#support3rdparty - Why we temporarily shut down our sites.

[Ian Doncaster]

yeah and wait for the next big group that wants something that you don't that uses this same tactic

Name one other group whose withdrawal of services would get such a major response.

Canonn: we'll stop looking for aliens if our demands aren't met
Hudsonites: we'll stop doing Powerplay if our demands aren't met
Distant Worlds: we'll stay in the bubble if our demands aren't met
SDC: we'll stop ganking if our demands aren't met

It might get some attention, but it's not remotely comparable.

It's highly effective in this *very* specific case because:
- their collective services are directly or indirectly used by an extremely large number of players across all styles of play.
- their collective services are not at all trivial for another group to replace; while others could in theory step up, it would take months - whereas if the Fuel Rats all quit, someone else could set up a chat and buy a limpet controller tomorrow. For the 3rd-party tools, it both requires specialist skills and a lot of spare time.
- they are a relatively small number of individuals who can coordinate collective action effectively.

Those who would rather it wasn't effective therefore have an obvious way out - implement their own toolset under a no-strike agreement.

 

[mikelimtw]

On the last paragraph, how? How can they make the game fun for each and every player, since we all have different and often conflicting ideas of what's fun and what's not? Seriously, how do they do that?

Also, I should note that there are questions about whether certain 3pdevs are making money off of their tools, with all the advertising they have on their sites.

When there is such a huge community backlash from an event such as this, that tells me that E is as I stated: It is needlessly complicated and obtuse. I don't know what exactly FDev are trying to accomplish here. "Realism" for realism's sake does not make a game fun. All the grinding is not fun. I suspect that it's there simply becuase there is not enough content. That being said, FDev should be addressing the root of the issue instead of the symptoms of it. Am I an expert at what is fun? Absolutely not, but I know what I feel when I play a game, and my feeling is that E could be more fun and less punishing/needlessly time consuming.

As far as 3rd party devs making money, I can pretty much assure you no one is getting rich off of their efforts. They do this mainly out of love for the game and the community, Any monies received is pretty incidental and only meant to help cover some of the costs involved from providing these services to us, the community of players.

 

[szopin]

Name one other group whose withdrawal of services would get such a major response.

Canonn: we'll stop looking for aliens if our demands aren't met
Hudsonites: we'll stop doing Powerplay if our demands aren't met
Distant Worlds: we'll stay in the bubble if our demands aren't met
SDC: we'll stop ganking if our demands aren't met

It might get some attention, but it's not remotely comparable.

It's highly effective in this *very* specific case because:
- their collective services are directly or indirectly used by an extremely large number of players across all styles of play.
- their collective services are not at all trivial for another group to replace; while others could in theory step up, it would take months - whereas if the Fuel Rats all quit, someone else could set up a chat and buy a limpet controller tomorrow. For the 3rd-party tools, it both requires specialist skills and a lot of spare time.
- they are a relatively small number of individuals who can coordinate collective action effectively.

Those who would rather it wasn't effective therefore have an obvious way out - implement their own toolset under a no-strike agreement.

Any of those groups if by some crazy RP reason decided that griefing newbies helped them get to their goal could do this. SDC of course fit the most, but the fact remains, make players suffer, players will start abandoning the game/leaving bad reviews, FD will have to react as sales will slump once reviews get to mostly negative or similar. It's mob rule, don't expect cannon to come up with reason that mostly harmless pilots are most likely thargoid spies, kill all and check their leftovers, but they could

 

[Lanceor]

For those who believe that the third party developers did the wrong thing, what should they have done instead? How could they have handled the situation better? I'd be very interested to know.

 

[Lucifer Hate]

Name one other group whose withdrawal of services would get such a major response.

Canonn: we'll stop looking for aliens if our demands aren't met
Hudsonites: we'll stop doing Powerplay if our demands aren't met
Distant Worlds: we'll stay in the bubble if our demands aren't met
SDC: we'll stop ganking if our demands aren't met

It might get some attention, but it's not remotely comparable.

