EVE New Citizens Q&A

This would be nice in solo/small-gang PVP, but it would be terrible to compute and display in a 255 vs 255 fleet fight. Each individual's contribution will be small per-ship. People staying on the field longer (ie. the last people to die) will look better than those first to die, despite being chosen randomly by the opposing FC.

If you are looking for information on your own performance, there is a 'Combat Log' which records how much damage you did in a fight. The logs are also, I believe, saved in a folder somewhere on your computer so you can look at them there as well.

As was said though, when larger and larger fleets start fighting, the data recording the amount of damage done to other ships would increase near exponentially making such a feature unwieldy for a killmail and computationally unfeasible.

It's computed, yes, but I really don't know. Here's what I'm thinking:

What the API would need to provide as a bare minimum is the following:

- the character ID of the attacker which should be 4 bytes
- the damage done, which probably would have to be 8 bytes or so, because titan doomsdays.
- the time stamp. A unix time stamp is 4 bytes

Now assume this:

A dude attacks another dude with his warrior drones. He has 5 of them, and they attack once every 4 seconds. That means 16 bytes every 4 seconds. Now let's assume 5000 guys duke it out for 20 minutes real time (3 hours 20 minutes in 10% tidi).

20 minutes are 1200 seconds, or 300 attacks by each warrior drone. 5000 dudes x 300 cycles x 5 drones x 16 bytes = 120 megabytes.

and those 120 megabytes would only tell who did how much damage. It would not reflect ships used for example, or who was attacked.

Now admittedly, not everyone in such an engagement has warrior drones. Some don't have any weapons, some have only drones, some have only guns/launchers and some have both. Some have faster cycle times, some slower, but in any case, this would be one hell of an API request.

I'm not a programmer, so I may be mistaken here, but the API comes in XML, which is basically just a text document. 300 damage would not be 4 bytes there, but 3. 10000 damage would be 5 bytes (one byte per character). But it would come with brackets and descriptors and other stuff. So one damage notification might look something like this:

(characterID="#############" damageDone="###" time="########")
(can't use > or < because the forum thinks it's html)

that's 62 bytes. For the afforementioned battle the xml would be something like 5000 dudes x 300 cycles x 5 drones x 62 bytes = 465 megabytes.

PS: I really don't know what I'm talking about, so please take this with a grain (or bucket) of salt. But it does look like a lot of data to me in any case.

It's being exported already. On a per-client basis, by the client, that has the information anyway into a local log file. A friend of mine once wrote a parser for those log files that allowed you to figure out how much damage you dealt and got dealt, and how much effective DPS that boils down to. I do not know if that thing still works nowadays, but I will inquire about it. So, technically, analyzing your own combat stats is already possible, just not in the form of a centralized public API.

Centralizing this and putting it out through the API for a "blow by blow battle report" would probably result in a couple of quite large API calls. Considering killboards and the API already start getting a bit slow when a big nullsec battle happens, adding multiple times the amount of data to the API would probably not be helpful.

I don't think the computation of those stats would matter at all. The info is all there, the clients log it, the servers log it. But those serverside logs must be huge. So it's not about compiling the data, it's about making it available. My concern is not processing power, but bandwidth.

I'd say no. You can already check your own combat logs, and really, the blow by blow performance of other pilots is not really your concern.

Oh, I was more referring to Trevor Dalechs suggestion of providing what he called "blow by blow" battle reports.

Just listing the total damage done by everyone even though the target didn't die would probably not be as bad, but still a lot more data to transfer than the battle reports we have, considering it literally never happens that all ships on both sides die.

I'd still say no. This information is already available in the form of local combat logs. So, i'd say leave it to 3rd party developers to add combat log parsing to their killboards, so you can post your log if you want to.

A google search brought this up: http://evelog.mikk36.eu/

You can just drag and drop a game log there, and it will show how much damage you dealt to and received from what, and how that translates to DPS.

Now, if people want to see this data in any 3rd party app, I'd suggest talking to the devs of the app about it.