Scenario to Keep Universalis Updated

[noobMagician42Participant]

Hello gentlefolk.

I have been using Miqo for about a month now, am very happy doing so. I send my many heartfelt thanks to all those contributing to the scenario and navigation grids repositories.

In the interest of contributing to my own gil-making efforts and the community at large, I decided to create a scenario for Miqo that checks the price of all item entries on the marketboard. Doing so would allow Teamcraft (or more likely an XIVLauncher plugin) to intercept the sale listings data for each item and upload them to Universalis, where everyone using the website and in-game market plugins can benefit. My goal is to never see another “last updated” timestamp more than a month in the past. This will be especially useful for keeping track of market fluctuations during the chaos post-Endwalker update, and also when patch 6.1 releases new housing onto all the servers and people need to outfit their new abodes.

My first thoughts on implementation revolved around Miqo submitting search queries from a text document with a list of all items that are possible to sell on the player marketboard. However, after a cursory look at the documentation and reading related forum entries I don’t think the scenario engine will have the capability to do such a thing any time soon.

Despite such limitations, I have been able to implement a primitive version of the idea using the numpad system navigation keys, similar to the way that Lyfox did in their retainer update scenario. It is limited to only one item sub-category at a time, but can be edited to go through all of the plates of 100 items in that subcategory. To clarify, you will need to focus a single sub-category “Miscellany” or “Orchestration Components” on the left side of the marketboard; the scenario currently is not able to go through all of the different main/off arms or armor categories.

To start the script, you need to choose a category, move your mouse over Miqo’s scenario Start button, tap 0 to bring up the in game pointer and focus it on the first item in that category, and then left click the start button without moving your mouse. The scenario will need to be fine-tuned for each different item sub-category that you choose. For example, if you wanted to check the prices on all 1000+ “Seafood” items, you will need to change the scenario so Miqo repeats the “check 100 item’s prices” instructions (chapter 2) at least 10 times. I have included these setup instructions and chapter by chapter documentation in the scenario itself.

A warning: this scenario is fragile. If anything moves the in-game cursor, it will cause the scenario act unproductively. The best case scenario has the script temporarily stuck inside a single item’s listings, and the series of button presses eventually brings it back out and able to check other items’ prices. However, it is also possible for the script to turn focus to the item categories and the search box, which will make the script turn “partial match” on and off for 5 minutes straight. None of the fail states I tested ended with the script buying anything from the marketboard, but your mileage may vary. I would never ever recommend leaving a script with gil on the line unsupervised. It’s a great way to lose everything.

Future improvements would include:

Making the scenario more resilient to accidental movement of the cursor
Reducing time spent idle
Moving between different sub-categories, so that the script could check all items in a column of 3 sub-categories or a line of 10 subcategories

The ideal is to have a one-click solution so that intrepid multiboxers could run the scenario indefinitely. Even better, I’m sure it’s possible to incorporate navigation meshes and the “NPCTeleport” feature to cycle through all the different servers on a datacenter. With one person’s rebellion against FFXIV’s TOS, we can guarantee that our market data sites and plugins will never be more than a day out of date.

I hope this scenario proves useful for you. If you have any ideas on how to make the scenario switch marketboard subcategories automatically, or even better are able to implement it successfully, please share it below.

Toodles!
-noobMagician42

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