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Topic: Exposing Game Data

What are your guys' thoughts on exposing more information about game data?

I'm working on an upgraded news system right now that will give us the ability to attach a history to everything.  Some possibilities:

  • A specific planet will have a timeline of its exploration, takeovers, being blown up, etc.

  • A specific system will contain all of the planet history above for its planets, along with its own system history (becoming a core, DS being blown up)

  • A player will have a timeline that includes any of the planet history while they were the ruler of the planet.

  • A family history will contain all of its player's histories, along with its own family history (war declarations, registrations, deletes)

  • A galaxy history will contain all of the above.

  • A universal history (complete game history) will contain all events from all planets, systems, players, and families in every galaxy.

To be clear, this data is going to be stored no matter what, and is already happening behind the scenes.

The question here though is to what extent should this data be exposed to the playerbase?  Some data will always be private (unit orders, fam aid, etc) but some of this information (planet takeovers) could in theory be curated if players aggressively checked systems every tick.

Data like that seems like it should be automatically made available to all players.

One significant side effect of this new system is that it also enables new types of notifications.  For example, you could bookmark a system and be notified any time a planet changes hands within that system.  That would certainly make sneaking around much more difficult.

My own opinion is that IC has long rewarded extremely active players who go above and beyond to obsessively check systems to see what's going on in the galaxy.  Although that does require dedication, I wouldn't say that it necessarily equates to skill.  It also punishes casual players who simply can't compete due to real life obligations.

In IC's earliest rounds, people had to check every system by hand to find out where other families' home systems were.  The game has since moved past that tedium and made a lot of system information very easy to find.  I suspect that IC can benefit from taking a similar approach to game activity in general.

Thoughts?

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Re: Exposing Game Data

Build the REST API and the requests will come.

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Re: Exposing Game Data

I think that activity should be rewarded. Providing system and planet history gives you information about:
- undefended (recently explored)
- unportalled
- when to hit to prevent coring

This is very steategic. If we are going to open this data up it should be via ops.


Succes o great ruler! Your magicians have summoned the spirits of the past. The comming  hour you can see how history evolved the last 2 years.

~Attacking is a Skill~
~Defending is an Art~

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Re: Exposing Game Data

I did consider making it op related, and I may still do that to some degree for "sensitive" data.

For otherwise public info however, the current plan is to open it up by default.  The empire page just got updated as a first pass at this feature.

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Re: Exposing Game Data

I'd like to see previous attack reports.

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