8 ms·

This mostly facilitates nicely what players were already doing with api & data dump integrations. It greatly boosts accessibility though, which is great. It ju

This mostly facilitates nicely what players were already doing with api & data dump integrations. It greatly boosts accessibility though, which is great. It just is so remarkable to me that no other games dare to have the depth & accessibility that EVE does. No one else has anything remotely as open ended as EVE Online's existing APIs or data dumps. It's shocking to me that games remain so quaintly isolated in their own world, that they don't seek to open up to allow more.

kjs3 3y ago
Not everyone wants to play a game where Excel is a requirement.
- mewmew07 3y ago
  I guess it's also true that not everyone wants to play a game where an Excel add-in is not available. Please note, Excel is not a requirement to play EVE Online, it is only useful to have an add-in for some roles. Further, for most popular games, Excel doesn't even make sense. Parent's request for more games to be more accessible to external tools like Excel is not a request to make Excel access your CoD game state, don't be dense.
  - tough 3y ago
    > not a request to make Excel access your CoD game state, don't be dense. Hey one could imagine cool things to crunch that data lmao
    - reportgunner 3y ago
      Microsoft Excel for Xbox ?
      - wheybags 3y ago
        Excbox
        aerio 3y ago
        Xboxcel
  - kjs3 3y ago
    Dense? Who's the one who missed the joke, and then doubled down on missing the point? The parent is excited because the game they like to play is so baroque and complicated, that full participation requires external data processing (yes I know you don't have to use Excel or anything else, but amongst the dozen or so regular EVE Online players I know, including one former EO QA tester, every single one uses Excel to some extent to track their game, so YMMV). The point is not every game needs visibility at the API level, so why should the game developers waste time providing it. My grandma's casino sim games don't need an API; wins and losses are tracked quite easily in the app. If you need an API and an external tool to play Farmville or some such, I think you're missing the point just a touch. Does my city building sim need an API? I guess I can think of a few things that an API could provide. Would I use it? Why, it's just a game. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If the game you like needs an API, everything need an API. Same mentality.
    - mewmew07 3y ago
      My brother in christ, you are are a casual, and there's nothing wrong with that, but leave the serious gaming for the hardcore players.
      - kjs3 3y ago
        No problem, sport, it's all yours. Just keep your APIs, Excel spreadsheets, game-as-job and the rest of the hardcoreness down in your mom's basement where it belongs.
  - slowmovintarget 3y ago
    Crusader Kings II/III w/ Excel? Also, have to love that Microsoft is actually involved here. Makes me wish that Activision buy out goes through.
- burnished 3y ago
  Don't really see how that enters the equation.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Technotroll 3y ago
  EVE Online has the nickname "Spreadsheets in Space" for a reason, though. There are many aspects of the game where you don't need a spreadsheet, so you're not forced to play this part of the game. However, if you want to do anything serious within research, production or sales, then spreadsheets quickly become your friends. And API calls and scripting.
  - lagniappe 3y ago
    that moniker came from the visual appearance of the old UI circa 2010.
    - thesuitonym 3y ago
      The "old UI circa 2010" is like the second refresh, and the game already had the reputation back in 2007 when I started playing. It refers to the big business players, who actually play the game like they're real life companies.
      - lagniappe 3y ago
        I was guessing at the date, because I started shortly after launch when I was a wee lad. The way I remember it is the joke was because of the way every window had rows and boxes, with data inside. I don't actually recall people using actual excel spreadsheets for much other than enjoying the meme because a lot of the things we use excel for in industry now did not exist yet at the time. (Maybe comparing ship stats before the compare tool got better?) I'm not so much arguing with you as presenting how I remember it. We could both be right, or one or the other, it's not important... I'm just an old scordite miner getting ready to retire, so out of the generosity in my heart, anybody who sends me some ISK today, I'll go ahead and double it - no strings attached. It's time to get out of the game anyway.
