Ariel Rin and Third Party Development for CSM 18

Council Of Stellar Management CSM Campaigns
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Why

CCP have been snuffing out some of the most passionate and engaged members of the EVE Community. In the last three years we’ve seen neglect evolve into unreliability, undocumented changes, year long outages, gaslighting and bans.

Third Party Tools have long been a driving force behind the success of CCP and EVE Online, members of our community working for free are a force multiplier on CCP development resources and have repeatedly resulted in some groundbreaking and unique tools unique to EVE.

CCP and Third Party Developers used to have a mutual goal of designing safe and effective tools, and It’s been my constant struggle to reignite that professional relationship for the benefit of all players.

I’m Ariel Rin, Third Party Developer, The current Maintainer of the Alliance Auth Project, and I’m running for CSM to bring ESI development back to a reliable, safe and game design approved state. In order to continue to push the envelope on community and social engagement in EVE.

I’ve spent the last two years as an EVE Partner with open arms attempting to bridge this gap with CCP, and while some amazing CCP devs have done their best, on the whole the experience has been heavily weighted against Third Party Developers with little to no interaction outside the Community Team. While i dont feel like my time as a partner was wasted, I think i’ve acheived all we can for Third Party Developers from this angle. More representation and a louder voice is needed, the CSM.

How

I am a realist, Getting CCP to allocate a developer to ESI again is a big ask, time and resources dont come cheap. But I see immense value in the passionate engaged Third Party Developer community as a force multiplier. If i can advocate for CCP to give us an inch to let us deliver a Mile, time after time we can make serious progress.

Advise on prioritising the 450+ untouched ESI/SSO tickets, this is likely intimidating to anyone coming afresh into the ESI role at CCP, but less than a dozen of them are severe pain points driving Third Party Developers and their Apps away from EVE.

Reinforce how the social engagement enabled by ESI is core to the longevity and passion of the EVE community. When ESI goes down and people lose access to Discord, Mumble, Teamspeak or Jabber, people are severed from EVE not just as players but as a community.

Push to re-open communication, the ESI team havent communicated a change or outage to us that wasnt reported by a popular app or discord becoming inaccessible, in almost three years. This really shouldn’t be rocket science and professional curtesy goes a long way. Most developers are chomping at the bit to help improve ESI, if there is something we can do to help, be it to reduce load on the server or move to another endpoint. Let us!

Remind CCP that every single ESI request should be tagged with our Email address, you dont need to ban us to discover who we are.

Work with the community and CCP Support to re-establish procedures around ESI reporting. A Support Ticket shouldn’t fall into a black hole because they send you to a dead Slack server (o7 the people that still use it), We have a Discord, We have Githubs, but after such a period of neglect these fall from the mind.

Continue to advocate against the narrative being pushed by factions of CCP that ESI is rogue, evil, unnapproved by game design, untrustwothy and bad for the game.

Push the Partner Program to fairly consider activity metrics for Developers as those for Streamers, Video Creators and other types of Partners.

To the great numbers of CCP Developers that do care and put yourselves on the line championing for us day in, day out. I hope this campaign reminds you that you aren’t alone and passionate Third Party Developers are still here and would love to work with you again.

My Vaguely Timeline-Esque Story

While I am primarily running on a Third Party Development platform, I’ve been around a while and developed connections and relationships in a wide variety of eve niche’s and mechanics.

  • Currently the Lead Maintainer of the Alliance Auth project with a dozen developers contributing to a fully open source EVE Authentication and tooling platform
  • Developer of AA Community Apps Market Manager, Relays, Alumni, Incursions, Drifters; contributor to Discord Bot, Corp Tools and more.
  • Built EVEMeet, for organizing out of game events. This was shut down because of COVID
  • EVE Partner for my current work on Alliance Auth and previously EVEMeet
  • Nullbrain line Member in The Initiative [INIT.]
  • Simple Farmers [FARMD] fanboy, taught me everything I know about gate camping and how to lose a super
  • Rekking Crew super hunting
  • Delve Dunks, a 10 person crew dropping dreadbombs in Delve trading 94 Dreads for 2.2T of 69 Supers (and more)
  • IT Admin and helped run Tactical Supremacy [TIKLE] an AUTZ Alliance focused solely on AUTZ players and AUTZ content creation. Early pioneers of fozzie-sov warfare and citadel mechanics. A founding member of StainFraggin, later Legacy Coalition
  • Highsec Incursions TLA#1 https://tlaincursions.com/, Level 4 Facwar missions, Level 5 Lowsec missions, C5 Magnetar’s in dreads, if you can make ISK I’ve tried it.
  • Pandemic Legion (RIP), RKK before they tried to awox me and SNIGG after that
  • Dustbunny <3 Dust 514

And before all of that, I rented in drone lands, from either Solar Fleet, XIX or whoever was “winning” at the time.

