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Remove killmail APIs

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voetius
Grundrisse
#61 - 2014-12-31 22:14:25 UTC

One thing I only found out recently is that there seems to be no way to hide now. I started a war deccing alt a few months ago with the intention of not posting any kills and not having the api logged with zkillboard thinking that I could use that to avoid giving out intell. I found out that zkill has all the kills on that character (no losses so far) so it must be pulling them from Crest or somewhere.

Only tangentially related to the OP but wanted to add that :)
Gabriel Elarik
Celestiel Rams
#62 - 2014-12-31 22:14:50 UTC
Thats not only a problem for pvp guys

I hear my old ceo in ts for losing Exumers **** if someone sees our killboard he sees that we are a mining corp
bla bla bla 1 hour later because of your loss we have to face more neuts Kick if you lose another exumer

i dont mind if the killer has a km but all others No thats wrong
Gully Alex Foyle
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#63 - 2014-12-31 22:26:11 UTC
Gabriel Elarik wrote:
Thats not only a problem for pvp guys

I hear my old ceo in ts for losing Exumers **** if someone sees our killboard he sees that we are a mining corp
bla bla bla 1 hour later because of your loss we have to face more neuts Kick if you lose another exumer

i dont mind if the killer has a km but all others No thats wrong
F*k your CEO and his blue standings.

Make space glamorous! Is EVE dying or not? Ask the EVE-O Death-o-meter!
Zed Rachalon
The Icarus Factor
#64 - 2014-12-31 22:40:36 UTC
While I don't agree with kicking a member for refusing to be risk averse like the rest of the corp, I don't think removing the killboard API is the answer.

What we have here is players min-maxing in the meta game. Min-maxing isn't inherently good or bad, it's just the natural result when a certain type of player is exposed to a system that tracks past actions. It's no different from mild compulsive behavior or completionism.

In order to "fix" this, you either need to forcibly change the players or forcibly change the system. Since the former is illegal, all you have left is the latter. The problem is, the killboard API provides some good to the community as well. Without being able to verify killmails, we wouldn't be able to poke fun at ALODs because we wouldn't know if they were forged or not. Without the ability to look up killmails, we might not be able to recount cool things we did. (If I provide EWAR support in an awesome fight, I don't recieve the killmail. It only goes to the final blow and the victim. If neither of them share it, I never get to see it.) The API also increases metagame visibility, which brings more subscribers to the game who might not have seen it otherwise. The min-maxers are only a small part of what the API provides.

It sucks that the end result of this behavior was kicking you, but if they were to discontinue the killmail api because of it, it would be attempting to kill a type of game play because you don't agree with it. It's akin to a miner asking CCP to remove the Catalyst because it's permitting others to play the game in a way they don't agree with.
Daichi Yamato
Jabbersnarks and Wonderglass
#65 - 2015-01-01 04:14:29 UTC
Liet Ormand wrote:
Daichi Yamato wrote:


Killboards are past information only. So they may give you an idea of what to expect, and when and where to expect it, but there are no guarantees. Not like local and watchlists.



That's actually not true.

I work for a University doing capacity planning for our data center, and one of the tools I use is a statistics processing environment called SAS. It's capable of handling large amounts of data easily, so I could for example import the kill history for every system in the game (with some effort to collect it) and process it.

I could focus on a particular player and for any system at any given time of day in game I could tell you what the chances were of that player showing up to kill you in your ship. This would be based on your cargo, activities, their past kills, past alliances, bounties, how long it's been since server downtime, the season of the real world year, whether or not a given football team is doing well in the world cup, etc.

Using this it would be possible to eg. avoid another player completely, or hunt them down. That's just one example of what's possible. How not fun would it be to have your current location and ship fitout tacked on to the notice to all players that you have a bounty of 500m ISK on your head? That's the effect.


That's the danger of databases.... the more information you have, the easier it is to predict things that shouldn't be known.


so you cant predict with 100% accuracy, 100% of the time with an infinite number of prediction attempts.

thanks for proving yourself wrong for me.

EVE FAQ "7.2 CAN I AVOID PVP COMPLETELY? No; there are no systems or locations in New Eden where PvP may be completely avoided"

Daichi Yamato's version of structure based decs
Sato Page
Auctor Illuminatas Infinitum
#66 - 2015-01-01 06:58:58 UTC  |  Edited by: Sato Page
+1 not only should player accessible api be removed entirely , local game cache should be placed in an encrypted image as well. Free Intel is cancer, enough said.

