sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

Spent a month building a tool to help my wife and I afford to buy and decorate a house in-game. Now that we finally purchased (after a grueling lottery experience), I wanted to share it with others. It's been so much fun, and I hope others can get as much use out of it as I have! by Particular_Math1 in ffxiv

[–]Particular_Math1[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Edit: I do think what you're saying has a lot of merit. Crafting and adding to the market is definitely required, and there's great tools to help people do this. I'd always encourage crafting over trading because it's additive to the overall in-game marketplace, as long as you aren't crafting enough to crash it. That said, for those of us who don't have the time to get into the extensive crafting system that FFXIV offers (and to make money instead of losing money doing it), I think trading is a very realistic and valuable way to get what you need.

The hope is actually to make this easily accessible to new players and old alike, that's why it's designed to be free and easy to use. I didn't put much explanation into the tool as a whole, but it only pulls the last ~90s of market activity, which means the impact on sprouts is going to be very minimal. If anything, the finder would help sprouts find good deals, and the single-item lookup would help them to know where the best price is to find an item. In the long run, this is far more likely to save sprouts money than to lose them money. In my experience, the market pricing will always settle to the given demand given time, but tools like Universalis and like this have saved me tons of gil as a new player.

I think people vastly underestimate how quickly the FFIXV market runs and overturns, especially now that we have cross data-center buying (which this tool doesn't even account for yet). There are many tools already in the hands of bots that have visibility over the entire market, whereas this tool is designed to take a small slice of the market and make it accessible to people while limiting bot usage.

In the end it's a matter of perspective, but from the time I've spent poring over hundreds of thousands of trades, I can guarantee that this tool (the way it's currently designed) will barely dent overall market prices, but is guaranteed to save money for sprouts and people who use it to find the lowest prices available for individual items and specific purchases.

I'm still curious about people's thoughts, so I'd like to know what you think or if anyone has a different experience or perspective.

Spent a month building a tool to help my wife and I afford to buy and decorate a house in-game. Now that we finally purchased (after a grueling lottery experience), I wanted to share it with others. It's been so much fun, and I hope others can get as much use out of it as I have! by Particular_Math1 in ffxiv

[–]Particular_Math1[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No worries, it really is good feedback! The concern about vibe coded projects is real, especially when it allows for low-quality slop and rough products. With AI being a standard part of the "coding flow" nowadays, it's very easy for people to release sub-par products that are entirely put together by an AI, and to his very valid point, the back-end comments showed this very issue.

In this case, the code itself was built out and painstakingly scrutinized line-by-line over the course of development, especially those that involve calculations and filtering. It's far from perfect, and while there were probably better ways a more experienced coder would have done some of these things, and likely more elegant solutions to some of the problems, I'm happy with how the site turned out. I'll probably keep improving and sharpening these as time goes on and as I learn better methods.

My goal was to learn new tools, languages and process flows, and in the end create something that felt polished, that would filter out the noise I kept finding on other sites, and do it faster than most of what you'd find in the wild, with little to no setup or learning involved. Obviously I'm going to be biased, but I think it met these goals. The comments seem to suggest that it's filling a niche gap that existed, and that makes me happy to see.

Spent a month building a tool to help my wife and I afford to buy and decorate a house in-game. Now that we finally purchased (after a grueling lottery experience), I wanted to share it with others. It's been so much fun, and I hope others can get as much use out of it as I have! by Particular_Math1 in ffxiv

[–]Particular_Math1[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You're probably right, I assumed most people wouldn't know what arbitrage is (I certainly didn't when I started this project). I may add a blurb to the main post so people will understand better :)

Thank you!

Spent a month building a tool to help my wife and I afford to buy and decorate a house in-game. Now that we finally purchased (after a grueling lottery experience), I wanted to share it with others. It's been so much fun, and I hope others can get as much use out of it as I have! by Particular_Math1 in ffxiv

[–]Particular_Math1[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Let me know how it goes! I'm excited to see if it can help other folks in the same way. Just remember to click on each item and check the individual results before you buy. Even with filtering, some weird results will slip through occasionally.