  - cartoonworld 3y ago
    Very true. I just wanted to add how much farther that the "Spreadsheets" analogy goes with a few examples: There are actually custom ERP and management resources that have been developed by the eve community like the Alliance Auth project and a large group has even a issued a cryptocurrency to automatically manage in-game payouts for certain types of ship losses. There are the requisite and copious discord, irc, and xmpp integrations, but there are also automated mapping projects, and large scale data analysis projects. There are projects which seek to analyze ship losses for intelligence and counter intelligence purposes. There are background checks, escrow services, automatic billing service for eg logistics (trucking services) and in fact there have been several functional _casinos_. The excel plugin looks to add a lot of additional capability to the spreadsheets, since now you can integrate all of this information into whatever analytics you would like to create with excel, which is of course quite powerful.
- JCharante 3y ago
  99% of players don't use spreadsheets but just like real life, the 1% own the majority of stuff and need to use spreadsheets or software to plan stuff out
  - abwizz 3y ago
    very apt metaphor
solardev 3y ago
As a Path of Exile player (another high complexity game, with market forces but less political intrigue), I wish we had more open APIs!
- xaitv 3y ago
  > I wish we had more open APIs! Do you mean in Path of Exile or in games in general? Afaik most of the economy stuff in PoE is behind an API that's relatively open(you have to request access, but you pretty much always get it). The complexity in Path of Exile is less in the economy and more in build creation though. With tools like Path of Building that you can spend almost as many hours in as you're playing the actual game(or you just copy what someone else did like most people).
  - solardev 3y ago
    Well, both! But for POE specifically, there's a lot of stuff they don't want to expose (the UI, damage numbers, MTX info, etc.) I wanted to build a better catalog for their MTX (because their shop site is pretty terrible) and was explicitly denied API access even though they already have a public API for it that their site uses. Shrug. Path of building is great, but AFAIK the formulas used for it are from observations and not an API.
    - xaitv 3y ago
      That's true yes. Most of the Path of Building stuff is datamined and/or tested ingame. Interesting that they declined the shop idea, guess they dislike people touching anything to do with their monetization.
      - solardev 3y ago
        Yeah, their official API support is just really limited... by policy, not availability. https://www.pathofexile.com/developer/docs#resources https://www.pathofexile.com/developer/docs#resources As in they have a bunch of endpoints that are perfectly usable but they don't want you using it for some reason. It spawned a small ecosystem of third party docs and wrappers on poedb and github. I can't tell if GGG just don't have the resources to support more APIs or if they are worried about increasing access for other business reasons, but they do threaten an account ban for unauthorized use of their public APIs. It's too bad, as someone who's both spent a lot of money with them and wanted to spend more but could never find the right items because their official shop is so bad. Oh well.
noir_lord 3y ago
> It just is so remarkable to me that no other games dare to have the depth & accessibility that EVE does. I think arma3 does (in terms of depth - very different games), it has a full programming language built into - people have done everything from Zombie Survival to Living on a tropical island to recreating the Vietnam war to completely replacing the stock AI with one that feels remarkably human[1]. It is a staggeringly complex system underneath. [1] https://github.com/nk3nny/LambsDanger/releases https://github.com/nk3nny/LambsDanger/releases
- Kinrany 3y ago
  Modding is also very rare, but it is different from the game providing tools for integrating the game with the outside world.
stravant 3y ago
The issue is that you typically need an unaccessible level of depth for new players to avoid the game getting "solved" by the data being open. WotC has a huge problem with this in Magic the Gathering for instance. They used to publish all the stats about what decks won the daily events on their online platforms but they had to stop because the data helped people micro-optimize the best deck way to quickly after a new set of cards came out.

