Issues with card prices
ic0n67 4 years{"ops":[{"insert":"There have been quite a few things I have seen with card prices here on this site. The first and most glaring one is that card prices is sometimes that are so very wrong. \n\nFor instance if you look at the Japanese Alternate Art Nissa, Who Shakes the World (https://archidekt.com/card?name=Nissa,%20Who%20Shakes%20the%20World&uid="},{"attributes":{"bold":true},"insert":"25d63632-c019-4f34-926a-42f829a4665c"},{"insert":") \n\nIt shows up as a $6.99 on Card Kingdom and $--- on TCGplayer. This is very wrong. First by clicking on the TCG link it comes up to the JPN Alt Art Nissa like it should, but it is $14.99 ($15.27 Market and N/A Mid). Now I know prices can change wildly on TCG so I don't expect that to ever be perfect, but this card has never shown a price. I might make the assumption that your price feeds off TCG-Mid, but I can look up my Foil Magistrate's Veto -- a card I know has in the past weeks jumped wildly all over the place because some jackass put 3 of them for sale for over $1000 each (I guess to inflate his collection price) and at the time there were only 4 available -- and the Veto is listed as $2.97 and TCG-Market is listed as $2.97. So I assume that is what should be used. I know TCG names the special reprints as (Borderless) or (Alternate) to confuse thing, but your link goes to the correct page so you must have the correct scryfall ID in order to link that part up correctly. I can't see how the price could not be obtained correctly if you can link to the correct page.\n\nAs for the Card Kingdom link: That just goes to the wrong version of the card. Both links to CardKingdom have product ID 224218. Where TCGplayer have 224218 for the normal version and 189017 for the JPN one. So it is obviously picking up the wrong price and wrong link for CK. I don't know how or why this is happening. I don't know if it is an issue with your load or an issue with where you are getting the pricing data from. But there is a disconnect. Usually with cards with multiple version of a card in a set. \n\nThe next biggest thing is what cards are defaulted. This is maybe just a me thing, but I don't want to see the digital cards. I don't like looking at them as the templating is all off compared to the paper version, plus they don't have a cost. Just today I grabbed someone's deck list who was bragging it was over $8000 and I was like \"man that can't be\" and I put it in the sandbox just to check it out and it came out to $1100 except, nope. All the most expensive cards were Vintage Editions or Kaladesh Remasters or what not. I had to go through and check all of the cards and change them. A Candelabra really doesn't cost $0 , but that is how much TGC and CK sell them for. \n\nThe deck did end up being about $8500, but that brings me to my point of: if you have a feature in place why do you have it so said feature is undermined by your own coding. I don't understand why you wouldn't have the default selection of a card not be the newest, non-special, paper printing. I don't know why if I put in Swords to Plowshares right now it will default to the Japanese Alternate Art Supplemental Strixhaven printing (something which precedent says you will never have the right price of) and not the normal Commander Legends version. You should be defaulting to the most easily available version of the card available. Let me change it to something special if I want to as I am less likely to have it anyway. Even better would be if you could default to something in my collection, but baby steps. \n\n\n\n\n\n"}]}
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Jeremy(Archidekt Moderator)
4 years{"ops":[{"insert":"I'll tackle this in two sections since your report mostly boils down to two issues: card prices and search optimization.\n\n\nRegarding card prices, all of our TCGplayer prices come from Scryfall, so I can't speak to why the exact example you provided is askew. If I had to guess, however, it's probably similar to our challenges with the Card Kingdom prices (which we do grab ourselves). In essence, CK uses their own internal IDs and set naming schema that our script can only really guess at. It's often right, but it gets increasingly difficult with the various promos and supplementary products that get tacked onto normal sets. Something similar is probably happening with how Scryfall gets TCGplayer links, so I definitely can't fault them for not having it perfect either. Ultimately, I can't even fault TCGplayer and CK because they're only working with what Wizards gives them... which is not much. If Wizards would consistently provide multiverse IDs for every version of every card they release, there would be a lot more consistency on third party sites. But, as things are, everyone's left coming up with their own system and trying to write scripts capable of understanding everyone else's. \n\n\nAs for search optimization, I'll start with what you're absolutely correct about: We need to adjust how we're handling foreign cards. We officially have no foreign cards in our database "},{"attributes":{"italic":true},"insert":"unless"},{"insert":" it's the only version of a particular card. That used to be enough, but with all of these foreign exclusives, the most recent printing of a unique version of a card is no longer necessarily English. We'll need to change our script to handle that better since the foreign version is never going to be the most widely available. Regarding digital, our search filters those out just fine, but what you're describing is a different thing entirely. It looks like our text importer for a deck is not filtering out digital if card editions are not specified, hence why you were getting Vintage Masters and Kaladesh Remastered. I'll put in a ticket for that-- thanks for the report! \n\nGenerally speaking, however, search optimization is not quite as simple as adding conditions in the background of all of our searches until we arrive at the \"most easily available\" result. While (as I addressed above) we should certainly be able to prevent foreign and digital cards from being the default result, we don't necessarily want to do the same for promos. For instance, many cards' cheapest and most available versions are from the List, From the Vault, a preconstructed deck, or other similar products. We don't want to filter those out across the board. Furthermore, every additional query that we tack onto our searches adds to the time that it takes to provide a result. While we're certainly concerned with providing good and accurate search results, we have to balance it with ensuring that the site doesn't feel slow. In some cases, a user needing to manually adjust the version of a particular card or two may be worth overall \"snappiness\". \n\n\nRegardless, I appreciate the time you spent to submit this report. While we can't get everything perfect, there's definitely some actionable changes to be made here. Thank you!\n"}]}
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ic0n67 4 years{"ops":[{"insert":"I can appreciate system incompatibility and I mean that it is literally a part of my job coding between systems that are not meant to be connected. From Nissa's example I can venture to guess that the CK issue is where whatever process was originally used to create the link between the two systems took its best guess and either missed or something changed after the fact. It is obviously defaulting to the regular version of the card, which is fine, but the problem is there isn't an additional process or protocol in place to fix the mistake. I know Nissa's has issues. The JPN Alt Art Lili is also an issue. I'd assume the rest of them are issues too and I have found other instance here or there that I can't remember atm and don't know if they have been fixed since anyway. \n\nAs for the TCG side, Scryfall is showing a price for the card. It also appears that the Scryfall ID you have for the card is the correct version. Is the star next to the card number causing an issue? I do also notice that there is another version for the Japanese version of the normal art for Nissa when I go to Scryfall and that doesn't have any pricing. Could you accidentally be pulling that price somehow?\n\nI'm not sure it would be very taxing on your queries to set a default card when a specific version isn't specified. I mean I your system has to do that already and it just seem like it is grabbing whatever the first thing it finds and put it in. I keep track of specific versions of cards in my decks and I swear there have been times I have put a card in and it was the version I was using then a few months later I come back to the deck and it is different. I'm diligent, but I can be forgetful but I am pretty sure they were what they should have been. \n\nObviously I don't know what your backend looks like but adding an extra attribute to your card table for DefaultView and have that be an ID back to the same table to figure out which to display. Then someone comes in and doesn't specify a particular version then it is a NULL and you do some ISNULL() statement to figure out which to display. You don't even need to maintain the DefaultView too often. It could be a weekly or monthly or even an ad hoc update based on when new sets come out. It is just a suggestion, because having something structured is going to come off a lot neater and a lot more appealing to use. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n"}]}
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