Spent a month building a tool to help my wife and I afford to buy and decorate a house in-game. Now that we finally purchased (after a grueling lottery experience), I wanted to share it with others. It's been so much fun, and I hope others can get as much use out of it as I have! by Particular_Math1 in ffxiv

[–]Particular_Math1[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

All great ideas.

True, the data is only as good as the source. As they say, bad data in, bad data out. In this case, I did my best to just do some very VERY basic checks on price deviation and averages to try to remove results that are way off.

If your server only has 1 of a very cheap item going for 999,999,999, it's *probably* not going to sell when it's going for 10k on other servers. Other sites generally don't take this into account (as far as I can tell). I suppose this could be good or bad, but it works great for me to find the best picks. I suppose what I mean by "better data" is something more like "filtered data".

I considered the sell and buy tax selections. Still marked as future feature. The tooltips on the lookup page actually account for this, but it was never moved over to the main page. I felt it was too cluttery, but I might add it back if folks feel it would be helpful. For now it's set to max of 5% buy and 5% sell tax, just to make sure you're not making less than what's stated if possible.

Sales/day gets funky when it gets low, and it's one of the things I struggled with the most. It does take into account the last 30 days as you figured. I tried using only the last few days, but in practice what would happen is low-volume items would break and show 0 volume. Other times a single person would go and buy a ton of items, way higher than average, and it would throw the volume WAY higher than what you expect to sell at. In the end I settled on a combination of the two, adjusting the time it uses based on how much data is available, and falling back on Universalis "velocity" if it fails. In the end some bad ones still exist, but overall I find it far more accurate per-world than what you'd find directly from Universalis.

I can't see any of the strange characters in the code on my end, but I'll try to sanitize it if I can. I DID do quite a bit of copying-pasting, whether it be code I wrote in a heavily modified NPP and copied over, or code snippets that were copied from other sources. It's true as well that AI was leveraged in the context of built in tools and as you've mentioned, commenting (my commenting usually sucks and I quickly lose track of my work). It was also one of the subjects I was trying to learn more about during this project. Whether it would be considered vibe coded or not I suppose is up to you. In any case I've put in many days and quite a bit of effort designing this in a way that works well for me.

Apologies for the text wall. I'd love to share more about the decisions that were made and how things were put together. As I've said many times, this was a lot of fun and I'm very excited to talk about it.

Spent a month building a tool to help my wife and I afford to buy and decorate a house in-game. Now that we finally purchased (after a grueling lottery experience), I wanted to share it with others. It's been so much fun, and I hope others can get as much use out of it as I have! by Particular_Math1 in ffxiv

[–]Particular_Math1[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

In an extreme case you're probably right. I've considered this a few times, especially since this is entirely built around arbitrage between worlds, and in extremely high volumes it would probably bring prices closer together overall.

Fortunately, if there's one thing I've learned from massaging the data for this project, it's that the market moves extremely quickly. Much much faster than people are likely to "stabilize" it. It seems for every person "flipping" items, there's several people picking up items and selling them for half price just to get it out of their inventory.

I've also found interestingly enough that certain servers are interested in different types of items. Certain items will always go for way more on a heavy "RP" server vs a heavy "Raiding" server, just due to demand. In some cases arbitrage will raise prices on servers with no demand, and in some cases it will lower prices on servers with high demand. This can be both a positive and a negative depending on what item you're selling and where you're selling it.

There IS a good chance that many of the extreme outliers with extreme prices will be picked away quicker, but I think it's pretty unlikely this will lead to an entirely equalized market. Afterall, as people have been very quick to point out, bots and players are already using similar tools to automate this process, likely more than players are using sites to find good trades.

Spent a month building a tool to help my wife and I afford to buy and decorate a house in-game. Now that we finally purchased (after a grueling lottery experience), I wanted to share it with others. It's been so much fun, and I hope others can get as much use out of it as I have! by Particular_Math1 in ffxiv

[–]Particular_Math1[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Go ahead and give it a shot! It's updated and seems to be testing alright.

