Issue with Kills stat (PS2)

There appears to be an issue with the per empire kills statistic for some charectors. When querying this data, I 

usually recieve kill data in this format:

<span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: monospace; font-size: medium; background-color: #ebeef9;">stats<span style="font-family: monospace; font-size: medium; background-color: #ebeef9;">: <span style="font-family: monospace; font-size: medium; background-color: #ebeef9;">{

<ul ><li style="position: relative;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">kills: {<ul ><li style="position: relative;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">faction: {<ul ><li style="position: relative;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">tr: <span style="color: green;">"48",
<li style="position: relative;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">nc: <span style="color: green;">"32",
<li style="position: relative;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">vs: <span style="color: green;">"0"
[/list]}
[/list]},
[/list]
However, for some charectors the data presneted looks like:

<span style="font-family: monospace; font-size: medium; font-weight: bold;">stats<span style="font-family: monospace; font-size: medium;">:<span style="font-family: monospace; font-size: medium;"> <span style="font-family: monospace; font-size: medium;">{<ul ><li style="position: relative;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">kills: {<ul ><li style="position: relative;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">faction: {<ul ><li style="position: relative;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">tr: {<ul ><li style="position: relative;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">nc: <span style="color: green;">"0",
<li style="position: relative;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">tr: <span style="color: green;">"0",
<li style="position: relative;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">vs: <span style="color: green;">"0"
[/list]},
<li style="position: relative;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">nc: {<ul ><li style="position: relative;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">nc: <span style="color: green;">"0",
<li style="position: relative;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">tr: <span style="color: green;">"0",
<li style="position: relative;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">vs: <span style="color: green;">"0"
[/list]},
<li style="position: relative;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">vs: {<ul ><li style="position: relative;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">nc: <span style="color: green;">"0",
<li style="position: relative;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">tr: <span style="color: green;">"0",
<li style="position: relative;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">vs: <span style="color: green;">"0"
[/list]}
[/list]}
[/list]},
[/list]<span style="font-size: small; font-family: monospace;">
<span style="font-size: small; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">This is obviously causing me errors, as my code is not setup to handle this (nor do the stats make sense).


The full detail of one particular charecter is below, this is by no means the only charector I have seen it on.

<ul ><li style="position: relative;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">character_id: <span style="color: green;">"5428011263335394001"
[/list]

 

That character hasn't logged in since 12 / 23 / 12 @ 1:59:10pm EST.

I'm going to guess the data format has changed since then. Our site (EQ2U) has to handle about 17 different variations on the Character record depending on what version of the Character export code was active when they exported.

Or... this could be a simple fix and a PS2 data wrangler will be along shortly to post about it.

 

Is there a notification or a revision posted somewhere conspicuous when the data export format changes?

Or do we need to figure it out on our own because something that worked before now does not?

 

The latter is generally how we've had to operate. Personally, I'd like to see EQ2 and PS2 devs posting here *every week* about what's going on, things being added and changed, etc.

The strategy that has kept us sane is, we have ONE file on our entire site called SOE.php that speaks the language of the data. Every other piece of code on our site is ambiguous and unaware of the format of the data.