Dinsdale Pirannha for [u]CEO [/u]of [u]CCP[/u]
TheExtruder
TheExtruder Corporation
#67 - 2015-01-01 14:18:11 UTC
baltec1 wrote:
As anyone can see, I give no fucks about my KB record. The problem isn't the KB, the problem is people who think they matter enough to kick people who don't fly whatever the current FOTM is. Organisations that do this tend to fold when the meta changes.


agree with this.
Like you said, its not for everybody, you either have the stomache for it or you dont.
Getting rid of the entire "gang mentality" is not the solution, at least propose a viable alternative that doesnt ruin eve's artificial sandbox.
Steppa Musana
Doomheim
#68 - 2015-01-01 14:40:51 UTC
What would be the point in killing rookie ships or offline POS towers if it werent for public killboards? And would people even gank anymore?

Hmm I think I support this suggestion. Half the gankers would disappear lol
Mag's
Azn Empire
#69 - 2015-01-01 15:54:24 UTC  |  Edited by: Mag's
Steppa Musana wrote:
What would be the point in killing rookie ships or offline POS towers if it werent for public killboards? And would people even gank anymore?

Hmm I think I support this suggestion. Half the gankers would disappear lol
We used to kill rookie ships, because of the ridiculous things people carried in them.
Players will kill an off-line pos for various reasons. ISK, war, they want the moon etc etc.
Just because you cannot see or know why something is done, doesn't mean there isn't a point to it.

One thing though. I'd like for you to explain, how this idea would make 'half the gankers disappear'. Do you honestly believe killboards are the main reason people gank?

Destination SkillQueue:- It's like assuming the Lions will ignore you in the Savannah, if you're small, fat and look helpless.
Varyah
Caldari Provisions
Caldari State
#70 - 2015-01-01 17:42:21 UTC
Serendipity Lost wrote:
Caleb Seremshur wrote:
FT Diomedes wrote:
I will agree with you because I hate the massive amount of historical intelligence you can gain on someone just by checking the killboards. Just by looking at a person's killboards, you can often isolate what time zone they play in, who they fly with, what ships they like to fly, and whether they are any good or not.

Eve needs to have fewer tools to tell you what is going on everywhere - I'd also get rid of most of the statistics published on the in-game map and through DOTLAN. Make Eve big again.


And while you're at it modify how watchlisting works so that the watchlistee must accept a tickbox to allow you to receive notifications they're online. Futhermore remove watchlisting functionality completely from wormholes as principally if local doesn't work then there is surely no central system to track you for watchlisting to work either.


You'd then have to go the next step and have clones not work. You're just dead - roll a new newb and start over.

It's kind of like the aregument that pot should be legal.... because alcohol is. It's a stupid argument. I'm not saying pot should be legal or illegal - i'm saying the 'because alcohol is legal' aregument is stupid. It's not even close to logical.

So.... Realism in a space game.... Warping shouldn't work, because it's impossible. Clones... nope. Cloaking.... not realistic. Warping cloaked.... pheww - that's just plain crazy.

My point - it's space fantasy game where we all role play being space men in space. You need to be careful on what you choose to throw a logic flag on. I prefer 'Is it fun?' as the acid test, not 'Is this realistic?'

TL/DR If you can space warp your ship across the galaxy or be cloned to life on death, then the watch list is probably realistic too.


Sorry for OT, but I had to lough pretty hard: By your own alcohol-argument your own argument is invalid. Logic can be a *****!

Further, I don't understand why every now and then someone brings up the argument that that claiming realism in fantasy, sci-fi, etc. is impossible. Any logic in existence uses some set of axioms and basic assumptions which means if you want to argue logically about EVE and tracking of people in space you should adhere to the given assumptions; in our case this basic assumption would be that communication (chat, local) in EVE works as information exchange via quantum entanglement using local routers in every K-system, in J-space there are no routers, therefore you cannot rely on local. So it is perfectly reasonable to claim realism (in the sense of adherence to the basic assumptions, as nonsensical as they may seem) with regards to watchlist tracking.

NB: Information exchange via quantum entanglement is provable impossible, at least the currently accepted mathematical model that describes quantum physics implies that this is not possible. The points you mentioned on the other hand, warp drives, cloning and cloaking are far from provable impossible, you could at most argue that at our RL-level of technology these things are at the moment more or less unachievable.
SpaceSaft
Almost Dangerous
Wolves Amongst Strangers
#71 - 2015-01-01 20:14:16 UTC
For that purpose yes but in principle no.

