Idea for ManaMarket upgrade

[blackrazor]

I first thought of this idea when I saw that MM was actually level 255, and thus no "ordinary" player. If the bot is run by the TMW admins, then it can also be given an admin level high enough to spawn items and gold. This would free it from carrying any real weight or slots in inventory and storage, and also from any gold limits (if they exist). This modified ManaMarket bot would destroy all items given to it during !add, and simply respawn the items back, as needed, for !buy and !giveback.

The advantage of such a system is that without weight and slot limits imposed upon the ManaMarket avatar, players could be given more slots, could be allowed to sell more items within a given slot (for example more than 150 Iron Ore at a time), and you would not need to enforce item removals from the active list after a week.

The cons that come to mind are that this kind of ManaMarket would not work with Manaplus' shop feature, only with !commands (because there would be no actual "real" stock present in the inventory). Also there is a hypothetical risk of having a bot exist with high admin level access if there is a way to abuse it. All actions on ManaMarket could (and probably already are) logged, so this risk can be minimized, especially if you also restrict who has login access to MM, and what actions they can perform on it, besides the automated ones.

[o11c]

This sounds like a great idea. The real concern is figuring out how to detect rollbacks. Hm, I guess something like zeny could be used as a simple counter... IF we could guaranteed atomicity.

The cons that come to mind are that this kind of ManaMarket would not work with Manaplus' shop feature

I don't see why this couldn't be made to work.

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Of course, long-term I intend to write a bot-API so that the character does not actually exist at all, and can store arbitrary state in the server so that there won't be any problems with rollbacks. But let's not wait on such long-term plans.