EVE Technology Lab

The contract XML API now sometimes has citadels as the start or end of a courier contract. Is there a way to query the api and find out the name/location of a citadel? At the moment I have to display something like "unknown citadel" as the contract start/end point.

Cheers for the idea of getting it out of the market data.

I've set up a scraper that grabs this info, and then because **** it why not, I've made an API so other people can look up citadel names if they want to.

e.g. https://stop.hammerti.me.uk/api/citadel/1021114053333

More info at https://stop.hammerti.me.uk/api/

Question for people:

Do you see any potential problem with having an API that's scrapable (making it unscrapeable would be, umm, troublesome), to locate citadels?

The cat's pretty much out of the bag there, similar to the R64 moons. If you can see a non-public citadel on the overlay or on d-scan then you can bookmark it and share it with other people.

Outposts and Conquerable stations are very public, and in the long run any citadel is. If you make the citadel private, then it remains private only until people find out where it is.

I've launched a crowd-sourcing exercise this week to populate a list of citadels, which augments the earlier work I did to scrape citadels that have ranged buy orders out of CREST market data.

One hero today has bookmarked almost 500 citadels, ~250 of them were new. We're up to 1476 known citadels so far, and I estimate that there could be up to 4000 out there, based on the number of Astrahus that have been traded in Jita.

I don't disagree that there would be a period of secrecy, but I don't think it would be very long before the people who live near your space work out where your citadels are - they're not very hard to spot when they're anchored, and very obvious while they're anchoring.

FWIW You currently get free intel about any outpost that gets placed from CCP's APIs.

On the other hand POSes, don't appear in an API but *always* appear on the overview.

So right now, citadels are the most secret form of structure that CCP have ever produced!

So to play devil's advocate for the sake of an interesting discussion: given that citadels are designed to eventually replace outposts, why should players expect a greater level of secrecy than they have experienced with outposts?

Oh it's POCOs that always appear on your overview - you're right POS don't.

So to correct myself, citadels adopt the POS model with optional Outpost model if you set it public. I think citadels still are the most secret structure the game's seen so far though - as POS are always in a fixed location whereas a citadel could be anywhere in the system.

Anyway, my thoughts on the matter are that I think there is slightly interesting gameplay around hunting down citadels.

On the other hand, we currently get no information in third party applications about our market orders or our assets if they are located in a citadel. This hinders the development of third party applications and is rather frustrating. For example, I'm used to scanning each market hub for the cheapest input materials for my manufacturing. However any items for sale in a citadel are not accessible to any third party application which means its currently hard to use citadels to supply manufacturing operations.

Apart from the missing features I mentioned above (and others I mention at https://stop.hammerti.me.uk/api), one problem that third party applications have at the moment is with courier contracts to/from citadels: there is no way to know where the source/destination of a citadel contract or what the citadel is called as the API just provides a citadel ID.

So lets say that CCP don't make a scrapable citadel API, but they solve the courier contract source/dest problem in another way. How might they do this? They could provide the solar system and citadel name in the api data - similar to citadel ranged buy orders in the market orders API.

If we go down that route, then CCP end up augmenting every API that has a chance of involving citadels (e.g. assets, structures, character orders, market orders, wallet api) with some information about the citadel - at least its name and possibly its location.

The alternative, is that they don't augment these apis, and provide an API to look up this information about citadels as necessary.

You can imagine good technical arguments for either approach. And perhaps a gameplay argument for one over the other depending on your views on whether the existence of citadels should be secret(not secret) or public.

When we do put full formal support in CREST for citadels it will be (and will have to be) ACL based. If you can't see it in the structure browser you won't be able to get it from CREST. People could launch crowd sourcing efforts from that, which I'm ok with for the moment. If it proves troublesome we might clamp it down, but in principal if you don't want your citadel discovered you should be careful about who goes on the ACL.

However, that's actually a pretty big unit of work, because CREST knows nothing about ACL's at the moment. All citadel information currently in the API is either based on the starbase management corp role or is derived from other public knowledge (e.g. public buy orders). It's not been forgotten about, but Tech Co is currently working flat out on the mobile app backend. We'll have some pretty exciting news for third party devs on that front ready some time Soon™, but until that's done the work on integrating ACL's into CREST will need to be on hold.

So you're saying a super critical part of the game is being put on hold so you guys can get into the mobile app business.


Great.

I really hope that the assets, manufacturing job and blueprint APIs get updated to support Citadels by the time we get Industry Arrays, otherwise it will be a case of: these industry arrays look cool...but what are we supposed to do with them again?