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05/24/21, 06:54 PM   #1
QuantumPie
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Proving ownership of an account on a 3rd party website

I'm in the process of fleshing out a site that allows players to see extended history of sales that occurred in-game using uploaded MM and ATT data. The inspiration came from a research project where I needed to create a (private) interactive dashboard to let attendants interact with the data themselves. Among the many visualizations I had, some relied on sales / statistics pertaining to specific players, which I created a unique identifier for to hide their names.

Among the many ideas I have for this, a features I've been considering is letting players consent to having their names shown, as opposed to being anonymous. If that were possible, it open the doors for functionality such as a leader board.

As of now, however, though there is no secure method I can think of to accomplish this which is automated. There is no way to sign into a site with your ESO account (which ofc makes sense when compared to sites like Steam or Github), and I couldn't find anything in the API that would give some sort of unique account ID to prove ownership. Before I make a post in the Wish List category, does anyone have any ingenious ideas of how to accomplish this?

The only instance I've seen this accomplished is with ESOLogs, where there is an in-game setting that allows players to have their @name show up in logs that other people make.
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05/25/21, 05:53 AM   #2
Baertram
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There is no way and files could be even manipulated via text editors before upload to make them show wrong @displayNames

I would simply not add such leader lists/rankings etc and hide the account and char names as you are not able to assure the data uploaded is valid!
Even the data of MM and ATT could be manipulated via the addons themselves. If you want to build rankings you should use plain LibHistoire data and calculate your stuff/rankings needed yourself.
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05/25/21, 06:21 AM   #3
Shinni
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I think the only way to verify accounts is to have them send something to you ingame. Eg mail or a guild application. These things can be done via the addon API, but you will have to login on both servers regularly to confirm and empty your inbox.
IMO this additional delay in confirmation and the extra overhead for you make this infeasible.
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05/25/21, 06:56 AM   #4
Sharlikran
 
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Remove MM from your project. Not because I'm upset, or whatever. I'm not even saying that like I have some control over it. I will explain in a moment.

I do personally feel this isn't feasible and I am against this 100%. I don't even have any clue whether or not I'm correct. My take on this is it would show too many people which people are in which guilds and how much guilds make. The blind bidding could be effected because people will have an idea of what other guilds make. Now with that said I don't care if that does or doesn't happen or whether that will or won't happen. To me it isn't something to even discuss. This just should not be allowed by zos at all.

Never the less MM data will be 100000000% useless to you. I changed the format. MM doesn't save data anymore, and is only used to import old data. All the item link, account names, and guild names are integers. You would never be able to line up the data in a million years. The next iteration of what MM does, if I can get it to work, won't have any external data except for what it need that doesn't come from Libhistoire. I will use Libhistoire directly from memory.

Last edited by Sharlikran : 05/25/21 at 06:59 AM.
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05/25/21, 07:04 AM   #5
Marazota
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also to OP, if you will not use MM, you can revive and use the first guild trading history addon that was the parent of all others including MM

i am saying about Shopkeeper

at least we will have some lightweight alternatives in this case

Last edited by Marazota : 05/25/21 at 07:16 AM.
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05/25/21, 07:26 AM   #6
QuantumPie
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Originally Posted by Sharlikran View Post
Remove MM from your project. Not because I'm upset, or whatever. I'm not even saying that like I have some control over it. I will explain in a moment.

I do personally feel this isn't feasible and I am against this 100%. I don't even have any clue whether or not I'm correct. My take on this is it would show too many people which people are in which guilds and how much guilds make. The blind bidding could be effected because people will have an idea of what other guilds make. Now with that said I don't care if that does or doesn't happen or whether that will or won't happen. To me it isn't something to even discuss. This just should not be allowed by zos at all.

Never the less MM data will be 100000000% useless to you. I changed the format. MM doesn't save data anymore, and is only used to import old data. All the item link, account names, and guild names are integers. You would never be able to line up the data in a million years. The next iteration of what MM does, if I can get it to work, won't have any external data except for what it need that doesn't come from Libhistoire. I will use Libhistoire directly from memory.
Thanks for the heads up on the format change, I'll have to look into other alternatives. As for the privacy concerns, after looking at peoples reception to ESOLogs being released, I have a feeling a lot of individuals wouldn't be too thrilled even if the data was hidden behind an anonymous tag. Your concerns just makes that more clear. At this point I don't think I'll even store the information at all. My focus is probably going to shift to acting more like TTC but tracking sales as opposed to listings, and storing them for a much longer period of time.
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05/25/21, 08:04 AM   #7
Sharlikran
 
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If you went that route that would be different. I don't have anything against TTC personally, but it's rather common that I see in chat that everybody thinks it's useless because certain items are ridiculous as far as the price range. Say 3,000 to 120,000 ????

There are just too many people out there that try to skew prices and make people think that certain things are a good deal or worth more then thay are. Things like a green recipe that isn't worth more than a 100 gold but they're trying to sell it for 5000.

There are just too many people out there that just waste too much time trying to sell stuff that isn't really worth selling. Guilds that make billions and billions of gold per week, those people don't have spread sheets, exe files of exported MM data, and they don't care about anything more then 30 days old. Gold mats, people usually use the MM modifier and look at 10 to 15 days.

