#support3rdparty - Why we temporarily shut down our sites.

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mia389

M
I love these 3rd party sites and thank the guys putting the time in making them. However, No no one told you that you had to make these programs. The API is there if you want to make/build programs with it. If I were frontier I would just shut down the API if the community starts demanding things from me.
 

palazo

Banned
palazo
Help the guys Frontier, dont be
They have sites that make your game not crap.

Take a few minutes for day to help the free devs, nothing pay to him for his work and is really important for us and Frontier company.
 
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Kaltern

Kaltern
Mohrgan said:
A pile of complete and utter nonsense. Arguments like these show nothing but desperation.

It's obvious the OP has zero interest in a conversation. The only desire here is to cause their 'junkies' to cry out, demonstrating the power they have. Ego's gone wild. If those heads continue to swell up, while still stuck in that orifice, it could very well get stuck in.

We, as players, are being exploited by these out of game developers. Why couldn't they just ask for the support of the posters here, rather than take the resources away from those that would have happily supported their requests? Because of: Arrogance. FD didn't respond like they wished. They are too important to fail. after all. So, they extort FD, using our voices.

I for one can't take these guys seriously until they answer: What priority this should take, and what development might be displaced as a result? If they would be successful in getting resources diverted to their cause, where would they come from, and what other features would be move out? Childishly calling for efforts FD never offered is well.... childish.
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You, and other people with similar opinions make me sick.

If a group of people - who make tools in their own free time, with NO REWARD, and have already tried to communicate with FDev over the last couple of years, feel that their efforts are being unappreciated by the game developers they're trying to support, then it is their absolute RIGHT to say 'enough is enough.'

YOU do not pay a penny to these people.
YOU have used their tools at least once.
YOU don't get to decide if a bunch of VOLUNTEERS are doing the wrong thing.

IF these guys were either contracted by Frontier to develop 3rd party tools, or they have been financially supported by Frontier at some point in the past, then POSSIBLY people may have a point about their timing, and the inconvenience it's causing. Much like when public services go on strike in the real world.

But, when a group of people who have tried, tried and tried again to get SOME useful communication from Frontier are feeling that their efforts are being wasted, and their pleas for help ignored... then why on earth should they not decide to take disruptive action? I mean, if they wanted to, they could just have easily said 'Right folks, we've had enough of this. We're closing down our sites, and if you don't like it - we really don't care because we owe you, the community, and Frontier, absolutely NOTHING.' They didn't, though, and they're doing pretty much the only thing they can do so prove just how reliant the Elite Dangerous community is on their services.

For people like you, get your entitled head out of your , stop trying to defend Frontier yet again, and never again use their tools - you clearly do not deserve them in any way.
 

Felix Dyson

Felix Dyson
Zambrick said:
Honestly, if they want to close out their sites out of spite, then that is fine. I say go for it. Someone else will make a site to do the same thing. You are trying to hold a group of super nerds and game developers hostage to meet your demands. Any one of a thousand players could get a new site up and running in a matter of weeks.
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Thanks for volunteering!
 

Lucifer Hate

Lucifer Hate
jasonbarron said:
I suppose it was bound to happen someday: AA and jasonbarron would heartily agree on something. What happens next? I don't know, but the day has promise:)
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Agony in my time here I cant say I have agreed with you on alot but I have to agree with some things you said here in this thread.. Even though I have used some of these tools, unlike many here, I don't agree the game is unplayable without them. Hell in some ways they made it to easy.
 

HazardousMatt

HazardousMatt
I wash my hands with this filth.

The fact some of you are calling these 3rd part developers childish proves their point. They spend hundreds of hours of their time for free or "donation" to create public accessible tools. They can do whatever they please. All they are asking is a line of communication. That's it!! I kind of wished they didn't give any reason why. They should of just did it silently and watch the community scramble on what was going on and let you guys figure it out on your own. This really goes to show how inadequate the in game tools are. It's 3303 in game but yet I can't pin more than ONE blueprint per Engineer??? And the response from FD on the matter in a live stream is simply the typical response for everything "can't say, well look into it, nothing at the moment" We can't search in game for the price for ships and what's available nearby but IRL I can search by car, color, price, convertible. I have to wait and dock at some outfitting space port before I can see the detailed specs of my ship. That is only a few but they're so much more. Cmon!