It's highly effective in this *very* specific case because:
- their collective services are directly or indirectly used by an extremely large number of players across all styles of play.
- their collective services are not at all trivial for another group to replace; while others could in theory step up, it would take months - whereas if the Fuel Rats all quit, someone else could set up a chat and buy a limpet controller tomorrow. For the 3rd-party tools, it both requires specialist skills and a lot of spare time.
- they are a relatively small number of individuals who can coordinate collective action effectively.

Those who would rather it wasn't effective therefore have an obvious way out - implement their own toolset under a no-strike agreement.

easy and I am sure there are more that could coalition but the Fuel Rats would be 1 if they decided to make demands

 

[Alec Turner]

Name one other group whose withdrawal of services would get such a major response.

Fuel Rats? Luckily (and I think I'm right in saying this) we would never do such a thing ... hmmm, unless maybe there was a bug re: fuel transfer limpets? Or maybe if Snickers went the way of Toblerone.

 

[Genar-Hofoen]

Y'know some of the posts on this thread are pretty outstandingly bad.

Take for example, recent comments on the cost of running a server.

It's all very well saying "it'll cost <this much> to purchase any old VPS package" - what's not taken into account is the many man-hours taken to actually keep the server operational - configuration, administration. Some of the really big sites need and use more than one server, just to crunch the data, serve their own API's, be able to meet the demand placed on them to serve and feed data off to other sites and applications.

There's man-hours consumed just even producing the code required to crunch that data which is relied upon by so many.

There's the man-hours required to produce the code necessary to glue additional servers together, make sure data is synchronised.

There the man-hours required to produce the API code.

Then there's the man-hours taken to code the web site itself. If you think something like Inara is just bunging a couple of Wordpress add-ons into a cheap web server, you are either being disingenuous or being extremely naive. Inara is a custom built web site, run by one person and one person only.

There's the man-hours clocked up to produce something like my Captain's Log, and especially the amount of man-hours that have been sunk into producing EDDiscovery.

None of that work is being charged for.

The developers operate their sites at a loss.

So when I see these posts spouting off about 'costs of running a server', I just need to shake my head in dismay.

I especially shake my head at those trying to imply that we run a commercial operation - that's an outstandingly scurrilous claim to make.

Lastly, for those calling for FDEV to rip out the API and stuff the 3rd-party developers. There are lessons to be learned from history.

It apparently took CCP a long time to realise the value in nurturing a healthy 3rd party developer culture, but nurture they did.

You would be well advised to watch this video CCP made...

[video=youtube;uS9BgDtQ5Rw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS9BgDtQ5Rw[/video]

 

[Zyr1987]

When there is such a huge community backlash from an event such as this, that tells me that E is as I stated: It is needlessly complicated and obtuse. I don't know what exactly FDev are trying to accomplish here. "Realism" for realism's sake does not make a game fun. All the grinding is not fun. I suspect that it's there simply becuase there is not enough content. That being said, FDev should be addressing the root of the issue instead of the symptoms of it. Am I an expert at what is fun? Absolutely not, but I know what I feel when I play a game, and my feeling is that E could be more fun and less punishing/needlessly time consuming.

As far as 3rd party devs making money, I can pretty much assure you no one is getting rich off of their efforts. They do this mainly out of love for the game and the community, Any monies received is pretty incidental and only meant to help cover some of the costs involved from providing these services to us, the community of players.

First paragraph has nothing to do with what I was asking. You said "FDev SHOULD be ensuring that the time each and every one of us spends in their game is fun". I asked how that could be done, taking you at your word. Either way I don't find these third party sites fun to use. They take away the challenge, and that bores me. And I find it anything but obtuse. Spartan in info given at times? Absolutely, but not obtuse at all. (BTW, obtuse is so the wrong word anyway. It means, as close as you're going to get to what your talking about, not quick or alert in perception, feeling, or intellect; not sensitive or observant; dull.)

And to your second paragraph, how do you know, if you can state such so confidently? I mean EDDB has at least one ad on every page, and IIRC, claims millions of views a day. That does add up, especially as you move up the google adwords tiers (I know about those tiers due to several incidents on TV Tropes, where they had their ads pulled and they talked about said tiers when talking about ad revenue and alternative providers), and apparently they only pay $30 a month for hosting. And, either way, how can you be so sure? Have you seen their financials?

 

[Alec Turner]

2000!

