[Web AH Tool] Pet Magpie

[Morazor]

Hello fellow pet collectors. It's my first post here, I usually just lurk in the shadows

Since a couple of months I've resumed playing and I've restarted collecting pets. Searching the auction house for missing pets can be a pain sometimes and software developers hate to do painful things that a computer can do for them.

So I started looking into the Blizzard Web API and I built this little thing that finds shiny new pets for me. I called it "Pet Magpie".

It is a so-called "web app": basically a web page that does things usually done by programs.
Its basic feature is showing a list of a character's missing pets that are on sale on the auction house, sorting them by price and grouping them by species. Every entry has some infos about the auctions and some handy links to check out if it's worth the price.

Pet Magpie also has an auction watcher that can find pets you are looking for. For example, it can be set up to look for any pet costing less than 550 gold or an H/H Skunky Alemental at any price. When something matching is found, a sound is played and the auction is highlighted.

Finally, Pet Magpie will check the auction house for new auctions every 5 minutes. This means that you can also leave it in the background and wait for a sound warning you that something has been found.

PM.png (107.6KiB)Viewed 16446 times

Cute little bird, isn't it?

I'm still testing and fixing some things, but it's working fine. I'm planning to release a prototype tomorrow or on saturday and I hope that you will find it useful. It will be free and with no ads, I'd be happy if you'll have a look and share your opinions with me

Edit:

Well, let's see if it works
Be gentle, it's just a chick!

http://petmagpie.altervista.org

[Waflob]

cool idea - I'm sure you will find plenty of interest for this here.

[Kiella]

This sounds very promising- I currently use a combination of Auctionator, TUJ and TSM, but a better interface that incorporates everything in one place (rather than tooltips, individual item screens and general battle pet AH screens) would be much appreciated. Are you going to include the pets found in the Miscellaneous tab too (the unlearned pets)?

[Morazor]

It's just how it works: it filters auctions and shows only the pets you miss

It also has some tools to find specific pets you are looking for and warns you if they are on sale under a price you set.

[Drudatz]

well without url hard to judge :p

[Morazor]

Of course

I will post it later, still have a couple of things to fix.

[Paladance]

They're a new user, they need to post once more to get the URLs unlocked.

1. There are two AH websites related to pets specifically but both seem to be poorly updated. I hope you'd really found the solution.
2. Are you going to make it related to a single chosen realm, or shall we be able to pick up more realms to maximise our chances?
3. [For the later development] If it's the latter one, are you planning to include the realm comparer for both missing and duplicate pets?

Thank you in advance.

[Morazor]

Well the URL posting problem is fixed right now

1. I hope so
I still may fail anyway, I think I've set up things properly but... I don't know, if others didn't manage to do it maybe there's some problem I still can't see. Well, time will tell

2. Right now when you choose a realm and a character they will be saved to cookies... so basically you can browse just one auction house. In the future I will change that to let you browse any number of auction houses by including realm and character data in the url.

3. I didn't think of that... By browsing this forum I'm understanding that I'm pretty newbie as a pet collector and have a lot to learn

[Morazor]

Oh ok, let's give it a try.
I'm probably a bit busy tonight, I hope it won't explode

http://petmagpie.altervista.org

If you find some bug or horrible things in general just tell me and I will fix it ASAP.

[Paladance]

Well, with the links to The Undermine Journal one can easily check what's going on. Well done!
After several tries I don't see any timing inconsistence (TUJ updates every 25-35 minutes), but more of tries are welcome.
I wonder however if Blizz API isn't limited in advance to several queries in a certain amount of time. I've read that from another fetcher (not AH, but armoury stuff nonetheless), whose site is regularly broken. :\

3. I didn't think of that... By browsing this forum I'm understanding that I'm pretty newbie as a pet collector and have a lot to learn

Currently, I guess that for duplicates I can just add these myself. ^^

Didn't have a need to explain, but:
1. An obvious thing: Each realm has varying prices.
2. You want to pick up a pet from the realm where the price is the lowest.
3. You want to sell a pet on the realm where the price is the highest.
4. If you feel lucky for gambling you can apply the point 3 to the pet from the point 2.
5. For all of that, one would need statistics for all the realms of interest.

They doesn't have to create any boring or overwhelming table (not referring to you, oh no! ). Just that:
Recommended to buy on:
Recommended to sell on:
(Optional for more than 2) Total price order: e.g. Burning Legion < Emerald Dream < Nemesis

Of course that may not fit into the main table, so you'd create a switch between the original page and another one.

