Value Loops are a new kind of trade system, taking some of the best features of Math Trades and the Trade Finder.

Math trades are great, and one of their features and drawbacks is you have to actively participate in the list and adhere to its timetable.

The trade finder is great, but it only finds person-to-person trades, and the results are often overwhelmed by trades of mismatched value.

Enter a new kind of trade system, the "Value Loop". This provides a means for people to automatically mark how they value various games for the purposes of trading and have an external program automatically identify person-to-person trades and small loops.

How it works:

In the "condition" field of a game you have marked as "trade" or "want", you add a special indicator indicating how much you value that game. For games you want, you put "wantvalue:XXX" where XXX is the how much you want that game. For games you're trading, you put "offervalue:YYY" where YYY is equal to the lowest wantvalue game you'd accept in trade. The values of XXX and YYY can be anything, but I'd suggest either using a scale of 1 to 100 or using your currency of choice. As long as you are consistent, it doesn't matter what absolute numbers you use.

For example:

Kingdoms (wantvalue:10)
GIPF (wantvalue:15)
We the People (wantvalue:60)

Mystery on the Nile (offervalue:15)
Trump: The Game (offervalue: 10)
Funkenschlag (offervalue:50)
Poisson d'Avril (offervalue:100)

This means
- I am willing to trade "Trump: The Game" in exchange for any of the 3 games I want (10 is lower than or equal to all the want values).
- I am willing to trade Mystery on the Nile for GIPF or We the People
- I am willing to trade Funkenschlag only for We The People
- I am currently unwilling to trade Poisson d'Avril (no wantvalue greater than or equal to 100)

Once you've marked your games, you go to the Value Loop tool and enter your username:

http://boardgamestuff.com/cgi/valueloop

(or, if you want to cut and paste, to skip the annoying frame wrapper, http://mkgray.com:8000/cgi/valueloop)

Currently, when you submit the request, it retrieves your tradelist and any other users tradelists who want what you're offering and so on. Tradelists are cached for 10 minutes (which will go up, eventually) but the tradelist of the username entered is always retrieved anew.

Loops of up to 5 people are found. The finder can take a while to get the results.

Previous discussion of this trade scheme is at http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/135123

Yes, this is worth pointing out. Until many people have tagged games, it won't find any loops.

Features that will be included in the future, but don't hold your breath:

- "Near" loops. That is, loops that could be formed if people would just raise their wantvalue and lower their offervalue a bit.
- Multi-game loops. That is, I trade GameX and GameY for GameZ.
- Best guess loops. For people who have not tagged games, but based on how other people have tagged them, loops that might be formed.

Great idea. Just to be clear, entering these tags is to help find *potential* trades, right? If a potential trade is found, you are not obligated to complete the trade. I can imagine people setting them, then getting a copy another way or forgetting to reset the price as a game goes out of print.

Yeah, it's like the trade finder, it finds possibilities. No commitment is implied by tagging your games. Of course, best effort should be made to keep things up to date and consistent with ones actual willingness to trade, but that's just good manners.

Can we have more text in the condition field?

Example:

"offeravalue:50 I have an extra copy of the largest Sac Noir version of Bausack for trade in excellent condition, with more than complete 101 pieces."

Yes, you can have arbitrary additional text in the condition field, and that text (including the tag) will be displayed in any trade loops found, since that may be relevant.

For example, I have RoboRally with a wantvalue:25, specifying the new Avalon Hill edition.

For that matter, it doesn't matter how oddly buried the "magic string" is:

"This game is awesome thisismywantvalue:20.5/19.3/100.893234,300=YES"

will be extracted as a wantvalue of 20.

Can confirm that other text can be there as I have labelled all my want/offer values to help folks understand these "condition" comments should they run trade finder.

Matthew - can you whip up an XML API that pulls out our wants/trades sorted by value so that we can cross-check our entries? This might be useful tool to help folks confirm their values. Right now the lists I have are alphabetical, so takes a bit of back and forth to ensure consistent values.

Wow. It's good to see the massive untapped computational power available here put to proper (automated) use.

I hope Aldie is paying you what you are worth, Matthew.

I had a concept brewing within my head during several of the last Math trades about some automated scripts that could query the individuals want lists and use BGG's user rating as a basis for setting up trades... but this is better. And even more so, since it's done.

Truly, 'tis a wondrous age.

Well, I'm in sorta... I need to tweak values, but for now I've got info there.

Has anyone found a closed loop yet?

I'm very interested in this idea, and can't wait to see what happens when more people add want and offer values.

This is very cool. I only have a limited number of games up for trade, and no one wants them (expected). But hopefully, as more people become aware of this, it will really grow. Great idea.