Mo-momentum

I just flagged the 41st account to be a member of our motley crew!  A handful of those are SOE folk, but most of them are the curious and adventure seeking thrill seekers of data.  If you remember this post, we have doubled the size of our community in only 2 weeks.

As we get more sites and applications up and running, there will need to be some changes.  Here is a summary of where we are going with the API.

New Test Servers - We are going to be working on ways to introduce changes in a way that won't have an immediate impact on your operations.  We will be putting up a separate REST endpoint that we can push the latest code that you can use to test changes.  We don't have the ability to know, much less test, the impact of changes on your applications.  It is my hope that we'll get into a regular rythmn of release that balances the needs of new features and fixes with the need to be stable.

I do not yet have an ETA on the test server (I haven't even put in a request for the hardware), but I hope it will be deployed in the next couple of weeks.

Continued Performance Improvements - We are still working on expanding our operational footprint to meet the needs of all of your sites and apps.  We are testing it internally and I hope to have it deployed within a month or so.  This new cluster is being designed for scale and even more redundancy.

Privacy Concerns - We will continue to have discussions in this forum about the balance of data privacy concerns.  I am counting on each of you to represent your customers in this discussion so that we can provide a practical solution.  We are not going to make everyone happy, but we are going to be open and respectful about this issue and we will try to provide the necessary tools to allow each customer (of ours, and yours) to participate in a way that they are comfortable - including the ability to not participate.

As discussed in several topics in this forum, some of you are importing data from the API into your own cache.  It is absolutely imperative that you keep that cache up to date with the privacy wishes of the consumer.  If someone marks their character as being private and they are able to find that character on your site, we are going to have some backlash.  Let's stay ahead of those issues and all be model citizens on this issue.

More Games - I keep hinting at this - and I still do not have anything to annouce - but this API is absolutely intended to be used in more games than EQ2.  It is our hope that your experience working with the API will give you a headstart towards supporting the next game that integrates (and the next game, and so on, and so on...).  Please take this into account as you design your site's infrastructure.

One caveat on this...the developer of each game is in control of the content and organization of the data provided in this API.  We can represent, request and even beg for changes...but it ultimately has to be done by each game team.  Please keep this in mind when making requests.  At some point, we will probably need to create new game-specific forums for this purpose.

Variety is the spice of life - While each of you has access to the same data, I encourage each of you to find your niche and passion as you build your site or application.  Our players have varied backgrounds and reasons for playing the game.  When the official SOE EQ2 Players site launches, you find that it will not be the same as the EQ2U site - and that is a very, very good thing. Find and follow your passion.  Don't ask for permission to be awesome.

I hope that that my repetition of this is not making it sound insincere, but I am truly thankful for your participation in this effort and the community of developers that we have here.

-dan

 

Dan,

Sounds like some good changes coming our way.  

Feldon and I talked about the privacy issues with our cached data a week or two ago and decided to do exactly what you just asked.   If they turn on their privacy settings so their character is hidden from the API, within five minutes it will be hidden on EQ2U as well.

Great news on the test servers.  That's going to help a LOT.

Thanks again for all the great support you've given us all with these great data feeds.  Our users seem quite pleased so far.  

Dethdlr