Please provide read-only game data APIs.

[yamamushi]

Having a market API won't make logging into the game pointless because you will still have to log in to go retrieve your items from wherever they are. It's not like it's going to automate putting them into your inventory automatically. You'll still have to interact, at the very least, with someone in game to go get those things for you. 

 

In Eve the reason there are so many market bots isn't because they're providing an API interface, it's because they're using a 3rd party utility to collect that data from the client logs (which Eve has an option for exporting a spreadsheet), and then using bots to interact with the UI behind the scenes to automate their trading activities. Something that isn't allowed in Eve, it's just a byproduct of the way their client is written. 

 

From an API perspective, they could reduce the ability for bots to exploit the market features by requiring manual captchas or some type of human authentication before allowing a market order to be submitted. I mean, every time we do something on the community site we have to submit a manual captcha test, so why would it be that much more intrusive to have to do it from your phone before submitting a market order?

 

That doesn't even cover the topic of rate-limiting API requests (Eve's API only allows a full retrieval once per hour), and metrics gathering solutions to determine if someone is a human or a bot. 

 

 

In fact, by not giving the ability to access the market information either in an exportable format or via an API, it means we're going to be stuck aggregating that data by hand into excel spreadsheets, which doesn't sound particularly -fun- to me.

 

It also means we'll never get cool things like live market tickers on websites or twitch streams, or notifications on our phones that one of our items sold. 

[Anonymous]

It seems important to clarify a few things

 

- Why Novaquark implemented LUA script in Dual Universe:

 

The main goal is not to give a tremendous advantage to developers.

First, because LUA implementation has been decided for enabling more creativity freedom regarding the design of constructs like spaceship, not to automatize everything with bots. In short, we want for those having development skills to be able to use their talent  and be recognized for their contribution in the community, not to become the masterminds in control of everything.

Second, because there will be probably limits to what you can do with LUA scripts, for game balance.

 

- About Wallstreet and NASDAQ examples:

 

The fact that it exists in real life doesn't mean it's a perfect system and should be copied exactly the same way in our game. The real world has flaws, that's a fact. We probably won't create a perfect system, but we can at least learn from the mistakes made in the real world. We know that almost all transactions in real time have been automatized with advanced bots reacting to the microsecond at Wallstreet. Is this really a good thing? everyone can have a different opinion on this. Is it a fun system? it's safe to assume it's not, because nearly no human action is required anymore. If it's not a fun system, then it might become questionable to implement this in a game, as the primary goal of a game is to have fun, not necessarily to copy exactly what exist in the real world. Yes, we aim to offer a realistic game world to players... to the limit where it starts to hurt the game experience.

 

Best regards,

Nyzaltar

 

To add to this: Speaking as someone involved in the creation of such financial systems - what one sees today in the stock market is an evolution driven system based on needs - namely volume and the 24 hour trading cycle.

 

DU, for a long time, won't have the first, and well, unless we are talking planets to scale and time zones and rotation, we will never need to over come the second. So we will never need anything so complex as the real world.

 

As for my 2 cents on this topic - FWIW I agree with NQ on development priorities - this isn't a huge one.

 

Of course,  I would love to see these sorts of things IN-GAME so we can build constructs that display information to people, because, emergent game play etc. I think in that spirit it should be firmly limited to providing the means (read-only basically) for players to record local observations about the game world, and then it is up to us as developer-players to build our own in-game solutions which provide services to players.

 

NQ should not have to do our work for us. Think of them as Platform-as-a-Service. You've got to do the SaaS side yourself.

 

(Upon reflection - really what we should be asking for is permission to create API's in game, and for NQ to provide a very simple GET "web-service" that lets us grab only the limited basic game data which is relevant - namely some location information (where am I in the game world), Org names/ids, Character id number (not names - that's our job), Object ID. Really, anything else is something we, the players, could observe and track ourselves, including making connections and relationships between those things.)

 

While we are at it - ideally, we'd make the market mechanisms for the game, not NQ - they should provide the simple mechanism of being able to exchange things between two people. It should be up to us to build trading systems to handle stuff once the Alioth colony grows beyond what basic barter and coin exchange can provide. That's half the fun of an emergent sandbox game - like real life, working out innovative solutions to problems using the tools at your disposal).

[Lord_Void]

It seems important to clarify a few things

 

- Why Novaquark implemented LUA script in Dual Universe:

 

The main goal is not to give a tremendous advantage to developers.

First, because LUA implementation has been decided for enabling more creativity freedom regarding the design of constructs like spaceship, not to automatize everything with bots. In short, we want for those having development skills to be able to use their talent  and be recognized for their contribution in the community, not to become the masterminds in control of everything.

Second, because there will be probably limits to what you can do with LUA scripts, for game balance.

