EVE Online
Finance Tool
EVE Online is an online MMORPG where, as far as I can tell, players split their time between flying around in spaceships robbing eachother and managing their finances in an in-game economic system complicated enough to earn the game the nickname "Spreadsheets in Space." I have not personally played the game, but one of my roommates has been playing for years.
The game also has APIs that let you pull down up-to-date information about various aspects of the game's economy, including current outstanding buy/sell orders for goods at various locations in the game. People have used these to make tools in the past, but apparently they have not been as helpful as they could. As a favor to him I wrote a tool that utilizes these APIs, external spreadsheets with static information that we pulled from elsewhere, and a locally hosted MySQL database that is constantly updating with information from one specific API, which only allowed information about a single item at a time to be pulled (there are thousands of items, so for the tool to run smoothly it needs to poll many at once).
The tool asks his current location, how much cargo space and capital he has available, any items he wants to avoid, and then uses the game's information to determine what would be the most profitable trade run he could make from his current location (buy items at the current location, sell them somewhere else. It also factors in how much of each item is being traded at the destination, to ensure that it will not take too long to sell the items. The projected profit is often slightly different than it turns out to be when he makes the run due to some latency in the APIs and deals changing during travel, but in about two weeks of off-an-on use he went from having lower than average wealth to being in roughly the top 10% of the wealthiest players in the game.
Future features that I've started include alerts when a sell order you've placed is underbid by someone else to allow you to lower your price accordingly, planning multi-destination trade runs, and possibly using machine learning to predict future fluctuations in price or impending market manipulations by players (these apparently happen frequently).
The game also has APIs that let you pull down up-to-date information about various aspects of the game's economy, including current outstanding buy/sell orders for goods at various locations in the game. People have used these to make tools in the past, but apparently they have not been as helpful as they could. As a favor to him I wrote a tool that utilizes these APIs, external spreadsheets with static information that we pulled from elsewhere, and a locally hosted MySQL database that is constantly updating with information from one specific API, which only allowed information about a single item at a time to be pulled (there are thousands of items, so for the tool to run smoothly it needs to poll many at once).
The tool asks his current location, how much cargo space and capital he has available, any items he wants to avoid, and then uses the game's information to determine what would be the most profitable trade run he could make from his current location (buy items at the current location, sell them somewhere else. It also factors in how much of each item is being traded at the destination, to ensure that it will not take too long to sell the items. The projected profit is often slightly different than it turns out to be when he makes the run due to some latency in the APIs and deals changing during travel, but in about two weeks of off-an-on use he went from having lower than average wealth to being in roughly the top 10% of the wealthiest players in the game.
Future features that I've started include alerts when a sell order you've placed is underbid by someone else to allow you to lower your price accordingly, planning multi-destination trade runs, and possibly using machine learning to predict future fluctuations in price or impending market manipulations by players (these apparently happen frequently).