I agree that a pilots losses should be a more private thing.

KIllboards provide lots of different services though, intel is only one of them.

  • They allow players or groups of players to see if something was successful or not, isk efficient, a victory at all etc.

  • Right now, really they're the only permanent records we have as players of stuff happening in eve.

    • I mean, there is still market data but you'll not look back at a good profitable month the same way as a successful kill. If you lose sov, you lose sov, maybe there is still a map that shows a little spot and then you can say to yourself or to people "I was there!" and they'll be thoroughly unimpressed because, well that's cool, but did you do anything there? Who were your friends? What did you do?

    I'd alter your proposed solution to:

    Make killmails personal information of the pilot, like wallet transactions and mail and whatnot. Alliances could still request it and use it but it wouldn't be an intel tool any longer. Alliances would have to pool killmails from their members to form a picture of their enemy if needed.
    Serendipity Lost
    Repo Industries
    #72 - 2015-01-02 11:58:25 UTC
    Varyah wrote:
    Serendipity Lost wrote:
    Caleb Seremshur wrote:
    FT Diomedes wrote:
    I will agree with you because I hate the massive amount of historical intelligence you can gain on someone just by checking the killboards. Just by looking at a person's killboards, you can often isolate what time zone they play in, who they fly with, what ships they like to fly, and whether they are any good or not.

    Eve needs to have fewer tools to tell you what is going on everywhere - I'd also get rid of most of the statistics published on the in-game map and through DOTLAN. Make Eve big again.


    And while you're at it modify how watchlisting works so that the watchlistee must accept a tickbox to allow you to receive notifications they're online. Futhermore remove watchlisting functionality completely from wormholes as principally if local doesn't work then there is surely no central system to track you for watchlisting to work either.


    You'd then have to go the next step and have clones not work. You're just dead - roll a new newb and start over.

    It's kind of like the aregument that pot should be legal.... because alcohol is. It's a stupid argument. I'm not saying pot should be legal or illegal - i'm saying the 'because alcohol is legal' aregument is stupid. It's not even close to logical.

    So.... Realism in a space game.... Warping shouldn't work, because it's impossible. Clones... nope. Cloaking.... not realistic. Warping cloaked.... pheww - that's just plain crazy.

    My point - it's space fantasy game where we all role play being space men in space. You need to be careful on what you choose to throw a logic flag on. I prefer 'Is it fun?' as the acid test, not 'Is this realistic?'

    TL/DR If you can space warp your ship across the galaxy or be cloned to life on death, then the watch list is probably realistic too.


    Sorry for OT, but I had to lough pretty hard: By your own alcohol-argument your own argument is invalid. Logic can be a *****!

    Further, I don't understand why every now and then someone brings up the argument that that claiming realism in fantasy, sci-fi, etc. is impossible. Any logic in existence uses some set of axioms and basic assumptions which means if you want to argue logically about EVE and tracking of people in space you should adhere to the given assumptions; in our case this basic assumption would be that communication (chat, local) in EVE works as information exchange via quantum entanglement using local routers in every K-system, in J-space there are no routers, therefore you cannot rely on local. So it is perfectly reasonable to claim realism (in the sense of adherence to the basic assumptions, as nonsensical as they may seem) with regards to watchlist tracking.

    NB: Information exchange via quantum entanglement is provable impossible, at least the currently accepted mathematical model that describes quantum physics implies that this is not possible. The points you mentioned on the other hand, warp drives, cloning and cloaking are far from provable impossible, you could at most argue that at our RL-level of technology these things are at the moment more or less unachievable.


    If there are no router thingers you speak of.... how does the clone tech dude even know I was poddes? Either we get a second instance of our clones in k-space everytime we jump into wh (as our life force or whatever is no longer detectable) OR when we get podded.... we just permanantly end in wh space, because.... no router thingers. You just want it both ways.

    Of course the alcohol/pot argument is rediculous... that was the point. You need to step back and see the joke inside the joke.

