Dust 514, some EM2 teasers and statistics

As you might have heard, CCP announced Dust 514, their console MMORPG. And then announced it was to be integrated with EVE, especially with alliances and corporations. I just don’t see how it can work, honestly.

Half the point of EVE is the userbase is a very mature one and the sort of crowd who sit in their room playing with internet spaceships. Does EVE really want to get the Halo players of the world contributing to the game? I honestly don’t think so. It’s a very snobbish view, I know, but the average console gamer probably doesn’t want to spend their time liasing with alliances and planning the takeover of space from other alliances with internet spaceships they can’t see. What’s in it for the Dust 514 players, anyway? A mission system that could easily be done with some clever AI, from what I hear. I remain highly sceptical and look forward to seeing what CCP has planned in further detail- if they make it work it’ll be fantastic. But it’s a big if.

On a much lighter note, I’ve got some snippets from EM2′s new API integration. We’re being really thorough with this so far; we have seperate workers to download and process the API, meaning we can get around the API-being-slow bottleneck by having 3-5 workers just downloading and a few doing the processing (which is quick). What we also wanted to do was give you, the user, tons of control over what information we load into EVE Metrics. Read on for detailed information.

Right now we don’t have the ability for you to set information as private. It’s either in the system or out. That applies only to market orders, of course; everything else is private anyway. We may well be using people’s transactions and asset data in an anonymous manner for statistics, but we’ll have a complete privacy policy drawn up before this goes live so that’s more concrete. What we haven’t added, though, is a way to have your orders show up in the system just for you and not for anyone else. It’s a technically huge hurdle, and so it’s unlikely to happen.

Edit: Apologies for the odd yellow lines in the screenshots below. My computer is currently totally fubar with graphics card issues and software problems and I’m writing this blog in safe mode with graphics artefacts all over the damn monitor. They’re not there on the site, anyway.

What we do have is the aforementioned shedload of controls over everything we access. Here’s the API list view:

The EM2 API key list page, complete with permissions link (Click image to expand)

This is exactly the same as on other websites I’ve produced, with one extra addition- the permissions button. Click on that and you’ll be taken to a page that looks something along the lines of this (BETA ALERT: The UI here is unfinished and the API methods are not representative of what EM2 will actually use. The character list method will reside in it’s own API-key-wide section instead of on each character, too, and you won’t be able to block character sheet calls):

API Permissions example page with character sheets blocked on two characters (Click image to expand)

Now, this is where things get interesting. EVE Metrics will only pull data for the methods enabled here. By default, everything that is not required for basic operation (Which will be Character List, Character Sheet and Corp Member Security for corp directors- more on that in a bit) will be turned off. As you browse EVE Metrics you might stumble across features that need data from the API; for example you might try and use an asset valuator. At that point you’d be prompted to enable that bit of the API. You can also go in and fiddle on a per-character basis at any time to keep things locked down to your heart’s content.

Of course, this means nothing. We could be pulling your asset APIs for your corps and selling them on eBay. Now, I’d like to think we’re quite well trusted in the EVE community, but of course the more paranoid amongst you will want to keep an eye on your API request logs. Our server’s IP is 77.74.196.169 and we’ll be maintaining a list of all IP addresses API requests could have come from if we ever expand to more than one server. We may also add our own API access list to log everything we do with your API, but that’s subject to performance constraints.

We do think this system will let even the most paranoid of players and CEOs of large corporations use EVE Metrics safely and securely, without compromising any data they don’t want shared with us. Of course, I’d be interested to hear feedback on the system, but that’s what comments and Twitter are for.

I promised some statistics up in that title, so here’s some juicy stats for you now the teasing is over.

• The Forge Market Coverage: 65% (Active Orders)
• Active Orders: 480,734
• Expired Orders for July and August: 1,608,408
• Total Orders: 2,089,151
• Historic Datapoints: 6,949,494
• Computed Trades for August: 892,990

And for the technical readers, some interesting statistics on our caching performance:

• Cache hits: 72% (438,140 of 609,386 gets)
• Cache datastore size: 41 megabytes

We’re quite proud of that cache hit rate. The vast majority of the time you look at a page on EVE Metrics, the database is barely involved; you’re looking at a pregenerated snippet of HTML. But there’s never stale data on the site; every time new data comes in the relevant caches are wiped and next time you look, the new data is there right away. It works really well, and is part of the reason why EM2 is so damn snappy compared to EM1.