 

[szopin]

Y'know some of the posts on this thread are pretty outstandingly bad.

Take for example, recent comments on the cost of running a server.

It's all very well saying "it'll cost <this much> to purchase any old VPS package" - what's not taken into account is the many man-hours taken to actually keep the server operational - configuration, administration. Some of the really big sites need and use more than one server, just to crunch the data, serve their own API's, be able to meet the demand placed on them to serve and feed data off to other sites and applications.

There's man-hours consumed just even producing the code required to crunch that data which is relied upon by so many.

There's the man-hours required to produce the code necessary to glue additional servers together, make sure data is synchronised.

There the man-hours required to produce the API code.

Then there's the man-hours taken to code the web site itself. If you think something like Inara is just bunging a couple of Wordpress add-ons into a cheap web server, you are either being disingenuous or being extremely naive. Inara is a custom built web site, run by one person and one person only.

There's the man-hours clocked up to produce something like my Captain's Log, and especially the amount of man-hours that have been sunk into producing EDDiscovery.

None of that work is being charged for.

The developers operate their sites at a loss.

So when I see these posts spouting off about 'costs of running a server', I just need to shake my head in dismay.

I especially shake my head at those trying to imply that we run a commercial operation - that's an outstandingly scurrilous claim to make.

Lastly, for those calling for FDEV to rip out the API and stuff the 3rd-party developers. There are lessons to be learned from history.

It apparently took CCP a long time to realise the value in nurturing a healthy 3rd party developer culture, but nurture they did.

You would be well advised to watch this video CCP made...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS9BgDtQ5Rw

Yeah, I'm sure the guy who runs it considers his 1 person work as a 1500$/h thingie, so FD owns them like millions by now, but the fact is hosting isn't expensive, the development time they put in as hobbyist cannot be reasonably put into their current expenses and this is what we are considering when comparing CMP income from serving ad on each and every page vs page size and hosting costs. They are losing thousands per day.

Oh and sorry but the EDDiscovery guy told us he has no ads, no donation buttons and is FOSS running out of his pocket, so please do not claim for yourself his contribution to the community

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Fuel Rats? Luckily (and I think I'm right in saying this) we would never do such a thing ... hmmm, unless maybe there was a bug re: fuel transfer limpets? Or maybe if Snickers went the way of Toblerone.

I think there'd be a lot of noise of the Fuel Rats did - and I agree that I can't see how that would happen.

But if it hypothetically did... someone could set up a discord server, a reddit and a forum thread for the Fuel Mice in a day, and get things up and running again pretty quickly. (It took a while for the operation to get as slick as it is now, but I seem to remember the original Fuel Rats being operational basically as soon as fuel limpets were for sale)

 

[Lucifer Hate]

I think there'd be a lot of noise of the Fuel Rats did - and I agree that I can't see how that would happen.

But if it hypothetically did... someone could set up a discord server, a reddit and a forum thread for the Fuel Mice in a day, and get things up and running again pretty quickly. (It took a while for the operation to get as slick as it is now, but I seem to remember the original Fuel Rats being operational basically as soon as fuel limpets were for sale)

I would say yeah there would as there are people that were harassed and threatened over the death of a fuel rat in game allegedly to the point of death threats. The rats had to put out an announcement to try to get the harassment to stop

 

[Genar-Hofoen]

Yeah, I'm sure the guy who runs it considers his 1 person work as a 1500$/h thingie, so FD owns them like millions by now, but the fact is hosting isn't expensive, the development time they put in as hobbyist cannot be reasonably put into their current expenses and this is what we are considering when comparing CMP income from serving ad on each and every page vs page size and hosting costs. They are losing thousands per day.

Oh and sorry but the EDDiscovery guy told us he has no ads, no donation buttons and is FOSS running out of his pocket, so please do not claim for yourself his contribution to the community

There is no helping you. *plonk*

 

[robbyp]

All you knowledgable people on this forum thread are welcome to help us maintain the 3rd party ecosystem by the way. We can always use people who know about hosting, coding, web site dev etc. Thats how I got into EDD, thru signing up to Distant Worlds and thinking, i'd like a tool to track my travels. Then I started thinking, I can help improve this tool.

