Assembly Hall

I think everyone who played Eve for more than a few weeks will agree that 3rd party tools are an invaluable enhancement of the game and can improve the game experience a lot. Today it has been 2 weeks since Retribution was released and the 3rd party devs still haven't got a proper Static Data Export without errors by CCP. Most of the tools (including the 3rd party devs ) rely on that data to do their job.

I know that at least some of the CSM are aware of this problem, but I think it can't hurt raising awareness a bit. The current process for releasing the SDE appears to be that whatever dev finds some time besides doing "real work" does a data export, publishes it at some random place (which could be Twitter, IRC, the Tech Lab forum or the fankit website) and the QA process seems to rely mostly on the 3rd party devs coming back at him and telling him what was wrong with the released SDE.

Just to make this very clear: I don't want hate for the poor dev who did the erroneous SDE releases after Retribution, who apparently isn't even responsible for doing this. I want hate (or any other emotion you can muster) on the Eve expansion release process which puts such a low priority on this.

Ideally the release of the SDE should be on some release checklist and because this data usually doesn't change a few days prior to an expansion and because it usually doesn't contain any big surprises which players couldn't have found on the test server already the SDE release should be a few days prior to an expansion (around the time when patch notes get published) to give 3rd party devs the possibility to prepare their applications in advance. Also this should happen at a well-defined place, and while I don't particularly care which place that is the Twitter account of some dev might not be the optimal solution. And dare I ask for some internal QA on the SDE? Probably not, but I'm doing it anyway .