Git

For more information about the Alliance Auth project and the dedicated developer team

My projects

WIP/Betas

Socials

Discord: arielrin
Twitter Github GitLab

AUTZ GMT+10

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Expanding on the widespread issues with ESI

The non-exhaustive list of problems with ESI

  • 2018-05-18 - Chat Channels removed from ESI, while its rebuilt for new chat servers. Not Restored.
  • 2019-11-25 - “Temporary Blackout Of ESI Bookmarks”, still not restored
  • 2020-12-16 - Removal of Character Stats (those cool year in review videos!)
  • 2021-10 - Bulk character affiliation updates now fail on a single biomassed character, without details. Requiring 500 (vs 1) ESI calls.
  • 2021-11-01 - SSOv1 Deprecation Timeline, effort was put into moving to V2 at CCPs request. V1 is still active…
  • 2022-03-29 - CCP modified the JWT validation of tokens, breaking all apps and requiring rushed fixes. Not communicated, Developers were blamed for following CCPs documentation.
  • 2022-04-29 <> 2022-07-11 Corporation and Character Assets and Contracts offline.
  • 2022-07-12 - Unauthenticated Search taken offline. Will not be restored. (this is fair)
  • 2022-09-26 - ESI Tokens not being revoked upon character sale/transfer. No response from security@ccpgames, fix took a month.
  • 2022-11-04 <> 2023-05-09 - Market History taken offline, This endpoint has returned with undocumented rate limiting, leading to many developers still being banned for not respecting limits they dont know exist.
  • 2023-01-09 - Character Corporation History taken offline, still not restored.
  • 2023-01-24 - CCP begins banning people using ESI Contracts, Bans continue to be applied.
  • 2023-05-18 - Developers are blamed for using the old image server, while CCPs own websites and launcher continues to use it, Though the awesome beta launcher does use the new image server.

CCP have very nicely asked us to add User-Agent headers with our email addresses, yet strip this information from ESI requests, and cant/wont use them to contact us for issues. Because of this, they are continually banning some of the most popular community apps and Auth platforms for major alliances without even bothering to reach out to resolve the issues

405 Open ESI Issues, 269 of which are untouched for three years
45 Open SSO Issues. 34 of which are also untouched for three years
security@ccpgames.com email address is unresponsive to critical security issues

FAQ:

Q: Third Party Apps are evil, they are cheating

A: Every feature currently in ESI was approved by Game Design, but if CCP choose to change this, I would support it. Part of maintaining an API is removing features deemed unsafe or too powerful.

I do place a great deal of value in things that are currently available in the game client, and I think not providing them via an API encourages client cache and memory scraping, tools that we used to rely on in a grey area and one of the primary reasons CCP developed ESI, to legitimize approved methods of data access.

Q: I hate killboards, CCP should stop or delay them

A: So, what does this mean for ingame killmails, should killmails just not exist? Be private and remove the Corp being able to see it?

I don’t think so, and ESI is just an approved and safe way to access the data already visible to you.

Q: Having to run a server and have an IT admin for a video game sucks

A: I Agree! While I’ve put a lot of work into making it as easy as possible for players to run their own tools, the amount of time we can dedicate to making this seamless and user friendly is limited by the time we spend under attack by CCP.

Q: ESI puts too much power into the big blocs

A: In my experience as a developer for large and small entities, this isn’t so. Big Blocs have large masses of humanpower to throw at problems like HR, authentication and social access. Small groups have to spend time that could be spent creating content on these issues instead.
Automated tooling levels the playing field for everyone and frees people up to play a video game

Q: What value does ESI bring to EVE and why should CCP care

A: I mentioned that ESI is a force multiplier for CCP developer effort, what I mean by this is for every hour CCP spend on a feature, the Third Party Development community spends hundreds, building and maintaining better tools than ccp could hope to build in their time spent.

Q: What about the Excel Addon

A: An interesting point, the Excel addon is powered by ESI in the backend, as near as I can tell the delays and problems with releasing this was around the massive outstanding issues with ESI, a healthier ESI allows not only Third Party Developers to develop features, but CCP as well.

Also a shoutout to GESI that already exists for Google Sheets, built by a Third Party Developer and is awesome.

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I can’t really see any details on how you plan to make CCP putting more effort into ESI.
What would be your role as a CSM member?

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Ariel is my go to person for 3rd Party development stuff. It is critical, in my opinion, that we have at least one person familiar with this stuff on the CSM, because it impacts players so much. In the days when Steve Ronuken was a fixture, he was great and an excellent resource.

Ariel will do a great job representing this part of the community and I hope he makes it.

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Hey mate, you caught me still uploading all my text and reformatting it.

My top two posts have been updated, but Third Party Developers currently have zero way of communicating with CCP, git tickets are ignored, Support Tickets are redirected as they cant intake ESI issues, the security@ email address is a dead end. On the flip side we tag every single ESI request with an email address and ccp have never used it.

Third Party Developers dont need much, just some professional curtesy and being pointed in the right direction. We are happy to do the work that needs to be done.