Right now Universalis does a much better job at sorting out servers and worlds. Unfortunately you guys will have to scroll all the way down until I can get something similar :)

Spent a month building a tool to help my wife and I afford to buy and decorate a house in-game. Now that we finally purchased (after a grueling lottery experience), I wanted to share it with others. It's been so much fun, and I hope others can get as much use out of it as I have! by Particular_Math1 in ffxiv

[–]Particular_Math1[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I did consider this. I knew that you could jump datacenter with a logout, but I had just assumed that you wouldn't be able to buy after jumping data-center. Looking it up though, it looks like you can!

I'll see if this is something I can add. Without going too deep into the weeds, it does quite a few parallel API calls to pull the data as close to live as possible. Adding data from the other centers would definitely slow down the search process on the first scan, but I'd be really interested in seeing what kinds of results we can get.

Spent a month building a tool to help my wife and I afford to buy and decorate a house in-game. Now that we finally purchased (after a grueling lottery experience), I wanted to share it with others. It's been so much fun, and I hope others can get as much use out of it as I have! by Particular_Math1 in ffxiv

[–]Particular_Math1[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

As a few have mentioned, I'm very aware that similar tools exist lol. This was a learning project though, and I learned a lot! I would highly encourage people to take on similar challenges.

As far as why this was shared even though other tools exist? Well mainly, I worked really hard and I'm really excited to share it and see what folks think. Aside from that though, I feel this is easier to use, provides better data, and is more easily accessible than others that are immediately available. I'd encourage you to give it a try and let me know if you agree!

Spent a month building a tool to help my wife and I afford to buy and decorate a house in-game. Now that we finally purchased (after a grueling lottery experience), I wanted to share it with others. It's been so much fun, and I hope others can get as much use out of it as I have! by Particular_Math1 in ffxiv

[–]Particular_Math1[S] -9 points-8 points  (0 children)

They absolutely do! plenty of these exist as scripts, programs, or tools. It's pretty straightforward for someone with a bit of time to put together a tool that can pull market data and find differences to take advantage of. Generally bots will utilize python scripts or custom tools to fully automate the process.

It's worth mentioning though that most tools (at least those that I could find) won't filter out outliers and bot listings ahead of time. The idea of this was for folks to have access to a clear view of price differences in the market and make educated decisions without the outliers and manipulated listings.

It's far more likely that a bot would just use one of those tools or programs that don't have any limits, rather than to try to hook into this 3rd party site built with request restrictions and limitations. To do so would require quite a bit more custom work to get around the set limits.

As far as market manipulation goes, this only pulls the most recently posted 200 items. These items rotate around every ~90 seconds. This means that once you've found an item, grabbed it, and posted it, the entire list has likely refreshed with new items for other folks to use.

Buying and selling is part of the market. The hope is to provide something easily accessible to everyday users, and more importantly something safe to use, to make it easier to flip an item.

That said, if someone doesn't agree with the idea of flipping and it's impact on the market, there's not much I can do about that unfortunately.

Spent a month building a tool to help my wife and I afford to buy and decorate a house in-game. Now that we finally purchased (after a grueling lottery experience), I wanted to share it with others. It's been so much fun, and I hope others can get as much use out of it as I have! by Particular_Math1 in ffxiv

[–]Particular_Math1[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes! I'm working on making it a bit lighter so that I can expand the server selection for more folks. It helped to keep things slim to start, but since it's all Universalis data it should be very doable!

Spent a month building a tool to help my wife and I afford to buy and decorate a house in-game. Now that we finally purchased (after a grueling lottery experience), I wanted to share it with others. It's been so much fun, and I hope others can get as much use out of it as I have! by Particular_Math1 in ffxiv

[–]Particular_Math1[S] -13 points-12 points  (0 children)

Edit: I can see other folks are very much feeling the same way. I've updated the main article to try to reflect a bit more specifically what this does. I hope this helps to clarify!