    Try this one: http://xkcd.com/1132/
    Varyah
    Caldari Provisions
    Caldari State
    #73 - 2015-01-02 13:09:00 UTC
    Serendipity Lost wrote:


    If there are no router thingers you speak of.... how does the clone tech dude even know I was poddes? Either we get a second instance of our clones in k-space everytime we jump into wh (as our life force or whatever is no longer detectable) OR when we get podded.... we just permanantly end in wh space, because.... no router thingers. You just want it both ways.

    Of course the alcohol/pot argument is rediculous... that was the point. You need to step back and see the joke inside the joke.

    Try this one: http://xkcd.com/1132/



    Quantum entanglement works regardless of distances (fact), so if the pod euthanizes you it can send the data directly to your cloning facility.

    The router thingies are just there for you to publicly announce your presence so everyone knows you are here, this is an infrastructure enforced in K-space. I suppose every ship has to have enough entangled quantum states for every router in K-space built in.

    At least that is how I understood the justifications from lore I read.
    Serendipity Lost
    Repo Industries
    #74 - 2015-01-02 13:26:49 UTC  |  Edited by: Serendipity Lost
    Varyah wrote:
    Serendipity Lost wrote:


    If there are no router thingers you speak of.... how does the clone tech dude even know I was poddes? Either we get a second instance of our clones in k-space everytime we jump into wh (as our life force or whatever is no longer detectable) OR when we get podded.... we just permanantly end in wh space, because.... no router thingers. You just want it both ways.

    Of course the alcohol/pot argument is rediculous... that was the point. You need to step back and see the joke inside the joke.

    Try this one: http://xkcd.com/1132/



    Quantum entanglement works regardless of distances (fact), so if the pod euthanizes you it can send the data directly to your cloning facility.

    The router thingies are just there for you to publicly announce your presence so everyone knows you are here, this is an infrastructure enforced in K-space. I suppose every ship has to have enough entangled quantum states for every router in K-space built in.

    At least that is how I understood the justifications from lore I read.



    Just how many punch lines do you see in the joke I linked?

    On topic: so in wh I should be able to anchor a super cap assembly array thinger, because concord isn't there to see that I don't have the approriate SOV crap to make it ok and there are not router doodles to announce to them that I'm building it?

    (I'm against supers in wh space and not advocating the building of them in wh space. Just pointing out the logic foul in the quantum entaglement (fact) stuff)
    Zan Shiro
    Doomheim
    #75 - 2015-01-02 14:05:09 UTC  |  Edited by: Zan Shiro
    Mag's wrote:
    Steppa Musana wrote:
    What would be the point in killing rookie ships or offline POS towers if it werent for public killboards? And would people even gank anymore?

    Hmm I think I support this suggestion. Half the gankers would disappear lol
    We used to kill rookie ships, because of the ridiculous things people carried in them.
    Players will kill an off-line pos for various reasons. ISK, war, they want the moon etc etc.
    Just because you cannot see or know why something is done, doesn't mean there isn't a point to it.

    One thing though. I'd like for you to explain, how this idea would make 'half the gankers disappear'. Do you honestly believe killboards are the main reason people gank?



    Oddly enough some idiots think this is the safe way to move high price goods. If you look over years of noobship kills....you see some wtf km's with what dropped.


    Also not all gankers claim their kills. I have been in some homes where we had standards. Corp didn't want crap kills on the kb site. Low level ganks fell under the title of crap. There is the 0.0 branch kicking ass and taking names on massive fleet fight kills and dropping caps and bs's galore. Then there is some some empire peeps going gank happy and dropping 50 t1 frigates the same day. Tends to look odd on the KB, and kind of bad imo.

    So if into that and you must do it on the corp char in the old days when it was purely player submission you could get a few ganks, not post them and be pretty certain the ganked won't post loss mails either to have any link to them. Really just ran the risk of the ganked sending a mail to CEO crying about it. Mine just blew these off, had the sit down with the ganker and say if you have the energy to kill stuff, keep your ass in 0.0 more and do it there.
    admiral root
    Red Galaxy
    #76 - 2015-01-02 17:49:03 UTC
    I'm not sure what's worse - the OP's suggestion or my killboard. Why can't I tell? Because you can only sink so far into the depths of terrible before it becomes pitch black and you can't see anything.

    No, your rights end in optimal+2*falloff
    Carmen Electra
    AlcoDOTTE
    Test Alliance Please Ignore
    #77 - 2015-01-02 19:40:17 UTC  |  Edited by: Carmen Electra
    Thanks for all the comments. I see good points being brought up on both sides.