3rd party developers....just take em offline for good. Watch it burn.

Like I said, I wash my hands of this toxic community and toxic game development. I am no longer supporting this game with my money.
 

tomeagles

tomeagles
This thread is unbeleivable, the API isn't essential to anyone other than website creators, it doesnt generate revenue for FD unless they decide to monetarise it, all it does is add a load onto the resources used, no matter how small that be there is a cost involved, it also costs them man hours in dev time which THEY pay for.

So how about this: Would you as third party developers be willing to pay for access to an API tool? If the answer is no why should you expect FDEV to pay for it?

Next up do you think this strike is going to achieve anything other than probably antagonise the player base, are people going to stop playing ED because your sites are offline, the fact in all probability is people will continue to play which means that the tools are not essential to play (no impact on FDEV whatsoever) just a nice aid for players and yes they are very cool and I appreciate the huge amount of work involved in it coming myself from a full time web developers position and also someone who has been working in the games industry since the 80's and written websites that hook into games. I am actually designing the site and UI for a commercial flight sim at the moment so know exacty whats involved. But try to force a developers hand by taking this route isn't the right way to go. The API as it stands now is better than some, not as good as others but to extend it requires resources which cost so either offer to pay for it or let FDEV decide when they will commit the rescourses to it.
 

MoonWeb

MoonWeb
Showing my support for third-party tool sites as I use them all the time while I am playing this game.
The complete lack of search features and the complete lack of data about engineers in the game as well as the complete lack of data about stations, trade data and the inability to filter or prioritize (an encyclopedia, if you will) means that third party sites are completely necessary.

Wanting to know what materials are needed for an upgrade, or wanting to know all of the closest bodies which can supply a material such as polonium or Technetium, wanting to know all of the closest stations which supply a particular commodity and then delving into said station statistics before arriving is not cheating. Expecting players to keep their own records (a la 1984) is short-sighted and the reason is that we all know what technology can do now, and expect our in-game technology to be somewhat analogous to it.

It isn't. Tools are necessary.

Moonweb out.
 

Skilhollow

Skilhollow
themroc said:
Dear Elite: Dangerous Community,

We are the developers of third-party tools for Elite: Dangerous, and we are taking them offline to call attention to a request for more formal support of our efforts from Frontier. We will remain offline from Thursday the 27th of April 12:00 UTC until Sunday the 30th of April 12:00 UTC.

Our third-party websites and tools are used on a daily basis by many tens of thousands of players, and they generate millions of pageviews every month. We believe that our tools greatly enhance the game playing experience, and yet we often feel that Frontier does not actively encourage the effort that goes into supporting their game with these tools. We believe they can and should improve on this situation by maintaining clear and open communication with the third-party developer community.

There is currently no easy way for us to request features and support that will benefit the community as a whole, and there is often no warning from Frontier when a game update will alter or break existing APIs that we rely on. This places a significant extra burden on third-party tool makers to work around these issues and to fix our tools. Repeated requests for support and bug fixes are made, but there is frustration caused by an apparent lack of progress on those.

We apologise for the inconvenience to you, the user of our third-party tools, but we feel that this action is the only way to make Frontier clearly understand the huge disconnect between the high level of support that the players (their customers) have for third-party tools, and the lack of consistency from Frontier in effectively fostering third-party development. Modern games thrive on an active and vibrant third-party ecosystem, because no game developer can do everything by themselves. As much as we would love to see the features of various third party tools incorporated into Elite: Dangerous itself, we realize that Frontier’s developer time and resources are limited, and we are happy to provide our tools freely to the community. In turn, however, we need Frontier to acknowledge that third-party tools are an important part of your playing experience and act accordingly. The alternative is that tools such as these may disappear entirely as third-party developers give up on donating their time and effort to make Elite: Dangerous better.

If the lack of this tool has reduced your ability to play or your enjoyment of Elite: Dangerous then please let Frontier know in this thread or the Reddit post. The more players who share their stories, the more Frontier will be able to see the value of supporting the third-party development community which has brought you this tool and so many others.