I have to beleive that ccp have no idea how core ESI is to social engagement, without Discord, Mumble, Jabber and Teamspeak EVE simply stops.

Its also late in the AUTZ for myself, so dont be surprised if my thread is updated again with a fresh coffee in hand tomorrow!

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Really appreciate it mate, You were always happy to take whatever issue CCP left on my doorstep and run with it.

If i can do 1/10th of the job you did, I’ll be able to look back at CSM 18 with pride.

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You have my sword!

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Ariel Rin is one of my favorite people to write EVE Fan Fiction about as the story ideas flow so ESI…ily. Vote for this man!

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Having a subject matter expert on CSM like Ariel would be great for the player base. Good luck Ariel!

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So many of these ESI issues hurt so much… I also miss certain functionality from the IGB JS hooks (e.g., invite to convo, preview fit etc).

Good luck.

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It’s even more painful when you try to use some of the UI interactions that do exist in ESI, but weren’t included in the recent Photon UI updates. They now just silently fail.

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Ariel Rin is my favourite third party developer on the citadel.

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Good Luck Ariel!

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I fully endorse @Ariel_Rin for this

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You have my vote for CSM 18 and for CPM 3!

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Ariel’s passion for eve is stronger than anyone I have ever played with. Even when everything he has built up to help the community dies due to some unannounced change, first thing he is doing is working his ass off to try and get all the tools working again (while complaining on comms :D)

Could not imagine a better representative for the 3rd party tool community.

Dude is also a true turbokrab and some of the most fun I have had in the game has been working along side him optimising the hell out of some new krabbing activity we decide to jump into.

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Being another AllianceAuth maintainer I may be a bit biased, but @Ariel_Rin is easily one of the hardest working devs I have ever met in this game. Having worked with him for the past few years there is no one else I would rather see on CSM.

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tl;dr: You have one of my three votes (the others going to Pando and Mark Ressurectus, respectively) because community devs and tools and proper communication important.

I’m also biased per default as a now INIT. Member. However: I have been playing (again) since 2022. I started out trading. Learned about tools/external sites, such as the impressive and very helpful Adam4Eve. The disabling of the market history endpoint with zero communication screwed over a lot of people’s projects and left them in the dark for months.

Then the character corp history got turned off without zero communication. These are just two more than haphazard handlings by CCP that I experienced in less than a year which affected me personally by suddenly disabling player-created services I was using.

On my previous go at Eve, more than a decade ago, I remember discovering EveMon and how it helped me immensely to deal with skill planning and understanding more about it by having information presented to me clearly where the game and its interface was needlessly obtuse.

Alliance Auth is simply a masterpiece of an organisational/logistical backend.

Recently, I started using evetycoon.com because it saves me a lot of time by consolidating information and presenting it to me in an easily viewable manner.

EVE, as the intriguingly complex game it is, has an amazing community with gifted and dedicated individuals creating FREE tools that are usually vastly better in design and functionality than what I have used IRL both as a customer and as an employee.

What modding is for other games - community work that vastly enhances the capabilites and lifespan of a game - and thus its sales - 3rd party/community devs are for Eve.

CCP can do with their game what they want of course, and, to my knowledge, at least some endpoints had to be disabled because people were simply hammering them with requests.

But they should cherish these people and, if not support them directly, at least show them the basic courtesy of providing fundamental information about the status and capabilities/limits of their services.

edits: Spelling, Formatting

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A good egg, worth a vote.

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What do you hope to do about the excessive use of ESI to beeline toward cloaked vessels?

More importantly, there is an incredibly awful level of privacy violation with ESI and third party app usage.

Anybody that has ever run a web server knows how easy it is to access HTTPS request logs and pinpoint IP addresses to cross-reference with a multitude of other things.

On top of this, relays within relays, a vicious cycle to whatever final endpoint they may be reporting to.

When it’s all said and done, a small number of knowledgeable people have the capacity to get endless intel in ways that fall far outside the scope of the game client.

I will hand it to you, Alliance Auth is an absolutely fantastic package. To be honest, It’s the kind of interface that needs to be -IN-GAME- for multiple reasons.

I would say the -BIGGEST- issue in my opinion with ESI, is the unfair advantage it provides to those with the skills to use it. I don’t mean for the public tools and such. I mean for things like Intel and Opsec. It could be argued that ESI has almost -reinforced- the abilities of botters.

3rd Party Developers have always been a staple for this game. As technology has gotten more sophisticated, new platforms (discord, slack, etc) there’s always something that needs “fixing”. Which on one hand is the nature of the software industry, so it’s largely unavoidable. But I fear it has come at the cost of Privacy for both players -and- their characters.

@Ariel_Rin
For many, privacy becomes the cost of convenience. If you were elected, how would you ensure that player privacy is respected and reinforced? Also, what would your plan be to reduce the incredibly overpowered Intelligence capabilities within the ESI framework?