[ShopDB 1.1] Accuracy Improvements -- Information (Trial Run).

Hello EcoCityCraft community!

As some of you may already know, as a staff member, it’s basically mandatory to be AFK active for at least two hours per day. Some of you may also wonder what we do during our AFK free time, whether it’s being outside or doing chores.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on a small project in web development in an attempt to help out the ECC community. It’s a project that involves the community, and in essence is “by the community” and “for the community”. I will explain this in further detail shortly.

We all know all too well that ShopDB has its flaws, given some feedback on the official thread or on some suggestions that have floated around lately. I thought that perhaps I could do something to make this a bit of a smaller issue.

This may turn out to be a temporary thing, particularly given that there are plans to move ShopDB onto ECC’s servers, but we can see how it goes. If you all would like to check out what I would like to call “ECC ShopDB 1.1”, feel free to do so at: https://eccshopdb.com/.

The basis of ShopDB 1.1 is this:

• Essentially, it works much like ShopDB, which is why I tried to keep some of the visuals the same. There is a search bar, some radio buttons to add options to a query, and the tiles we see for search results. You can click on “warp” or “coords” to copy the coordinates to your clipboard and use them in game. This did not change all that much.
• The main difference is that for each shop, you can leave a rating. Here is an example of what a rating dialog may look like:

Spoiler: Rating Dialog

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• As you can see, you are asked three simple questions:
  • If you are selling items to a user: “Did the store owner have funds when you arrived?”. This is intended to combat the issue of stale shops, where users claim to buy items, but simply can’t because they ran out of money.
  • If you are buying items from a user: “Was this ChestShop in stock when you arrived?”. This is also intended to combat the issue of shops showing as having available items, when in reality they do not.
  • The second question is: “How accessible was this ChestShop?”. This is to combat the issue of users having “entry: deny” flags on their town for long periods of time, thus rendering any ChestShop in the region inaccessible. Also, some users will have a roof to their shop, which can make using coordinates to teleport via /tpc a bit difficult. You can factor in these two issues as you see fit and leave a rating on the slider, ranging from 0 to 5, and incrementing by 0.5.
  • The third and final question is the “make-or-break”, so to speak. “Overall Rating” means: how would you rate this ChestShop on a scale of 0 to 5? The results from this are factored into a user’s star rating on their tile. I will provide an example of what I mean by this next.

Spoiler: I am an image! Click me to continue!

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• This being the first screenshot you are seeing of an actual available ChestShop, some parts are rather self-explanatory, like the coordinates and town in the top right corner, the “Warp” and “Coords” buttons (where clicking on them will copy to the clipboard), the quantity and price. The user’s head is in the top left, as well as the block / item. If there is no image for the block / item, then a barrier is used.

• As you can see, historically, users have rated this ChestShop as a 5/5. (Who could that have been?) This is calculated as the average of “Overall Rating” in the “Rate” dialog, so all users have left a rating of 5/5. That must be one good shop! The rating counts results from the last week, so if a ChestShop gets no ratings for over one week, then they fall back down to 0 stars.
• You also may have noticed a little triangle to the right of the stars. This is a warning. Currently, there are three options as to what this triangle may represent, and hovering over it will give you an idea of what’s going on. The options are:

Spoiler: Options

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• When searching, by default, the shops will automatically be ranked from highest rating to lowest. This means that a shop that buys sand for $3.75 may be higher up the list than a shop that buys sand at $100. This could be purely because of overall rating, as would be expected; it doesn’t matter if a user buys sand at an exorbitant price if they don’t have the funds to purchase any.

Spoiler: Image

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• This uses information gathered from the ShopDB that is already in place. So, any results you will find on ShopDB should be in ShopDB 1.1 as well. To this end, credit continues to go to @Kozz for their amazing work on ShopDB.
• This is a bit of a trial run. If these certain features are useful and the community likes them, then further integration may be a possibility.

Issues / Comments / Suggestions:

• For any issues, comments, or suggestions, I ask that you contact me via forum PM for now. To start out, I do want to see how everything goes and then will see what happens. So please, don’t break too many things.
• I will be trying to keep this post as up-to-date as possible.

Spoiler: Known Issues / Bugs / Potential Improvements

• The buying / selling terminology is a bit confusing at times and ambiguous.
  • I am prioritizing this and do have an idea or two of how I’d like to tackle this.
• The site is a bit slow.
  • I know there are ways to make the site more efficient and I will be exploring them in the coming weeks.
• The site could use a bit more visual appeal.
  • Some other ideas may be explored once some other issues have been ironed out.
• The site is not working / the site is down.
  • As I continue to put a bit more work into the site, it may be unavailable for brief periods of time. Bare with me as I tweak some things. If there is a huge problem, then I may just take down the site until there’s a fix.

 

Thanks for the support!

I interpret it as the shop is completely inaccessible if "entry: deny" is on; it would be a 0/5 rating.
Having a roof that makes it hard to get into a shop, or having a disorganized shop where it's hard to find anything at the warp would maybe rank a bit higher than that. You can still get to it, but it's just really inconvenient.
Being able to walk in and out, and do your business quickly and efficiently is exactly what we want, so ideally this would be a 5/5.

This is how I interpret the accessibility ranking; is there a different way you see it as?

 

I've made some updates to the site that should make it load faster. Hopefully it's a noticeable difference.

Thanks to all who took the time to check this out!

 

Unfortunately the only way I see this viable from the front-end is to have the community / potential shoppers comment on this (via ratings).

Currently, the stars only take into account ratings from the previous 7 days, so a shop being closed for a week wouldn't be permanently affected, per se. (But I do get that if users see a poor rating for a shop, they may remember that for a bit.)

Users also do have the option of unlisting their shop temporarily. Also, a shop being in "maintenance mode" so to speak could do so, but they could move some ChestShops around, or perform their upgrades in stages so as to not affect the whole shop, if that makes sense.

If a shop is unlisted, it indeed will not show up in the search results. Though a new ChestShop in the same location, selling the same amount of item at the same price will retain their ratings (from up to seven days prior).

Thanks for all the input!

 

The ~8 month "trial run" has run its course -- I appreciate all the feedback / input and hope the community liked the idea of something like this.

I will be closing the instance down as I am out of resources for other ongoing projects. If there is a demand for it in the future, perhaps something could be worked out.