Thank you for your support!


Sites offline

The following sites are offline for the duration of this event:


In addition, the authors of the following apps support this event:


Suggestions

Here are some suggestions to Frontier that we feel would be reasonable steps toward improving our working relationship:

  • An appointed liaison for the third-party developer community could help to keep communication flowing freely. This should ideally be a specific role for someone with a technical background; community relations representatives have tried to fill this role in the past, but seemed to have too many other responsibilities to be effective.
  • A commitment to fully supporting an external API -- whether this is the existing Companion API or a proper replacement that provides the same data -- would ensure the survival of the dozens of tools and websites that have come to rely on it. Including the API in beta testing cycles would also allow us to help you identify issues early rather than suffering days or weeks of downtime after game patches.
  • Different bug and feature tracking procedures may be needed for things like the Journal and Companion API (or its replacement). The simple acknowledgement of “I’ll pass this on” does not always suffice for these kinds of issues; third-party developers need follow-up feedback and communication about future API changes and bugfixes, and Frontier developers could benefit from a better avenue to request additional technical details about reported issues.

A brief history of Frontier and Community Developers

December 2014 - Elite: Dangerous launch

During the beta before Elite: Dangerous was even released, the community had already begun to build tools to map the galaxy and optimize commodity trading. Some tools that date back to this period are Thrudd’s website, Slopey’s Market Tool and the TradeDangerous console helper from Maddavo and kfsone. This is also when the Elite: Dangerous Data Network (EDDN) was established, which allows tools to send, receive and share market price data.

January 2015 - EDDN and API

A couple of weeks after release, EDDB launched with full EDDN support. At that point, the only way to automatically collect price data from the game was seeebek’s EliteOCR. This used optical character recognition (OCR) to process screenshots of the market prices which were then sent via EDDN to EDDB. The data quality was very poor since OCR produces a lot of errors, so we had to spend a lot of time fixing and cleaning the price stream.

In mid January Michael Brookes posted the External API Requirements Thread on the forums, and a month later it was closed stating that Frontier would need “a few weeks” to put together a proposal and invite community developers to a working group. This was a very promising early indication that Frontier was serious about supporting third-party development, but it would be another 18 months before we saw any concrete follow-through on this idea.

June 2015 - Frontier’s Companion App API

Frontier released an iOS Companion App in November of 2014 (and later discontinued it). The app used an undocumented API to pull information from within the game, and although it was almost immediately reverse-engineered, it would be several more months before it saw widespread use by the community. In April of 2015 Andargor released the Elite Dangerous Companion Emulator (EDCE) to demonstrate how to tap into that API, and by June this capability had been incorporated into tools such as TradeDangerous and OtisB’s Elite: Dangerous Market Connector (EDMC) in order to retrieve market data and share it with other tools via EDDN.

This was a giant leap forward for the community, because we suddenly had access to accurate market data without the need for error-prone OCR; it’s fair to say that this breakthrough is largely responsible for the wide selection of wonderful trading tools that exist today. Unfortunately Frontier did not seem to share our excitement, and responded by deleting any forum thread related to usage of the API; a moderator explained in a private message that “our standing orders are to remove posts about, and links to, any software that accesses the game client or the servers. This includes the companion API” . But the API kept on working, and it was extremely useful, so we kept on using it. We didn’t know where we stood in a legal context and tried to get an official statement from Frontier, but it was another eight months before they would comment on it one way or the other.

October 2015 - Powerplay data

To their credit, Frontier tried to publish weekly Powerplay data for use by the community. Unfortunately this data has not been as useful as it could have been because it is a snapshot of the powerplay state taken several hours before the actual in-game cycle changes. This means the data is always slightly off, showing a large number of systems in the wrong state with no way of knowing which ones are affected. We asked for a fix for this many times and were told it would be passed along, but nothing has changed.