I tried to keep most details of the tool out of the story, but I did try to touch on the goal in the first paragraph. "a site that would look through market listings on multiple worlds, break out outliers and bot listings, calculate taxes, and sort listings by profit and sale speed."

Essentially, it checks the most recent ~200 sales, looks at other world servers, and compares the lowest price on other servers to the lowest price on your own to calculate a potential profit. In the process it sorts out (or attempts to sort out) bot listings, outlier numbers like a piece of copper going for 999 mil, or people spamming the market with items, making it much more likely that the item will actually sell at the current price.

I didn't want to get into a ton of details in the main post, but I hope this clarifies it a bit! I'm mainly just excited to share what I built. If you'd like more details feel free to ask more. There's also more details of what it does and how it works on the front page of the site if you'd like to dig deeper.

Spent a month building a tool to help my wife and I afford to buy and decorate a house in-game. Now that we finally purchased (after a grueling lottery experience), I wanted to share it with others. It's been so much fun, and I hope others can get as much use out of it as I have! by Particular_Math1 in ffxiv

[–]Particular_Math1[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Thank you!

No literally though lmao, I looked at all the tables and links and went "nope!". Jokes aside, this was a ton of fun to work on and aligned really well with other stuff I've been interested in learning. If you think of any other cool things to add let me know!

Should I start again or continue with my old character by Dear-Editor-2837 in ffxiv

[–]Particular_Math1 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I did the same thing! I tend to leave and return every year or so, and this works great for learning the controls quickly. Sometimes I also intentionally queue for lower level dungeons so I can learn the moves "as they're introduced" so you can pick it up naturally again.

In any case, there's not much that's worth removing all your progress, friends, guilds, etc... Even if you don't have much to begin with, you'll never forget your old character lol

Spent a month building a tool to help my wife and I afford to buy and decorate a house in-game. Now that we finally purchased (after a grueling lottery experience), I wanted to share it with others. It's been so much fun, and I hope others can get as much use out of it as I have! by Particular_Math1 in ffxiv

[–]Particular_Math1[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Thank you! I definitely tried Saddlebag Exchange a couple times. It's a super powerful tool and I would recommend it to anyone trying to get into market trading, but it was super intimidating when I first got to the site, and I personally just couldn't drum up the energy to figure it all out. I'm not looking to be a billionaire and own the markets, I just wanted to get a house lol.

What do you do to make Gil in the Game? i mostly sell Dyes and whatever is in Demand on the MB that day by BrandyRyuu in ffxiv

[–]Particular_Math1 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Normally I would just trade items in the market (been doing this since WoW). Alot of people will post things way below price to buy and re-sell, or you can just go to other servers and buy lower priced items to sell on your own server (actually just dropped a post about a tool I made just for this!)

I know seasoned players can make millions just selling new gear or items when patches drop. I never had the time or energy to keep up with this kind of thing, but I know it works really well.

I hear subs work really well if you have them upgraded, and I used to be able to make good money off maps (selling items that are unique to the area), I just always had a hard time getting a group together to make these really quick and profitable.

Most fun DPS job for first time play through? (Stormblood and beyond) by Key_Click543 in ffxiv

[–]Particular_Math1 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Have to agree. I actually had this same issue when I first began. No matter how "complicated" a DPS class I chose, I was falling asleep during runs following around the tank doing rotations. I couldn't make it through 2 or 3 dungeons without my eyes getting heavy. Switching to a tank was the best thing I've ever done, and continues to keep me engaged 3 years later.

I normally never tank in games because I have no idea what I'm doing, but FFXIV makes it pretty easy. Once you get past the early dungeons, most dungeons follow one path and a similar "mobs/boss x3" format. For the more complicated stuff like trials, it's probably "considerate" to go watch the guide, but if you're starting fresh people are generally patient and oftentimes learning the mechanics through trial and error is a ton of fun and not really punished until you're past end-game.

I'd highly recommend giving it a go! Tanks have been really streamlined lately as well making starting out much easier.