found. Check out the notes here.

[woogerboy21]

Posting these for historical reasons.... if any site admin see's fit to remove them feel free.