December 2015 - Release 2.0 and the Open Letter

Despite Frontier’s continuing silence on the issue, usage of the Companion API by EDMC and other tools continued to grow until the whole market ecosystem came to depend on it. But with the release of Elite: Dangerous 2.0 on the 15th of December the API suddenly stopped working, and the whole trading-related third-party scene came to a grinding halt since nothing got updated any more. It took Frontier almost a week to correct the problem, and it likely could have been avoided entirely if Frontier included the Companion API in their beta testing, but they never have. Instead, API changes and breakages simply appear without warning when the final game patch is released, leaving the community in the lurch until Frontier can get around to fixing it after the fact.

This situation caused a lot of frustration among us developers, not so much because of the outage (many of us work as career software developers, we know that bugs and downtime happen sometimes), but because Frontier still didn’t talk to us about it and didn’t seem to consider our projects or our users to be a priority. As a result we wrote an Open Letter to Frontier which was signed by many of the active third-party developers at the time and asked for better communication from Frontier. It received a lot of attention among the whole community, and Frontier finally allowed us to use the existing API officially and offered some indications that they would look into improving their API support in the future.

February 2016 - A Private Letter

Unfortunately, that was the end of the conversation. There was no follow up discussion of any specific API development plans, and there was little response to reports of continuing problems with the existing API. Because of that lack of communication, the community had no idea what to expect; was Frontier hard at work developing a new and improved API? Were they working on the bugs with the existing system? Were they going to just shut it down completely at any moment? We didn’t know, and they wouldn’t say.

In the face of this uncertainty we organized ourselves and founded the Elite: Dangerous Community Developers (EDCD). We wrote a private letter to Zac Antonaci (Frontier’s Head of Community Management) to explain our continuing frustration and to request fixes for the outstanding API bugs, as well as a timeline of Frontier’s API development plans. Above all, we once again requested more regular communication between Frontier and EDCD, but to partially quote Zac’s reply: “the situation is the same as the last response we gave over there isn't really any additional ongoing communication we can give at this time.” So once again, that was the end of the conversation.

July 2016 - The Journal

In July of 2016 we were informed that update 2.2 would introduce a local data logging feature called the Journal. This was fantastic news; the prospect of gaining access to such a wide array of in-game data promised to be just as big a breakthrough for third-party tool development as the Companion API had been one year prior. More importantly, the Journal represented Frontier’s best effort so far to put real action and developer resources behind the idea of supporting third-party tools.

The three months following the Journal announcement up until the 2.2 release still remain the all-time high point in terms of productive communication between third-party developers and Frontier. After soliciting our input and feedback, Howard Chalkley (Frontier Senior Programmer) did a great job of responding to and actually implementing many of our suggestions and requests, although we were baffled by his odd comment that the Journal “was not designed as a mechanism to export data into other databases.” Given that it’s formatted in machine-readable JSON which would be unintelligible to the average player, one has to wonder where Frontier thought that data would go if not into “other databases.”

Still, we were greatly encouraged by Frontier’s apparently renewed interest in supporting third-party development and we hoped to continue the kind of collaboration we saw with the Journal. Having recently launched our EDCD Discord server, we decided to take the initiative and created a private channel for discussion between Frontier and some core EDCD members. We hoped that a dedicated communications channel insulated from the clamor of the public forums could be a useful tool to foster ongoing collaboration and prevent public outrage over minor issues by giving Frontier the opportunity and the venue to solicit focused feedback in advance.

October 2016 - Release 2.2

The development of the Journal during the 2.2 beta was a hopeful time for the community of third-party tool makers, but those hopes quickly faded after the 2.2 release.

The private Discord channel that we provided for Frontier went completely unused. Brett C (Frontier Community Manager) said hello once, but no one ever responded to our questions there, and our private messages still went unanswered for weeks and usually produced no resolution for the issues we raised.

Communication on the forums also began to break down again. We were told that the Journal thread was no longer monitored and we should submit ordinary bug reports, but the usual QA bug triage process is not well suited for this purpose because after the initial “we’ll pass this on” response, the report is forgotten and there is no follow-up communication about when or if we should expect a fix. As a result, Frontier’s fixes for Journal and other API bugs have often ended up inadvertently breaking third-party tools all over again because we had no advance notice to prepare for them.