kjs3 3y ago

Not everyone wants to play a game where Excel is a requirement.

mewmew07 3y ago
I guess it's also true that not everyone wants to play a game where an Excel add-in is not available. Please note, Excel is not a requirement to play EVE Online, it is only useful to have an add-in for some roles. Further, for most popular games, Excel doesn't even make sense. Parent's request for more games to be more accessible to external tools like Excel is not a request to make Excel access your CoD game state, don't be dense.
- tough 3y ago
  > not a request to make Excel access your CoD game state, don't be dense. Hey one could imagine cool things to crunch that data lmao
  - reportgunner 3y ago
    Microsoft Excel for Xbox ?
    - wheybags 3y ago
      Excbox
      - aerio 3y ago
        Xboxcel
- kjs3 3y ago
  Dense? Who's the one who missed the joke, and then doubled down on missing the point? The parent is excited because the game they like to play is so baroque and complicated, that full participation requires external data processing (yes I know you don't have to use Excel or anything else, but amongst the dozen or so regular EVE Online players I know, including one former EO QA tester, every single one uses Excel to some extent to track their game, so YMMV). The point is not every game needs visibility at the API level, so why should the game developers waste time providing it. My grandma's casino sim games don't need an API; wins and losses are tracked quite easily in the app. If you need an API and an external tool to play Farmville or some such, I think you're missing the point just a touch. Does my city building sim need an API? I guess I can think of a few things that an API could provide. Would I use it? Why, it's just a game. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If the game you like needs an API, everything need an API. Same mentality.
  - mewmew07 3y ago
    My brother in christ, you are are a casual, and there's nothing wrong with that, but leave the serious gaming for the hardcore players.
    - kjs3 3y ago
      No problem, sport, it's all yours. Just keep your APIs, Excel spreadsheets, game-as-job and the rest of the hardcoreness down in your mom's basement where it belongs.
- slowmovintarget 3y ago
  Crusader Kings II/III w/ Excel? Also, have to love that Microsoft is actually involved here. Makes me wish that Activision buy out goes through.
burnished 3y ago
Don't really see how that enters the equation.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Technotroll 3y ago
EVE Online has the nickname "Spreadsheets in Space" for a reason, though. There are many aspects of the game where you don't need a spreadsheet, so you're not forced to play this part of the game. However, if you want to do anything serious within research, production or sales, then spreadsheets quickly become your friends. And API calls and scripting.
- lagniappe 3y ago
  that moniker came from the visual appearance of the old UI circa 2010.
  - thesuitonym 3y ago
    The "old UI circa 2010" is like the second refresh, and the game already had the reputation back in 2007 when I started playing. It refers to the big business players, who actually play the game like they're real life companies.
    - lagniappe 3y ago
      I was guessing at the date, because I started shortly after launch when I was a wee lad. The way I remember it is the joke was because of the way every window had rows and boxes, with data inside. I don't actually recall people using actual excel spreadsheets for much other than enjoying the meme because a lot of the things we use excel for in industry now did not exist yet at the time. (Maybe comparing ship stats before the compare tool got better?) I'm not so much arguing with you as presenting how I remember it. We could both be right, or one or the other, it's not important... I'm just an old scordite miner getting ready to retire, so out of the generosity in my heart, anybody who sends me some ISK today, I'll go ahead and double it - no strings attached. It's time to get out of the game anyway.
- cartoonworld 3y ago
  Very true. I just wanted to add how much farther that the "Spreadsheets" analogy goes with a few examples: There are actually custom ERP and management resources that have been developed by the eve community like the Alliance Auth project and a large group has even a issued a cryptocurrency to automatically manage in-game payouts for certain types of ship losses. There are the requisite and copious discord, irc, and xmpp integrations, but there are also automated mapping projects, and large scale data analysis projects. There are projects which seek to analyze ship losses for intelligence and counter intelligence purposes. There are background checks, escrow services, automatic billing service for eg logistics (trucking services) and in fact there have been several functional _casinos_. The excel plugin looks to add a lot of additional capability to the spreadsheets, since now you can integrate all of this information into whatever analytics you would like to create with excel, which is of course quite powerful.
JCharante 3y ago
99% of players don't use spreadsheets but just like real life, the 1% own the majority of stuff and need to use spreadsheets or software to plan stuff out
- abwizz 3y ago
  very apt metaphor

solardev 3y ago

As a Path of Exile player (another high complexity game, with market forces but less political intrigue), I wish we had more open APIs!

xaitv 3y ago
> I wish we had more open APIs! Do you mean in Path of Exile or in games in general? Afaik most of the economy stuff in PoE is behind an API that's relatively open(you have to request access, but you pretty much always get it). The complexity in Path of Exile is less in the economy and more in build creation though. With tools like Path of Building that you can spend almost as many hours in as you're playing the actual game(or you just copy what someone else did like most people).
- solardev 3y ago
  Well, both! But for POE specifically, there's a lot of stuff they don't want to expose (the UI, damage numbers, MTX info, etc.) I wanted to build a better catalog for their MTX (because their shop site is pretty terrible) and was explicitly denied API access even though they already have a public API for it that their site uses. Shrug. Path of building is great, but AFAIK the formulas used for it are from observations and not an API.
  - xaitv 3y ago
    That's true yes. Most of the Path of Building stuff is datamined and/or tested ingame. Interesting that they declined the shop idea, guess they dislike people touching anything to do with their monetization.
    - solardev 3y ago
      Yeah, their official API support is just really limited... by policy, not availability. https://www.pathofexile.com/developer/docs#resources https://www.pathofexile.com/developer/docs#resources As in they have a bunch of endpoints that are perfectly usable but they don't want you using it for some reason. It spawned a small ecosystem of third party docs and wrappers on poedb and github. I can't tell if GGG just don't have the resources to support more APIs or if they are worried about increasing access for other business reasons, but they do threaten an account ban for unauthorized use of their public APIs. It's too bad, as someone who's both spent a lot of money with them and wanted to spend more but could never find the right items because their official shop is so bad. Oh well.

noir_lord 3y ago

> It just is so remarkable to me that no other games dare to have the depth & accessibility that EVE does. I think arma3 does (in terms of depth - very different games), it has a full programming language built into - people have done everything from Zombie Survival to Living on a tropical island to recreating the Vietnam war to completely replacing the stock AI with one that feels remarkably human[1]. It is a staggeringly complex system underneath. [1] https://github.com/nk3nny/LambsDanger/releases https://github.com/nk3nny/LambsDanger/releases

Kinrany 3y ago
Modding is also very rare, but it is different from the game providing tools for integrating the game with the outside world.

stravant 3y ago

The issue is that you typically need an unaccessible level of depth for new players to avoid the game getting "solved" by the data being open. WotC has a huge problem with this in Magic the Gathering for instance. They used to publish all the stats about what decks won the daily events on their online platforms but they had to stop because the data helped people micro-optimize the best deck way to quickly after a new set of cards came out.