 

[szopin]

There is no helping you. *plonk*

Seriously think about what I did last summer is your argument? Noone asked you for it. EDDiscovery guy said he's enjoying coding for ED and the community, not expecting us to pay him arrears for work noone asked him to do. He'll be happy to have docs to continue doing what he enjoys. plonk

 

[oscarolim]

Look, use the tools like whois, they both use ignum.cz:
https://www.ignum.cz/webhosting/full/
770 CZK (czech kronner) - 30USD
That's the business suite, Zyr1987 listed a small business/personal offer if you look at their 'unmetered bandwidth' which is nothing but unmetered. You can't run a buzzfeed if it all is so expensive while they run tons of pictures/videos of paparazzis etc. Please stop with this myth it's so expensive, it is not. With million views people will gladly buy them to put one two more ads and get more bucks. You can imagine the resources, but running php/sql queries is not really going to cost them that much more even if the DB is a bit bigger, more GB come cheaper after the 10Gb if they ever go over it (doubtful, again average load per page is around 50kb, it's bloody text)
And the time they put is irrelevant, whether it was hobby project, or not, don't put development costs on something that was voluntarily developed, are they going to cover their 500USD/h of previously invest3ed time in this equation, then yeah it will be costly, but makes no sense

Not sure which tools you were checking.
Both ed-board.net and eddb.io are hosted in France, and since at least on eddb.io the IP is not shared with other clients, is 99% safe to assume is either a VPS or dedicated server (maybe the former as is cheaper).
Looking at their prices is definitely going to be more than 30USD - the API eddb.io provides alone generates files that are about 6-7GB in total. Who knows how many use these.

 

[szopin]

Not sure which tools you were checking.
Both ed-board.net and eddb.io are hosted in France, and since at least on eddb.io the IP is not shared with other clients, is 99% safe to assume is either a VPS or dedicated server (maybe the former as is cheaper).
Looking at their prices is definitely going to be more than 30USD - the API eddb.io provides alone generates files that are about 6-7GB in total. Who knows how many use these.

Use a linux box and whois, ingum-cz for both. API is not a file but interface, to access a DB to spit out 17-80kb html +js/css/ads (js/css loading once, sure they are like 900kb, ads are from google so not covered by hosting costs). Quesrying a 6GB file once will use around 50kb bandwith on average. Even if the dns is screwed how much does it cost for 10GB in france? You can still easily host hundreds of txt based pages with just ad on them, srsly, buzzfeed and kotaku would be out of business long ago (they even host their video reviews whatevers)

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Any of those groups if by some crazy RP reason decided that griefing newbies helped them get to their goal could do this.

No. Forum is already full of threads about "too many griefers" "not enough crime and punishment" "PvPers ate my hamster" etc. What's one more group deciding to shoot people going to do?

People could easily go solo/private group or to another system to avoid them; people could go to the newbie systems to fight them; people could quite frankly not notice them in amongst all the existing newbie-killers and the instancing.

It would get a few pages of thread on the forums about the event, which would be buried by a few tens of pages of "generic PvP is bad/good" thread that it set off.

I mean, SDC's heat meta protest was pretty effective as these things go because they know self-publicity ... and it got a few pages here, and the vast majority of players probably never noticed it. There was a recent protest using UA-bombing and lockdowns against Frontier's handling of the BGS ... which again, barely anyone noticed and it only generated a few pages of threads spread out over weeks. People have tried getting Frontier to give in / give them more dev time with big in-game actions and ... well, it may or may not work, but it's not this big.

 

[themroc]

Not sure which tools you were checking.
Both ed-board.net and eddb.io are hosted in France, and since at least on eddb.io the IP is not shared with other clients, is 99% safe to assume is either a VPS or dedicated server (maybe the former as is cheaper).
Looking at their prices is definitely going to be more than 30USD - the API eddb.io provides alone generates files that are about 6-7GB in total. Who knows how many use these.

EDDB runs on a dedicated server in France, costing 70€ a month.

 

[GreyAreaUK]

I'm asking them to show that their costs exceed their revenue, which is easily done. Show us the donation and ad revenue, as well as the hosting and other costs. That's not proving a negative, is it?

It's also not something they're under any obligation to do, and may actually violate terms of service.