Hey everyone and happy luminaire! We just launched the new Mysterious Melody this week, which might not seem like it but had a lot of power being packed under the hood. Just for a recap:

NPC Agents Melody is out there, right now, buying from user shops!

This is our first attempt at building a 🤖 robot that can navigate the site, and do things like buy from user shops. it's really cool, and as you can see above she has a few strategies for choosing the items she is going to buy. Right now the advent is turned off (she spent a lot on items that, imo, hadn't quite gained their value yet) but is something we could easily flip back on.

As you can see from above, we're doing way more tracking of details now, so that we can make better informed decisions about tweaks to make or what to do with this kind of bot in the future. watch this space!

Item Price Updates While Melody navigates and buys items, I noticed that a lot of our 'user price' data is wayyyyy out of date. There were a lot of items, on wishlists for example, that it seemed like she should be able to buy, but wouldn't even attempt. Once I dug in a little bit deeper, it was clear this was a problem with the way that we calculate our sense of price.

Now there is a script running in the background when the database has low load that is updating our item prices for items across the site, by using historical purchase data and data like how many are in shops, what prices, etc.

This not only gives us a way better understanding of how items are priced on the site, but it also helps us make sure that we bring back old items from years ago at the right time.

User Shops To get Melody to buy from user shops.... I had to build user shops. there is a bare bones version running right now! with all of the improvements on kumos like being able to easily filter items based on item type (and all of these price improvements) getting that up and running should be a much easier task than last time we did this overhaul. And, something like the autopricer has scaffolding for running in the background easily, not something I have to build from scratch!

Q&A TIME While I'm waiting for the next Mysterious Melody reset to come around, I've got time for some questions -- and I love that we've got this live chat format here 😉 So, any questions about the above, about mysterious melody, about the work on kumos, or feedback. I know that it feels rough, but today a number of improvements went out for the mobile experience that I hope makes it more fun to use.

🎤 just double checking this thing still works lol

Hello

hello!

wow I had to remember how to send out a top page ad like that..... that was the first one in two years 😅

👋 come on someone say hi!!

hello :3

Hi, Keith :) Thank you for everything you and the team do!

Hello hello! Are there any plans for a plot/major site event in the upcoming year?

I love the new mystery melody!! So fun.

Maybe I read it too quickly, but why exactly is the NPC buying from user shops? :P

has a thousand questions to ask, but can only choose one Um.....UMMMM.....give me a minute, I have no idea what to ask

First wow what a neat feature.

Second, Could there be plans in the future to merge / migrate the old CW system to the new one? There are items I'd like and the releasers would like to re-release, but the system doesn't work that way. /I've never created CWs in my life so idk ._.

oh! i stopped playing Subeta for a few years here and there and managed to miss out on tons of site events. i'd love another questathon, even if there's no capacity to write story-based site events at the moment.

Hi I'm really excited to see what you guys have planned for the site!

The new Mysterious Melody has users join groups instead of one-to-one, and Melody joins every group!

Instead of making items from thin air, which is what we would normally do, she buys items from user shops. That means that we're moving sP around and hopefully knocking some cobwebs off old shops.

She uses a few strategies to choose which items to buy, has a sP limit, and a limit on hiow much she can spend in a day!

This is a really cool feature! I guess I could ask about when is the tea shop 🍵 going to happen or is that on the backburner at the moment?

I ... don't know 😅 CWs are something I've had pretty little oversight over outside of like, taking a look and maybe pushing code fixes over the year. I wrote the first version, but that was veryyyyyyyyyyy different from what we've got now!

Hi hi!

For Mysterious Melody, I've been added to a group in my event log but when I go to the Mysterious Melody page, it asked me to join again and now I'm in a waiting room. Is there something else I'm supposed to be doing?