It seems to me that certain items only appear in GO HQ when either I don't need them, or I haven't got enough room in my storage to buy them. I have thought this for a while but thought I was probably imagining it so I started making notes of what's on offer and when and I've come to the conclusion that it is true.
My post may have come across other than as intended. I am stating that there is no legitimate evidence to support a claim that EA is intentionally manipulating the result set. With no such evidence, then yes -- my default position is that they are not. Innocent until proven guilty and whatnot. You misunderstand me if you think I'm ignoring evidence. I'm just not seeing any evidence that I haven't been able to directly refute with my own examples. I don't KNOW one way or the other, and I'm not trying to suggest that I KNOW. I'm trying to represent a logical counterpoint to the correlation == causation mindset.
Well, the second post in the thread is you stating,"No, it's not". And you seem to be missing the differerence between 'evidence' and 'proof'. There is plenty of evidence but there is no proof. As for civility, if you thought my posts were uncivil, you must have very thin skin. I bear you no ill will.
I am not missing the difference between evidence and proof, are you? The only "proof" would be to get a look at the code. All of the rest is evidence. I'm differentiating between "evidence" and "legitimate evidence". To me, "I wanted a thing and it wasn't there" is not legitimate evidence, because no attempt was ever made to reproduce the experiment with a control that could possibly dead end the argument. However, I did. And what I found was that it's just as easy to not get items I didn't need. To me, that ruins the credibility of the first argument, because if the behavior is just as common with an undesirable item as with a desirable item, then the claim that it's a rigged system because desirable items are more often hidden is no longer legitimate evidence.
As for the "thin skin" comment and the suggestions that I don't understand simple language, I'll reiterate: assuming an attack posture is unnecessary. We can be civil to each other and not agree.
It doesn't have to be an algorithm that's evoked when the HQ is refreshed. The exclusion logic can be entirely table-driven. High-value or time-intensive items can be hidden in the HQ for a particular city the same way locked items are hidden. Items can be added to or removed from a cilty's hide item list based on current stock levels and current demand.
I'm not saying items are being hid. I don't think they are. I was addressing the notion that an algorithm that selectively hides items from a particular city based on the city's current demand would be complex or slow. It wouldn't be.
Your subjective experience tells you that items are not being hid, and their availability or unavailability is random. Others claim to have observed certain time-intensive items disappear from the market as soon as there is demand for them, only to reappear as soon as demand drops. Each is accusing the other of imagining things.
I go back and forth. Sometimes it seems like the selection of items on the market is not random, because I see a good mix of items instead of wall-to-wall donuts and Vu stuff. So rather than hiding items, perhaps there is logic that improves the mix of items. But that can also be explained by people changing their selling patterns.
I don't know about time-intensive items, but I am sure that expansion items are not being hidden or suppressed for higher-level cities. However, it does get harder to buy expansion items on higher levels. I have two cities, one at level 26 and one at 14. I achieved full land expansion in both, but was able to do so much faster in the level 14 city. While expanding, I was intensively shopping for dozer parts in both cities, and was generally able to make a purchase 5-6 times more often in the lower level city. But not because items were being hid in the level 26 city -- on the contrary, it was because the level 26 city had many more items unhidden, crowding out the dozer parts. Basically the market for specialty items gets diluted the more items you unlock.
Running two cities in parallel at different levels allowed me to observe some cool things about the market. I would put something up for sale in one city, and immediately refresh the market in the other, and almost always saw my seller city in the first few slots. If I hesitated a second before refreshing, my seller city would be much further down, sometimes not there at all -- that's how dynamic the market is. There are at least 10-20 new items advertised every second, sometime much more than that.
And the number of fingers pecking at dozer parts is huge. There were many times when I would tap on a dozer part, travel to a neighboring city, and see several other expansion items for sale. Ok, time to start pecking. I learned that it pays to go for one of the unadvertised parts first, because usually people make a grab for the item they came for. So I'd tap an item and get it, tap a second and get it, tap a third -- here come the llamas. I had a very real sensation of fighting over a handful of items with 20-30 other furiously tapping mayors.
I think the market has improved in the last couple months. Not sure what they did, but it's working for me.
Well, (and take this for what its worth because I don't use SQL much at work) I do think that a query that omits "hidden" results would be easy, just as you say. Just leave them out of the query. But what was mentioned earlier in the thread was associating each item with its own unique weight to ensure that some things come up less often than others. I suppose you could query for maybe twice as many items as you need and then roll the weighted dice for each result in the list (backfilling with items 25+ as needed when an item doesn't make the cut), but that's not particularly efficient because you're getting way more data than you need. Not noticeably slower. Just less efficient.
Whatever methods may be out there to do it, my own opinion is that it's not happening. And believe me -- I've had moments where I've hit that refresh button for the 20th time and NOT A SINGLE CHEESECAKE and my resolve starts to fade. But then I'll be badly in need of patio furniture and I'll see it pop up on 3 out of 4 refreshes. 🙂
Every other point you've made, I agree with. And that's interesting about how quickly items are added to the store -- I have to wonder, with that many going up for sale, how many people are there to buy? I'd imagine in the thousands browsing at any given time.
@jeffk42 wrote:
Every other point you've made, I agree with. And that's interesting about how quickly items are added to the store -- I have to wonder, with that many going up for sale, how many people are there to buy? I'd imagine in the thousands browsing at any given time.
EA has stated that some 8 million transactions are completed each day -- that's about 5500 per minute. And again, those are only the completed transactions, so who knows how many more are looking, but not finding what they are looking for.
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