The 2.2 release notes also mentioned that “Many starsystems were controlled by planet settlements. These have all been upgraded to dockable bases.” While this may seem like an innocuous change, it presented a problem for us because at this point we had already collectively spent hundreds of hours cataloging almost every dockable station in the game; converting some unknown number of settlements into bases meant that some unknown portion of our database was now incorrect. This left us with two options: we could spend many more hundreds of hours tediously re-verifying every single settled star system, or Frontier could simply provide the list of upgraded settlements for us to easily update our records. We sent Zac Antonaci and Edward Lewis multiple private messages asking for such a list and were given hope to get access to it, but it never materialized.

March 2017 - Apologies

On March 24th Zac Antonaci sent the same message to several EDCD members, saying he was “really sorry for the lack of comms.” But that was all; comms didn’t noticeably improve after this, and nothing else happened.

April 2017 - Release 2.3

Patch 2.3 was a mixed bag. On the one hand there were some great changes and additions to the Journal, and Howard Chalkley reappeared in the forum thread to announce and discuss many of them throughout the 2.3 beta.

On the other hand, all engineering information disappeared from the Companion API. This meant for example that players could no longer import their engineered ship builds into tools such as E:D Shipyard and Coriolis, which was a feature that had been often requested and took countless hours of work to develop. Two weeks after the patch it is still not clear if this change was a bug or an intentional removal of the feature.

The Past and the Future

Overall the past two years have been challenging, from both a technical and a motivational standpoint. At times Frontier has seemed genuinely interested in supporting our work, but at other times they have almost seemed to forget that we exist or that we might be impacted by a change they’re about to make. Various people at Frontier have expressed their appreciation for the things we create, but it can be hard to remember that when our inquiries and bug reports so often go unanswered.

Given the massive amount of time and energy that we have collectively invested into our various projects, it should go without saying that we are huge fans of Elite: Dangerous and huge supporters of Frontier Developments. We would like nothing more than to continue to create tools and fan sites until the Thargoids reduce the last human settlement to ash, but we can’t do it alone. We need Frontier to meet us half way by communicating with us and fully supporting the interfaces that we rely on.

We hope that this event will start a conversation that can lead to a bright future of collaboration and communication between Frontier and the community of third-party developers who have rallied around Elite: Dangerous.
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I feel blind, naked, and helpless without all of these third-party tools I'm accustomed to using for Elite. It's insanely difficult to do so many things in the game with only the extremely limited options available in-game. Frontier, please support these people, your game just isn't the same without them!

And if a "strike" is what's needed to call proper attention to the issues, I for one support it. TO THE PICKET LINE, BOYS!!
 
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NeilF

NeilF
bkrownd said:
It's a bit odd that these sites shut off the user community, then think we're going to blame FD?
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Really? Astounding...!

If they chose to close the site down for a month while on holiday, would you "blame them"?

If they chose to close the site down forever because they could no longer afford the time or expense, would you "blame them"?

And if they chose to close the site down for a few days because they fear they are getting to the point where they might have to consider closing the sites down permanently due to FD's lack of support, how is that anything other than their choice to make, and how can you "blame them"?


I doubt we can even imagine the amount of effort some of these individuals have put into these tools, and I doubt we can imagine how much soul searching and frustration has gone on for them to reach this position. Do you not suspect, maybe some of them are getting to a do or die position as regards their labours of love? That just maybe some of them are potentially seeing two possible outcomes, with one of them being closing the sites they've piled countless effort into...
 
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Sooden

Sooden
Although i used to use INARA for blue prints... that section has been out of date for a while...

Not been a hardship to visit locations and take a screen shots. as for the rest?

loaded outs, i like the surprise of working that out myself, and have never seen a need for any tools.... so what i say may be a little bias;

Looking at how this has/is affecting players, i think it may wake Fdev up. They have relied too much on 3rd parties and giving them more of what they want could lead to a power shift/ransoms.

Maybe it's time for Fdev to develop better in-game tools, with the input from the community, and not be dependent on 3rd parties, of which they have no control over. Just makes smart business scene.

But you know Fdev, they dont' always do what's smart, and you may get what you want :p
 
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