NPC buy order price changed
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I got the earlier post about there being less NPC buy orders, but noone mentioned that their values had been adjusted as well.
Back in the good old days, changed to the game behavior were accompanied by a changelog posted in advanced. Or at the very least associated with an announcement that something had changed.
May we please know what the buy/sell prices for NPC orders are?
I assume the sell orders have also changed, or have they not?
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NPC orders prices and amounts have nothing to do with game rules or available API methods, so they can be changed at any moment according to the current market situation without changelogs or notices. (Otherwise we need to create a new changelog every few hours, since they may be changed dynamically.) You have all available APIs to monitor the orders in real-time and take appropriate market decisions, there is no need in any notices.
Think of NPCs as real players with unknown intentions and code your strategy accordingly.
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So I think the issue is that people did not think of these prices as dynamic, and that there had been a precedent of announcing them beforehand. Updating the docs to reflect that this is the should solve that.
As another example, if we all logged in and saw that sources were max 1000 energy and there was no notice there would be some concern. These aren't game rules or api methods, just constants you can adjust, but they do change things quite a bit. When something we didn't realize was changeable changes it causes some issues with the assumptions we've made in our code. As long as the expectations are set that specific things can change without notice then people will prepare accordingly.
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Analogy with energy sources is not quite valid. Energy sources system is a strict part of game rules, and there is a game constant for this indeed. Market orders are different. There is no defined constant for NPC market orders, and they live in an environment that was designed to be dynamic from the beginning. You code your market code not like you code your harvest code, you use analysis and make decisions, it's how the market works. When some player changes or cancels his order, you don't expect him to notice you in advance. NPC orders are no different. Hardcoding NPC order prices into your code is like hardcoding real player's order prices (even if he seems to provide constant supply for a long time) -- the wrong way to approach the market problem by definition.