    Zan Shiro wrote:
    Tends to look odd on the KB, and kind of bad imo.

    So if into that and you must do it on the corp char in the old days when it was purely player submission you could get a few ganks, not post them and be pretty certain the ganked won't post loss mails either to have any link to them. Really just ran the risk of the ganked sending a mail to CEO crying about it. Mine just blew these off, had the sit down with the ganker and say if you have the energy to kill stuff, keep your ass in 0.0 more and do it there.

    This is exactly the content-stifling behavior/culture my OP is attempting to address. After reading some of the replies I want to clarify that the story of the Machariel loss and corp purge was told merely to illustrate the current state of things, not complain about a perceived injustice committed against me.

    SpaceSaft wrote:
    I'd alter your proposed solution to:

    Make killmails personal information of the pilot, like wallet transactions and mail and whatnot. Alliances could still request it and use it but it wouldn't be an intel tool any longer. Alliances would have to pool killmails from their members to form a picture of their enemy if needed.

    It's true that killmail APIs provide a sort of picture of activities and events. In a way, the API is CCP's way of offloading development work to the community. The problem with these APIs is that they're really just sanctioned metagaming. Metagaming, by its very definition, undermines the game itself.

    Usually, there's really no point in getting too worked up over metagaming because it's just a fact of life. eve-central.com, evepraisal.com, lpstock.ru, EFT, and others are all examples of metagaming. These are 3rd party applications where someone has either found a way to aggregate data or reverse engineer CCP's business logic (EFT).

    The difference here is that, in providing an official killmail API, CCP has pretty much metagamed themselves (undermining their own product in the process). If my reasoning seems unclear, think of it this way:

    We already have an in-game combat log. Why not just make each character's combat log publicly viewable? (Even if only player-inflicted losses are shown.) If you think the answer to this question is "No, because _____", then you've just made an argument in favor of my OP even if you don't realize it. If you think the answer to this question is "Yeah, sounds good". Then we should remove the API so that there's one less 3rd party application/utility required to play EVE and just use existing in-game features.

    Either way, the existence of the killmail API is problematic.

    Bacon makes us stronger
    Sigras
    Conglomo
    #78 - 2015-01-02 20:02:19 UTC
    Lugh Crow-Slave wrote:

    OP made me think about something that happened to me in the last couple of days. Specifically, after reading a post on Reddit I discovered Tripwire. For those unfamiliar, this web site and others like it available via in-game browser permit mapping of wormhole connections and storage of Cosmic Signatures already scanned, so if they're seen again they need not be re-scanned. Signatures repeat on a per-system basis, so if you see a sig that represented a relic site last time it will be a relic site again. Collect a big enough list of system connections and sites and you can zip around wormhole space cherry picking the locations that make the most ISK, or you can safely patrol a series of systems with Highsec links for newbros to gank.

    As soon as I read what Tripwire and its competitor siggy were designed to do, New Eden wormhole space shrank from a vast collection of unknown and unmappable systems with great risk and reward to a slightly esoteric version of lowsec space with the same site farmers, gankers, ISK-crazy industrialists, etc. I actually don't want to use Tripwire myself, but not using it puts me at a huge disadvantage relative to other players. Not using it is why I've spent hours at a time scanning down systems to find only gas sites and more wormholes because the folks who have maps have cleaned them out.

    So I'd like to support OP's statements here as well as make a request for some better handling of wormhole space signatures and the links between wormhole systems. Change them so they're not as easy to map and track.

    Wormhole space should be wild and difficult, not a guided tour through a grocery store.

    I have been living in WHs since weak one and let me tell you even b4 all of these mapping sites we have been mapping wormholes with simple flow chart programs and Excel sheets API just made it easier for people testing the waters of J-space

    I may or may not agree with the OP, but this needs to stop...

    I have no problem with people mapping connections as they find them, but when a new site spawns there should be no way of knowing what that site is without someone having scanned it down and found out personally.
    ISD Ezwal
    ISD Community Communications Liaisons
    ISD Alliance
    #79 - 2015-04-05 14:07:56 UTC
    Thread reopened as some want to continue the discussion.

    ISD Ezwal Community Communication Liaisons (CCLs)
    Cartheron Crust
    The Tuskers
    The Tuskers Co.
    #80 - 2015-04-05 14:36:49 UTC
    Remove killmails (at least as they are) from game. Purge all you bads that play just for your precious killboard stats.