Can we get an honest CCP response on the state of the ESI?

EVE Technology and Research Center Third Party Developers
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The CCP devs are reasonably active in this forum and respond to quite a few posts, so I’m hoping we might be able to get a real, honest response from one of them.

As we all know, the ESI has a lot of bugs, inconsistencies, and other issues that are well-documented but don’t receive fixes from CCP.

Since the ESI was released in 2016, we’ve seen a steady decline in the effort contributed to it by CCP. There hasn’t been a post on the third-party developer’s blog since 2021. The team that was responsible for it hasn’t posted since 2018. Most of the CCP developers who worked on it have since left CCP. @CCP_Chimichanga (Nicholas Herring, the Technical Director of Infrastructure at CCP) commented 2.5 years ago that the slow ESI development was due to a move from JSON to Protobuf internally, but there hasn’t been a real update since then.

It seems that the only time CCP will comment on the state of the ESI is when they have to disable something because it’s broken or has been abused (market history endpoint recently, still disabled, and the search endpoint earlier last year), but they won’t comment on why other issues (purely on their end, not due to abuse) won’t be repaired or receive any development effort.

I get it if you simply don’t have the time or money to work on it and add new features, but these tools are used by hundreds of third-party apps that keep this game alive. Some of these issues are pretty minor in terms of CCP developer effort but would have a major impact on quality of life for third-party devs.

And if the ESI has been “archived”, for lack of a better word (won’t be touched unless absolutely necessary), I get that too. It’s a business decision that I don’t agree with, and I think it will gradually cause greater and greater harm to the game as the current state gradually becomes more out of date, but that’s your call. But if this is the case, CCP could at least make a public statement about that so we stop hoping.

So, CCP, please give it to us straight:

  • Has the ESI been archived/abandoned?
  • Will developer time/effort be allocated to fix any of the major bugs, inconsistencies, or limitations?
  • If some developer time is or will be allocated, what’s the best way for us as a community to identify what we consider to be the most important fixes or improvements?

It’s hard to keep track of who is around anymore, but I’ll try everyone I know who has worked on ESI at some point or might be able to answer these questions (please don’t ban me for doing this, I’m desperate):
@CCP_Convict @CCP_Swift @CCP_Chimichanga @CCP_Mephysto @CCP_Prism_X @CCP_SnowedIn @CCP_Masterplan @CCP_Bartender @CCP_AquarHEAD @CCP_Zelus

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100% this. Some of the more egregious examples:

  • The bookmarks endpoints were “temporarily” disabled in 2019. They’re still not re-enabled. That’s a hell of a “temporary”.
  • On the public contract item endpoints, you can get ME/TE/runs for blueprints. On the private (character/corporation) equivalent endpoints though, you can’t, because they’re older and were never updated to meet the new design.
  • CCP decided it was better to create a completely new API for new faction warfare data than to update the faction warfare endpoints on ESI. Yeah, they would rather create an entirely new API deployment and not tell anyone about it, instead of just updating the existing one that the third-party devs use.

Crazy stuff. I’ve been a tech lead for a lot of companies, and I’ve never seen one be so OK with such poor maintenance.

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To be honest, EvE would be a better game without ESI. Just make all kills/losses public and keep public char data, that’s it. Imperfect information would make EvE a better game IMO.

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What a ■■■■■■■■. I dont know any other game that has an api that nearly matches what EVE provides. Its the base for the myriad of third party apps out there, many of them still working even without further work on the api. It had an impact on me and other people getting into development as a profession or improving there. Reasonable criticism is one thing, crying due to the sake of crying is something else.

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I know the csm cant say anything due to the NDAs

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CCP decided it was better to create a completely new API for new faction warfare data than to update the faction warfare endpoints on ESI

Happens a lot in our industry, “the code is rubbish, I know better lets re-write it” and then you end up with nothing really getting done. That, and devs tend to re-write code they don’t understand… Honestly, ESI future is not looking good.

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The one thing is if you don’t understand the code. This means your qualification is poor and you start to learn by first copy-pasting the code, then trying to make improvements where you see the gaps, then making a refactoring of the entire system if it really helps development.
The other thing is if the code is really bad and you can’t really make any use of it and forced to duplicate entire system for every new endpoint. In this case you are better off creating an entirely new system and hope it is easier to manage, more reusable and future-proof.

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I’d put good money on ESI being sunsetted/deallocated resources as it’s due to be replaced Soon:tm: by a Quasar/gRPC based API. It’s not even a case of good/bad code at this point, it’s about justifying spend on a mostly-retired project with imminent replacement on the horizon. Rest in pepperonis ESI, we hardly knew ye.
Don’t hold your breath for anything other than quick easy fixes, the new faction warfare API should’ve made it clear that ESI is not being touched anymore unless they absolutely have to.

So:

  • Has the ESI been archived/abandoned?
    • Yes, mostly.
  • Will developer time/effort be allocated to fix any of the major bugs, inconsistencies, or limitations?
    • Bare minimum
  • If some developer time is or will be allocated, what’s the best way for us as a community to identify what we consider to be the most important fixes or improvements?
    • See above, nothing you can really do.
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What source do you have for ESI being replaced?

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Can we also get an honest response about the bounty system?

“Temporarily” removed in October 2020?

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You likely won’t get a response, because “no news is good news, right?” They arent going to report on the ESI until they have something good to say.

Anything else will just add to the “EVE is dying” meme.

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Fanfest roundtable, can’t remember the name of which it was, but answer to my question (paraphrased) “will this new quasar/gRPC stuff replace ESI?” was essentially “yes but we can’t officially say yes”.

No, that roundtable was not recorded as far as I’m aware. If I remember rightly there was some discussion at the time, and it’s also slightly hinted at in the Quasar dev blog, that essentially as game services move onto Quasar/gRPC they can simply flag certain services as ‘public’ and those can then be consumed by non-EVE-desktop-client-clients. AKA third party tools.

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