Moondoggie & Market Browsing

OK. EVE Metrics is my big market browsing project. It’s very complex, it’s got a lot of data, but it all basically comes down to this: People browse the market with a program running on their computer, and when any market data is viewed, EVE Online writes it to a cache file, the program decodes that and fires it at the server. We collect all these reports and build a single picture of the market in EVE.

There’s the top-down view for you. We’ve never really not had enough data. We get good market coverage in most regions and we’re fairly up to date in the grand scheme of things. But compare the actual market of EVE to EVE Metrics and we’re still a long way off having a truly accurate picture. EVE moves quickly- in some markets, from minute to minute orders will be shuffling around and changing price and being bought out.

With Dominion we got a new browser. This means you can now use the full EVE Metrics website ingame, but also (through some Javascript client hook additions) lets us provide a fantastic new tool to help us get an even better picture of the market in EVE.

If you fire up the IGB and head over to the upload suggestions page, you’ll be given a list of 10 items, and a few options for automatic checking. Choosing this option will prompt EVE Metrics for a list of items to check, and will automatically go and look at those items. It’s slow, but it works. In the space of a few hours with one user, we can get data for an entire region across all the items on the market. This is utterly fantastic and we’re really looking forward to the larger volume of data this is bringing to the site.

So, if you’ve got a spare moment, or you need to go AFK for an hour, or you want to help out while you’re mining, or you’re just tired of clicking the next item in the list, install the uploader and visit the page ingame to get started. Every upload counts and helps us build the biggest, best picture of EVE’s market we can manage to produce. Uploads to EVE Metrics are also syndicated to other websites and tools, of course. Your uploads and contribution of time help hundreds of users who use the site, and tens of thousands more who rely on our pricing, history and order APIs for their applications.

Oh, and if you’re a developer, we now have a server status API with all the information you could possibly want on TQ, Sisi and the API servers. It can be found here (docs here). Enjoy!