 

- About Wallstreet and NASDAQ examples:

 

The fact that it exists in real life doesn't mean it's a perfect system and should be copied exactly the same way in our game. The real world has flaws, that's a fact. We probably won't create a perfect system, but we can at least learn from the mistakes made in the real world. We know that almost all transactions in real time have been automatized with advanced bots reacting to the microsecond at Wallstreet. Is this really a good thing? everyone can have a different opinion on this. Is it a fun system? it's safe to assume it's not, because nearly no human action is required anymore. If it's not a fun system, then it might become questionable to implement this in a game, as the primary goal of a game is to have fun, not necessarily to copy exactly what exist in the real world. Yes, we aim to offer a realistic game world to players... to the limit where it starts to hurt the game experience.

 

Best regards,

Nyzaltar

 

This is exactly what I was talking about earlier. If there is a unified market API system, people WILL abuse it to make bots, and then even the people who don't want bots will have to make bots just to keep up. I stand by my suggestion that NQ (eventually, as it is not a developmental priority) provide a way for market owners to export their market data in a controlled way, while also providing adequate protection to prevent bot use with this data. Perhaps the data would be output with a 15 minute delay, thus limiting the ability of bots to compete.

[himeix]

It seems important to clarify a few things

 

- Why Novaquark implemented LUA script in Dual Universe:

 

The main goal is not to give a tremendous advantage to developers.

First, because LUA implementation has been decided for enabling more creativity freedom regarding the design of constructs like spaceship, not to automatize everything with bots. In short, we want for those having development skills to be able to use their talent  and be recognized for their contribution in the community, not to become the masterminds in control of everything.

Second, because there will be probably limits to what you can do with LUA scripts, for game balance.

 

- About Wallstreet and NASDAQ examples:

 

The fact that it exists in real life doesn't mean it's a perfect system and should be copied exactly the same way in our game. The real world has flaws, that's a fact. We probably won't create a perfect system, but we can at least learn from the mistakes made in the real world. We know that almost all transactions in real time have been automatized with advanced bots reacting to the microsecond at Wallstreet. Is this really a good thing? everyone can have a different opinion on this. Is it a fun system? it's safe to assume it's not, because nearly no human action is required anymore. If it's not a fun system, then it might become questionable to implement this in a game, as the primary goal of a game is to have fun, not necessarily to copy exactly what exist in the real world. Yes, we aim to offer a realistic game world to players... to the limit where it starts to hurt the game experience.

 

Best regards,

Nyzaltar

NQ should focus on the game-play and set up rules. As what yamamushi, anonymous and Lord_Void said. Players can make many things with enough resource (not limited to the mining-able ones) and under correct rules. If there is a robust rule set, let players create their own world will proved to be a epic success. Players have talent to ruin EVE (pardon me for saying that) also means we have the talent to build an excellent DU. Only depends on if there is a crack in the rule set to trigger the evil in humanity.

 

Of course, building APIs is a low priority task at present. 2 yrs may be a good length of time to create a robust rule set. Alpha Academy always welcome to take part in tests and provide feedback.

[Troyd]

It's what Wall Street and NASDAQ do every day. I admit that I want to build a modern economic system in the game. But, don't forget the Lua Script in the game. Is it fair? No. I'm a programmer, I knew how to write Lua years ago. While others have no knowledge on it. But NQ still placed it into the game. It's because this society is a winner-take-all society, not a utopia. You can throw nuclear bombs, but I can destroy you with economic blockage, the third can win either of us because he has hi-tech. That's what we called "survival".

Hi Himeix, 

 

I'm only just reading this (sorry for the old post) - but could your development team consider a very basic api which only verifies the membership of a character/account for certain organizations? The large scale that this game is trying to promote will require simple authentication to the management of those organizations; a lot of your potential user base are coming from already established online communities and would like to integrate Dual Universe verification into their systems.

 

Fancy things like assets, markets and stuff are all "nice to haves". Simply organization membership would make managing large organizations much more practical. Eg; you can't have access to our Dual Universe forums unless you're a verfied a member off x y z organization in Dual Universe (api verifed)

[Lachenlaud]

At the very least I would very much like to see an API that allows for interaction with an external website to verify that a person signing up for my website is actually a player of dual universe. This will help to prevent spammers and scammers from affecting my game related website since they would have to first sign up for dual Universe account in order to verify an account on my website. That would be an awesome feature.

 

To add to that if we could set up API keys in such a way that players could provide them voluntarily to third party websites in order to pull bios or extracts on that character that would be awesome as well. For example, if I wanted to sign up for a website and be able to display my in-game profile on that third-party website I would have been have to provide a custom API key to that third-party website which I generated the other dual Universe website for that specific purpose, at which point that third-party website would be able to use that API key in order to read in my in-game profile to display as part of my website profile.