EVE Technology Lab

I am not offended on his behalf. I am offended on my own, thank you very much. Quite frankly, the collective "you" do not appear to know what you're talking about. In the last few pages, you have said that you don't have any devs who live in WH space and then do some sort of handwaving about how this will somehow affect primarily log-in traps.

I repeat since it appears you didn't grasp my point the first time: My entire corp, and I would hazard to guess no less than 95% of WH PvP corps uses this functionality every single day, day in and day out, for the last 5 years. In the over two years I have lived and hunted here (and I do it often enough to teach the class how to do it not only for my corp but for eve university as well) I can count on no hands the number of times I have set up a log on trap, or thought it was needed. Not to say it doesn't happen, but is way in the minority of things which drive WH PvP. Tracking the NPC API is one of the only ways to know if your constantly changing neighbors might be coming online soon, or if the chain you have should just be rolled, and the assertion that the information is somehow only available to the elite few is patently false. See dotlan or eveeye for proof.

Making this change is a major decision and it is insulting that your dev snuck the notification that it basically had already been decided 10 pages into a random thread instead of dev blog, discussion about the possibility, bright flashing lights, alert alert.

You know I was going to defend you and YOUR change in this very thread until I saw this post. EvE is a game that is half played in your ****** client and half played in tons of tools and utilities developed by the rest of the community. Tools without which your **** game would be unplayable. To put this paragraph as your TOP reason for this change is a slap in the face of your fans, fans who spend hours, days, weeks and months of their time doing your ******* job. Instead of thanking them for putting in the time, what do you do? You say that their tools give an unfair advantage? Maybe remove the Character Sheet endpoint since people who don't use skill planning tools are at a clear disadvantage.

Basically this.

As much as CCP want to bullshit the wspace community, Foxfour's not so subtle mentioning of logoff traps all but screams that this is designed to be a nerf to BU and Qex.

Apparently it is the price you pay for success.

I support this change.

Occasionally I would like to play eve instead of using all of the 3rd party tools you need to be competitive.

What do logoff traps have to do with data availability consistency? Are you confusing me with someone else?

I repeat: This is not data you have access to except through the API. Hence it should not be in the API. This goes for all data returned from it. The API is allowed to make your life easier, but it's not allowed to expose information you have no access to elsewhere.

If the lack of this information is causing you excessive grief that you need addressed then you're asking for a design change in EVE Online, the spaceship game. I'll freely admit that I, as a framework programmer, am in no situation to judge design suggestions on a professional basis. That's why I'm trying to refrain from passing judgement on any ideas proposed here. But whilst the data is not available for you in the client it cannot be available in the API.

That being sad I can fully sympathize if you feel like WH space lacks the tools to be all it can be. If you are relying on a third party tool to enjoy the game because the client is lacking: Well it's a situation you shouldn't accept quietly. But the API is not a backdoor to effect game design changes, and a programmer (me and FoxFour when he has his API hat on) is not the right person to make game design changes.

So I hope this explains at least that we're not doing this just to be difficult and make you people feel offended. But if that's still your opinion I'm afraid we'll simply have to agree to disagree on this.

Its quite entertaining hearing all of these "big" wormhole alliances complaining about this change. I for one welcome it as it gives a new challenge to overcome (which is what wormholes are famous for). You actually have to put in some effort to gather information now rather than it being handed to you via API.

As someone who is more frequently in the position of a defender than an attacker in W-space and is purportedly one of the people this change buffs:

I oppose this change and think that it will negatively impact the amount of pvp in W-space, AND will negatively impact income in W-space.

My fleets have been jumped several times now by people having open chains into holes that we are running sites in, leading to fun and interesting content. In virtually every single instance we have been jumped, we were not jumped by someone opening a hole into us. Instead, someone already had the hole we were bearing in scanned down and in their chain, saw the spike in NPC kills via API, and sent someone to check it out. In almost no instances have we been jumped because of someone who came through and scouted us by hand via an existing chain.

We will be pretty much completely safe with this change, and that's something that I very much oppose. W-space is supposed to be dangerous. Removing the danger just makes it an ISK faucet akin to highsec incursions, and will ultimately depress the value of loot from W-space as people flock to it because it's fairly risk-free.

No, it's clearly something that people should talk about ad-nauseum for the next six to seven years until CCP deigns to actually do something about it.

Maybe all those Interbus Customs Offices could transmit the kill data back home along with all the tax money they're collecting.

Since Interbus is the king of wormhole exploration.

This is a false equivalency. Very few people (if any) were arguing for the removal of this API data. Primarily, this was because very few people even knew it existed. The length of time during which you were able to abuse this data to safeguard your wormholes by collapsing holes that lead to "problem" links is in no way indicative of future performance, nor is it some sort of capital that you have collected to spend in opposition to change.

On the other hand, the fact that few people were arguing for the removal of the API data is not somehow a fulcrum that one can use to deny the change, either. It was just a mistake; one that is being ameliorated now. Count yourself lucky that you were able to short-circuit the design intentions of the game for as long as you have.