You'd be better off having your system ignore any with a raw N value <5 and apply a default price of $0.10. If there aren't any listings for it ending on ebay, then it's obviously not worth listing there and probably only worth a dime or so. Then, manually go in and override the dozen or so cards that are actually worth a little more.

Lets consider that example again. Bog for $1000.00. Now if I take a look at historical data and it shows that the price has remained at $1000 in previous weeks / months / years, I'm inclined to trust that $1000.00 a bit more. But with a historical value of .10, well as you state, it should be disregarded.

The point there is that it is the historical data that gave us clarity in how to handle the low-sales cases. With magic, it may be that all 16,000 cards are traded so often that, if for whatever reason one wasn't sold in a certain time, it should be considered worth only a dime. I would have to look at historical prices to see if that was the case - but you may have a good strategy if the volume of every magic card except .10 cards has a high N.

Thanks the link, very handy. There's been a few great sites that have come out of this thread as pointed out by users.

Regards.

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Originally posted by digitek:
Yes, all good points!

Lets consider that example again. Bog for $1000.00. Now if I take a look at historical data and it shows that the price has remained at $1000 in previous weeks / months / years, I'm inclined to trust that $1000.00 a bit more. But with a historical value of .10, well as you state, it should be disregarded.

The point there is that it is the historical data that gave us clarity in how to handle the low-sales cases. With magic, it may be that all 16,000 cards are traded so often that, if for whatever reason one wasn't sold in a certain time, it should be considered worth only a dime. I would have to look at historical prices to see if that was the case - but you may have a good strategy if the volume of every magic card except .10 cards has a high N.

Thanks the link, very handy. There's been a few great sites that have come out of this thread as pointed out by users.

Regards.

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this is so laughable it's funny.. it'll cost me.. what? a dollar (Store listing) to have a bog imp posted with a tag of $1000 for a yr or so.. just so skew with data scrapers? might be worth the effort.

as for the link.. dont make me laugh.. there's a lovely lil trend with findmagiccards website.. as it's based offa each site's buy list.. if you dont know what it is, i'm not saying.. but the reliability of it is laughable.

edit: some here will say i'm an insufferable know it all, but when it comes down to it, few here know as much relative background in relation to how that list works than i do.

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http://classic.magictraders.com/pricelists/current-magic-weekly

It often has more up-to-date prices than the full list. It solves the problem of stale prices in the full list.

I just downloaded the pricelist, and noticed something disturbing from the list a month ago.. the filesize went way down (used to be around 1100kb, now 680kb), only around 8000 prices listed now. From a cursory look, it appears someone did change the script programming, and all the stale Raw-N 1 cards were dropped. The previous behavior was those cards with 0 activity were left untouched and rolled their price over to the next list. Now all that better-than-nothing historical rollover data is gone from new pricelists, leaving a huge void of nonpriced cards. There are still N=1 cards, but only from current sales.

On one hand, this is a good move, eliminating unreliable data in favor of reliable current activity. On the other hand, if a card has occasional sales, it may appear for a few days and then vanish off the list, losing the recent fact of activity and possible pricing for someone interested. The prices of the infrequent and few-sales cards are lost. The Pricelists have gone from their namesake to a Whats Hot list, only listing what few cards are in demand on the market.

I can no longer use the price data for MWS with so many prices missing. Again, some data, albeit "last known" and unknown when the last activity was, is extremely better than nothing. I may need prices for 6 year old commons (for example), which will never be sold on ebay in singular; their last known price was great (if accurate - not 9.99 or something silly). Now I can only stare at a null entry and wonder what the price was.

I'd like to know what the new inactivity cutoff time period is. I might assume the basic lists, being monthly, will have a month cutoff for activity before a card is dropped; the weekly lists are weekly.

Your existing script enhanced to take a price base, and then override just those entries in the updated list would be a great start. Some "N" heuristics to discard entries here and there may still be necessary, but let me know if you need a beta tester.

For those new to retrieving the price lists and don't have a base, this is one of the reasons I requested access to previous data. Other sites have historical data graphs going back to October 2008 (like Black Lotus Project), but MOTL has been doing this a lot longer. They may not be archiving the results or have the spare bandwidth to share them all.

quote:

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Originally posted by Planeswlk:
I just downloaded the pricelist, and noticed something disturbing from the list a month ago.. the filesize went way down (used to be around 1100kb, now 680kb), only around 8000 prices listed now. From a cursory look, it appears someone did change the script programming, and all the stale Raw-N 1 cards were dropped. The previous behavior was those cards with 0 activity were left untouched and rolled their price over to the next list. Now all that better-than-nothing historical rollover data is gone from new pricelists, leaving a huge void of nonpriced cards. There are still N=1 cards, but only from current sales.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Leshrac:
However, flushing out the really old prices every once in a while is something that gets done every once in a while anyway. At some point having an old price with Raw-N=1 becomes worse than having no price at all because it says nothing about the current value of a card and could be misleading.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Planeswlk:

the super-stale prices were purged one time only.

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huh?

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