New Feature Suggestion! Price Fluctuation Graph on Decks!
TappedOut forum
Posted on Sept. 11, 2015, 5:32 p.m. by Femme_Fatale
One of the many things that I've always been interested in a deck is how the price of that deck changes as time passes. Either by the change of cards, or price change of individual cards.
My suggestion here is that each deck has an image of a graph that details the price of the deck on the y axis and time on the x axis. It would display the change in a deck's price over time.
Wizard_of_the_Broke says... #3
Cool idea. It would also be interesting to track popularity, either on T/O, or via MTGtop8-type tournament data.
September 11, 2015 5:51 p.m.
Femme_Fatale says... #4
Let's not track popularity formayor. Upvotes cause enough issues as it is. Let's focus on utilities and functionality.
September 11, 2015 5:58 p.m.
Wizard_of_the_Broke says... #6
I really meant popularity generally, not just on TO. So you could display the popularity of the relevant archetype based on outside data or based on similarity to other deck lists, the popularity of particular cards, and/or an aggregate of the popularity of cards. And I think that info would be useful alongside prices, and certainly more useful than upvotes, views, or comments.
September 11, 2015 7:10 p.m.
Femme_Fatale says... #7
T/O doesn't display a list of relevant archetypes as we have no organizing feature. We have hubs, but those are basically search engine functions to help find decks. It is difficult to get information from outside sources and insert that into a functional code as a continuous feature that requires no supervision. Card popularity is also kind of pointless as a majority of the decks built on here are casual decks made by people who use this site solely for a deck organization feature. So a card that may be incredibly well known and popular, think goyf, would be vastly under presented in comparison to casual appealing cards like Biovisionary.
In short, deck and card popularity are defined mainly by what is known as the "meta". We do not deal with the "meta" here on T/O, as our user base are mostly casual users. If you wish to find deck and card popularity, I direct you to mtgtop8.
September 11, 2015 7:21 p.m.
Wizard_of_the_Broke says... #8
Points taken. But you never know what you might glean from a bunch of data until you look at it. I use mtgtop8 to gauge the metagame, but that data is all very much retrospective, where the TO data would potentially be more speculative. It would be nice to have a feature that would glimpse into what people are experimenting with, casual or competitive. Plus you could always have some filtering options, and you'd be readily aware of whether or not you were looking at something intended for competitive play based on the deck itself. I imagine you could simply add check boxes in the deck editor which would indicate the level of play intended, the level of play actually entered, or even matchup result (the competitive hub isn't too useful, obviously). Top8 is still the best tool for analysis, but TO might just be able to yield some worthwhile info.
September 11, 2015 7:39 p.m.
Femme_Fatale says... #9
I pretty much can guarantee that won't work. As there is no indicator of what "level of play" means. It would end up with the same issue as the competitive hub and the same issue as the combase with no one coming to terms with the definition of "synergy" which ended up making it a useless function.
The second problem is the misportrayal of information. It is not right for this site to present information that won't be a proper accuracy of what is actually being played in real life. No matter how much we label that it is a representation of the decks/cards used on T/O only, there will be a numerous people who will think it is a representation of the real life meta.
The third problem is what the data would actually look like. There are just under 1,600,000,000 non-private decks posted on this site. Standard is the biggest issue in that there are so many standard decks that are illegal due to rotation. Lands would be incredibly difficult to portray as well, since for most formats, the lands used are all the same. Next, there are around 15,000 cards in mtg (I think), so any given card is going to have a VERY minimal fraction of the popularity pie. Sure we can graph increasing and decreasing popularity percentages, but it won't look very impressive when it is increasing by an average of 0.0005% a week. Okay, sure, you can limit that to specific formats, but once again this is difficult to properly portray as there are going to be tonnes of decks with cards used that are illegal in said format. And if we try and eliminate all prototype decks from the equation ... then we are effectively knocking off perhaps 50% (I have no idea the actual percentage of nonprivate decks are prototype) and the data is once again misrepresented.
I mean, sure, we can try and implement it to see the results, but yeago has a very limited schedule and he can't just implement whatever if it won't have a positive impact, or gives out misrepresented information.
September 12, 2015 3:20 a.m.
i like it. i think i made some changes to make tracking a deck's price easier, so it would just be modelling that out in a time series, which is doable.
September 12, 2015 1:43 p.m.
Wizard_of_the_Broke says... #11
Hey, Femme_Fatale - It was just a suggestion, and I don't know anything about the site's back end, but I do realize things like that can take a lot of work (though I certainly had no idea there were 1.6 million decks - or that most are obsolete Standard builds). All I really wanted to get at was that there's tons of economic data out there related to MTG (not that I'm against your deck price tracking idea), but remarkably limited information on how people actually play the game. I just think there's an opportunity out there for someone to try and generate some more detailed data. If anyone was so inclined, I'd happily be a patron of their website, despite not playing super-competitively. But if that's not for T/O, it's not for T/O.
September 12, 2015 2:57 p.m.
Wizard_of_the_Broke says... #12
And hey, Femme_Fatale and yeaGO - I would love to see total price values on cubes (tracker or just current)!
September 12, 2015 3:31 p.m.
Femme_Fatale says... #13
It's debating formayor. I'm not being upset. Please do realize that most of the regular users here don't argue, but debate. You present your side of the debate and I present mine, I just so happen to know more information.
I would like some feedback from other users about your suggestion though, as there could be things that I might have missed. Maybe the other regulars will pop-in.
Also: Surprised that cube doesn't have a price signature yet.
September 12, 2015 3:32 p.m. Edited.
Wizard_of_the_Broke says... #14
Femme_Fatale - I've only been on here about a year, but I have most certainly seen what happens when a T/O debate gets uncivilized - so I certainly wasn't interpreting your comments as having any kind of malicious undertone, and didn't mean to give that impression. And I realize you have way more info about the ins and outs of the site than I, so I appreciate your perspective. Thanks for engaging with the idea.
If you are going to ask around for feedback - I think the most useful and easily identifiable data would be in relation to trending cards/decks. Let's say for instance I'm looking at a Modern Junk list. It would be cool if I could click on Lingering Souls and see, over time, whether similar decks are trending toward running more or fewer of those cards. It would also be good to see if similar decks were being generated more or less frequently.
In any case, even without the trend data, an automated feature that identified similar decks would be sweet. I'm totally speculating here, but it might be do-able by automating the deck search engine's "search by card" feature and producing results when someone views a deck or by clicking a "similar decks" button. You could batch search the whole list and return 65% or better deck list matches, or something along those lines. Though, I realize nothing is ever quite that simple. Just food for thought.
September 12, 2015 4:45 p.m.
formayor what I read above is far from the end of the story regarding the features you're talking about, I think a lot of it is possible. but I don't think it's on topic for this post. feel free to make any suggestions in the forums. also, I think the similar decks thing is somewhere on the site.
CheeseBro says... #2
that would be cool!
September 11, 2015 5:51 p.m.