[Morazor]

About the number of queries: Blizzard API has limits, if I remember correctly something like 100 requests per second and 36000 per hour. It's sounds like a lot of them, but it's really not that much.
To avoid hitting the limit, I'm basically caching files on the web server I use.

The 5 minutes timer it's a bit too short maybe (basically a lot of checks are useless because the auction data from Blizzard isn't changed). It also checks pets collection every time, which also may be a waste for a couple of reasons:

- If you don't log out, armory isn't updated and data is always the same
- To avoid downloading the same data, I ask the server what's the time of the last update on the character. Problem is that pets are account wide: if you get a pet on one character it won't change the update date on the other... but the pets are changed anyway.

Probably the best thing in this case is just putting a big "refresh collection from armory" button

Anyway... The fact is that untill I don't have enough people using it, I won't reach the request cap and that's fine for now. If I will get there I'll try to optimize

About duplicates: I don't think I want to take the trading direction
I mean: for auctions statistics, trading and so on there are already very good resources (TUJ for example). I just wanted to do something to help collecting missing pets because I didn't find a good way to do that. I'm trying to stay in a niche, I don't want to compete with that big muscular TUJ thing

[Paladance]

It also checks pets collection every time, which also may be a waste for a couple of reasons:

- If you don't log out, armory isn't updated and data is always the same
- To avoid downloading the same data, I ask the server what's the time of the last update on the character. Problem is that pets are account wide: if you get a pet on one character it won't change the update date on the other... but the pets are changed anyway.

Probably the best thing in this case is just putting a big "refresh collection from armory" button

I wouldn't be afraid of that button. As WPets uses that method for users for several years, I can assume that they find it the best way.

About duplicates: I don't think I want to take the trading direction
I mean: for auctions statistics, trading and so on there are already very good resources (TUJ for example). I just wanted to do something to help collecting missing pets because I didn't find a good way to do that. I'm trying to stay in a niche, I don't want to compete with that big muscular TUJ thing

Okay!
And hmm, now I feel sorry for that guy who has tried to create a more complex website and just can't keep it up to date.
I can look for the address if you're interested in that.

[Morazor]

The one I've found is this: http://petsear.ch/

Is quite well hidden, I found it when I was already developing Pet Magpie and the auction section seems to be not working (or taking forever to load).

Anyway, I've spent much of the morning trying to understand legal things I need to include in the site. I usually don't work with public websites so I'm pretty new to this kind of stuff. I hope that saying "I don't know your identity and I don't track anything" will be enough

[Paladance]

Good luck with the EU forum, though it's sleepy most of the time unless a specific Murphy's law calls people out.

I believe that you'd have to post a cookie note anyway but none will call any EU watchers or someone I guess.

[Fantee]

OMG!

That's wonderfull! I was just looking for something like that.

Thank you so much!

[Pob]

This is fantastic, great work!

[Morazor]

I believe that you'd have to post a cookie note anyway but none will call any EU watchers or someone I guess.

Yep, I did it
I'm kinda paranoid for these things, better safe than sorry

About the EU forums: I know they are mostly sleeping but I see google tends to show results from them. If you do a google search about "pet magpie wow", the first result is the thread from WoW EU forum.

@Fantee, @Butchml: Thanks, I'm happy you find this useful

[Paladance]

About the EU forums: I know they are mostly sleeping but I see google tends to show results from them. If you do a google search about "pet magpie wow", the first result is the thread from WoW EU forum.

That's a clever thing my dear. Reminds me of the times when I used to have my original ideas in handy by putting them in a wiki, even just in a scrappage.

By the way, is the name related to the saying that magpies are greedy birds?

[Waflob]

I've been playing around with this and it's useful - no complicated interface or usage - a few other developers could do worse than to take a look

For some reason, none of my chars on EU Azuremyst are findable. They've been accessed recently and are in the armoury when I check there. Any chance that a typo has crept in? Or is the armoury playing up? I've checked this 2 days in a row, with several characters, all of which cannot be found. All others realms are doing what is expected.

I suspect the #1 things that developers say will be heard, namely 'strange ....'

Thanks for taking the time to create this - much appreciated !

[Morazor]

By the way, is the name related to the saying that magpies are greedy birds?

Yep. They are known to collect shiny things (actually looks like it's a myth: http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150408 ... ut-magpies).
Also, in WoW there's no tameable magpie. Magpies can be friendly to humans and are also very intelligent.

I suspect the #1 things that developers say will be heard, namely 'strange ....'

Also "works for me", "it's not a bug, it's a feature", "did you try rebooting it?"

I'll fix it ASAP, I've done some further testing and there's something messy in Azuremyst data.

EDIT: Fixed it, it should work now!