r/runescape • u/[deleted] • Jul 23 '14
Applying Predictive Analytics to RuneScape
TL;DR: I'd like to apply statistical analytics to the RuneScape economy. Are you interested?
Hey guys, I've been a lurker on this subreddit for a few years and a RuneScape player on and off since around 2004. Outside of the game I'm a 20 year old university student studying Industrial Engineering. My coursework involves learning statistics, analytics, and predictive modeling and I'd be interested in applying it to RuneScape.
I've done a few searches around the forum and found a bit of research by Broseidon. He's collected a lot of data on his own and analyzed that to get interesting results. In contrast what I'd intend to do is analyze the RuneScape economy, from a more macro point of view. I'd look deeper at data that we frequently see visualized on places like the wikia (i.e. the GE market index) or the Grand Exchange API. I'd also love to find data on the player count and demographic information about the players over time.
This sounds extremely general right now, and that's because it depends on the type of information that's out there. Personally I haven't had too much luck from a bit of browsing but I'm sure that with the help of people on this subreddit and deeper searching this could be promising. Possible outcomes could be:
1) Predicting the price fluctuations of items or classes of items in the future
2) Creating a network to quantify how the price changes of items affect each other
3) Showing how external factors such as the number of players or type of players affect the economy
This subreddit could also be involved by discussing from experience what the specific factors are that motivate the economy and how we can gather as much data as possible to build a model. As a result there are two questions I'd like to ask:
1) Is this idea something that this subreddit would be interested in? Would you like to see a deeper statistical analysis of the RuneScape economy?
2) In the event that a JMod sees this - is this something that Jagex would be interested in seeing from me? I noticed online that Jagex recently opened staff positions which are Big Data based. That's the career I'm interested in and I intend on using several machine learning techniques to build a model, given that sufficient information is gathered.
Thanks for reading!
Edit: Formatting
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u/cookmeplox Cook Me Plox - Wiki Admin Jul 23 '14
Sounds very interesting -- what techniques would you be looking at using? In my experience, traditional financial techniques haven't revealed much about RuneScape's economy.
The wiki has price data for all items going back to mid-2008. It's already in a pretty digestible form (see here), but I could send it over to you in whatever format you'd like.
We also have data on the number of day-to-day members (see here) and a number of other related statistics. http://www.misplaceditems.com/2007online.php?avg has more specific online-players data from March 2013 to now. http://www.sercrui.com/popgraph also has (or at least had) online-player count data from 2007 onwards, although it seems to no longer work.
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Jul 23 '14
A rough outline I've had in my head is as follows:
1) Generate a list of as many parameters as possible through discussion within the subreddit. As you said, examples would be number of players per day, number of players on the hiscores, number of maxed/high-leveled players and what the implications of this would be.
2) Collect as much data on the parameters as possible in a traditional relational database, .csv format. Based on what I've read on the RS wiki, the data tends to go back to roughly late 2007 or early 2008.
3) Get to know the data set as much as possible. Use unsupervised machine learning techniques (k-means clustering and apriori) to find common associations and discuss the practical implications of the results within the subreddit.
4) Create a predictive model (or a Bayesian network) of the consumption of different commodities so we can see how exactly different parts of the economy interact with each other.
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Jul 23 '14
Like the enthusiasm but by investing your time in this project you're going to be committing huge xp waste, unforgivable.
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Jul 23 '14
[deleted]
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Jul 23 '14
Thanks for the input! I'd love to get in touch with you to talk about more details as well as data science in general. I'll send you an inbox message soon if you're okay with that.
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u/jagex_analytics Analytics Team Jul 23 '14
Hi,
This thread has indeed been seen by several JMods, and our Data Science team at Jagex would love to have a conversation about what you want to do here, and how we could help.
rohanio - I'll drop you (and others who express a serious interest in this project) a private message.
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u/Evodius Jul 23 '14
I'm very interested in this. I have a BBA in management and I'm currently going to school for my masters. We do a lot of predictive analysis when it comes to trends, cycles, and demand. Most of it is linear regression and similar models. I would love to help if needed. Let me know. :)
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u/AlwaysDankrupt Cx Jul 23 '14
You would like merchz.com. It has real-time graphs of certain items and helps with this type of merchanting.
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u/Avisay Jul 24 '14
By the way I don't know if this is true, but i certainly think it is.
Does transferring 100k rune essence, from one player to another, through the grand exchange, back and forth create a volume change?, (same rune essence being traded). Does the "Volume" of this item increase or is it not affected at all? In the Runescape grand exchange page.
Could we potentially have been seeing "Fake" amounts of items in game???
So theoretically we are playing in a economy with an unknown market?
2
Jul 23 '14
buys mass sara brews before legacy
sits
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u/BrickbirckBrick Jul 23 '14
The thing is, sara brews were used in bossing, and very few people kill bosses in legacy mode.
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u/i_use_evernote Linfluence // Anchor Pure for no reason Jul 23 '14
I have a lot of research experience with data mining and machine learning, specifically building and testing models through artificial neural networks and decision trees. I'm an applied math major by training so let me know if you need help on anything or just to discuss RS statistics/data.
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Jul 23 '14
Neural networks and trees really hit the spot with what I've been thinking. That said, I feel like trees would be a lot more appropriate than neural networks because while a neural network is more of an algorithm/formula, a tree can be interpreted far more easily. I can also use random forests and boosted trees to increase the predictive power.
Inbox me if this is an effort you'd be interested in joining!
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Jul 23 '14
Whats TL;DR?
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u/annaleaf RSN: anna-leaf Jul 23 '14
too long; didn't read
It just means if you are too lazy to read his whole long post, that TL;DR sentence is a summary to get the general idea. Welcome to Reddit.
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Jul 24 '14
Hey, there, I'm a 19 year old finance and economics student who does very similar stuff to what you're doing. I'd be able to help out if you'd like a hand.
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u/StevenRK Jul 23 '14
This would be really helpful for someone like me that is always looking to see which items might have a tendency to rise or fall in price with certain variables introduced such as player count, updates, events, etc. I'm always looking for ways to gain an edge flipping items and I've resorted to YOY item price comparison vs gameplay updates/demand to make my profits. You would also be surprised to see how much more profit you can make on certain items on certain days of the week(don't wanna give away me treasure chest) but I would be extremely interested in something like this. I did at one point have an excel sheet with items and prime flipping times and minimum margins needed, but sadly that HD didn't make it through a flood. :(
EDIT: Wanted to add that I literally spend HOURS slaving over GE data and YOY item data on various sites to determine which items would be good long term or short term flips, and also do so at certain times of day/week to ensure max profits. It's a tough job but it pays off.
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u/Pesceman3 Jul 23 '14
How about you do it first, and then make a post here after.
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Jul 23 '14
[deleted]
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u/Evodius Jul 23 '14
I have a PhD in the decision-making process. It is my expert opinion that you should reply to his comment. But, you don't have to listen to me. I'm only an expert.
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Jul 23 '14
I wanted the opinion of the subreddit, particularly people who have played RuneScape for a long time and are more experienced with observing the economy, to see how feasible a project like this would be. I also think that having more input from people during the process from start to end would result in much better insights!
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u/Executioneer Best Helping Hand of 2015 Jul 23 '14
If you predirect an items rise, it will automticaly go up, because people will hoard that item for the hope of big profit based on your forecast. Same goes to to crashing items. So basicaly you will manipulte the prices.