As as far as trying to keep unwanted data out of a data set that's going to be nearly impossible because people will just do stupid things anyway. Like buying and selling on multiple accounts so that the sale goes through. So I don't care if you use predictive min-max kind of modeling using one or two levels of the standard deviation nor do I care if you want to try to check against the quartile range you're not going to prevent price skewing at all.

So having a TTC like project is great, be creative nothing against that IMO, but just having 20 to 1000 data points on certain items is enough to see a trend over 90 days. Trying to retain one year of data and using the MM max setting of up to 10,000 sales before the data is trimmed just takes longer to process the information to draw the dots for the scatter plot graph. It doesn't give you a more meanigfull average. If I outpot the mode you would see there are pleanty of sales clustered all in the same value. With that, an average will be the same anyway. You are just dividing by a greater number of X.

100 + 100 + 100 + 100 + 100 + 100 + 100 + 100 + 100 is still an average of 100. I don't care how many times you add 100 together to get the average. That's why I think it's silly that people want so many data points. The outliers are the only values changing the average and they usually aren't even valid sales. I can add people to the (Renamed from previous versions) the "Account and Guild Name Filter" (to be more politically correct) and once a seller that is clearly skewing the price the Deal calculator shows the item at a Green or Blue level instead of Purple or Yellow. Because the outliers were removed.

Too much data still doesn't help you get the right price and it still doesn't account for the great amount of competition in selling items anyway.

Bonanza should change that slightly but I just don't know what effect it will have.

Last edited by Sharlikran : 05/25/21 at 11:09 AM.
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05/25/21, 11:18 AM   #8
QuantumPie
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Originally Posted by Sharlikran View Post
If you went that route that would be different. I don't have anything against TTC personally, but it's rather common that I see in chat that everybody thinks it's useless because certain items are ridiculous as far as the price range. Say 3,000 to 120,000 ????

There are just too many people out there that try to skew prices and make people think that certain things are a good deal or worth more then thay are. Things like a green recipe that isn't worth more than a 100 gold but they're trying to sell it for 5000.

There are just too many people out there that just waste too much time trying to sell stuff that isn't really worth selling. Guilds that make billions and billions of gold per week, those people don't have spread sheets, exe files of exported MM data, and they don't care about anything more then 30 days old. Gold mats, people usually use the MM modifier and look at 10 to 15 days.

As as far as trying to keep unwanted data out of a data set that's going to be nearly impossible because people will just do stupid things anyway. Like buying and selling on multiple accounts so that the sale goes through. So I don't care if you use predictive min-max kind of modeling using one or two levels of the standard deviation nor do I care if you want to try to check against the quartile range you're not going to prevent price skewing at all.

So having a TTC like project is great, be creative nothing against that IMO, but just having 20 to 1000 data points on certain items is enough to see a trend over 90 days. Trying to retain one year of data and using the MM max setting of up to 10,000 sales before the data is trimmed just takes longer to process the information to draw the dots for the scatter plot graph. It doesn't give you a more meanigfull average. If I outpot the mode you would see there are pleanty of sales clustered all in the same value. With that, an average will be the same anyway. You are just dividing by a greater number of X.

100 + 100 + 100 + 100 + 100 + 100 + 100 + 100 + 100 is still an average of 100. I don't care how many times you add 100 together to get the average. That's why I think it's silly that people want so many data points. The outliers are the only values changing the average and they usually aren't even valid sales. I can add people to the (Renamed from previous versions) the "Account and Guild Name Filter" (to be more politically correct) and once a seller that is clearly skewing the price the Deal calculator shows the item at a Green or Blue level instead of Purple or Yellow. Because the outliers were removed.

Too much data still doesn't help you get the right price and it still doesn't account for the great amount of competition in selling items anyway.

Bonanza should change that slightly but I just don't know what effect it will have as of yet.
Absolutely agree with all of that. In reality I'm seeing this more as a way to get insight into the economy as opposed to (another) price checking tool. Being able to see inflation, how much of the market share an individual item takes up, how trends in what people are buying and selling change over time. A lot of it can probably be guessed by any savvy player, but if nothing else it would just be a cool tool to have.

At the end of the day though this all comes down to me needing something productive to do over the summer, and this was the best idea I came up with .
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05/25/21, 03:22 PM   #9
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You may not need to make it impossible to spoof an account. Just make it difficult. If you have them go to a URL then use the hash of the display name (if you can figure out the ZOS hashString). Maybe some other stuff as well. Make your code more complex, so that someone trying to spoof needs to understand Lua very well. It won't be perfect, but you'll still manage to stop the vast majority of players who try.

If you want more foolproof, then I think guild applications would be the way to go. Create a dummy guild, have users apply to it for verification and request verification on the website. Then the website generates a Lua file for you with a list of the names, and a personal add-on can flag any that didn't apply.


Or maybe crowdsource it - want to get verified? You need to get verified by another user (or two)

Last edited by Dolgubon : 05/25/21 at 03:30 PM.
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05/25/21, 08:09 PM   #10
Sharlikran
 
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Originally Posted by QuantumPie View Post
A lot of it can probably be guessed by any savvy player, but if nothing else it would just be a cool tool to have.
The "savvy " player can see that with MM in the scatter plot already. After MM 3.6.x and Bonanza is released there will be other information available. I'd maybe spend your summer time using that information once the new version is released, to minimize your time spent managing that kind of project, and maximizing your time playing and interacting with guild members. Just leave the calculations to MM.

Last edited by Sharlikran : 05/26/21 at 12:02 AM.
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