Killboards were notorious for how easily they could be fudged before api. Keeping the kill logs in both player history and corp is just fine.
Which effectively makes them stop existing because they would go back to being so inaccurate that nobody would care about them.
And what about war history? Or should that be private between corps at war and war details hidden from the rest of the playerbase?
Yep. War details should not be public unless the parties involved in the war provide them (and can be trusted to be honest about it) or you make the effort to send a spy/scout to observe the war and get that information.
Iâm not really sure why you think less data would create more content.
Stop lying. You donât agree with the reasons given but donât pretend that they havenât been explained to you. Less data creates more content because it removes the pressure to avoid fights and preserve killboard stats.
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{citation needed}
You might remove a few of the most killboard-obsessed players but that would be offset by an increase in PvP from people being more willing to engage without worrying about their killboard stats. And TBH, if a corp drops out of EVE entirely because they canât farm killboard stats, well, nothing of value has been lost. Thatâs the lowest tier of PvP quality and not something EVE really needs to support.
Iâm not really sure what benefit you think making wars less visible would have.
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The value of accurate intel increases now that CCP is no longer handing it to you for free, creating opportunities for spies/scouts/etc to create content.
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The wars that do happen are more likely to have actual goals (âclaim this systemâ, âkill that person who killed my mission shipâ, etc) where PvP is a means to an end, instead of inane âletâs get killboard statsâ arena fights.
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The lack of CCP-enforced accuracy gives more opportunities for propaganda, manipulating public opinion, making a reputation for honesty have value, etc. Information warfare is supposed to be part of EVE and putting control of the information back into the hands of players makes it more interesting.
Youâve simply not explained your reasons.
Stop lying. I have explained my reasons, over and over again, and they are not complicated.
Youâve basically said âI hate data existing so if it went away it would be goodâ.
Stop building straw man arguments. I do not hate data as a general rule, I hate this specific sort of API-verified data.
For the extreme minority that avoid all fights because of that reason.
{citation needed}
It can hardly be an âextreme minorityâ when there are, as previously mentioned, alliances that kick members whose killboard stats drop below a certain threshold because the alliance leadership insists on maintaining impressive killboard K:D ratios.
Some people are playing a game, just for fun.
Someone gets all huffy and upset.
Someone else tells them to chill out, "It is not like we are keeping scoreâŚ
Keeping score makes things too serious for many people, it is just fine as it, people with egos can sign up, people who just want to have fun can ignore it.
Saying the data is incomplete unless we post other peoples data against their will only works in San Francisco 
Give and inch take a mile?
Bottom line, many customers donât want it and CCP is not going to force it when really all it does is feed a handful of egos that no one cares about.
Are you like 17, no experience in the REAL WORLD?
CCP is not going to intentionally violate the privacy of itâs customer for no good reason whatsoever.
DUH???
The perception of the customers is all that matters.
Now I know you have no real world experience.
If the purpose of killmails is to allow players to analyze data, then all killmails should automatically all be public.
If the purpose of killmails is simply bragging rights, then no killmails should be automatically be made public.
As someone with a long background in data analytics, there is a real potential for faulty analysis using the current system since the data will skew towards war-centric kills. If CCP is releasing this information for analysis, itâs inherently invalidating that analysis.
Either way, this âin-betweenâ method CCP has going on at the moment is flawed. They should pick one and stick to it.
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This part is self-contradictory. They can be either public or require you to have some way to reach them which is not avaialble to everybody, not both at the same time.
Historically kill mail verification has been developed as part of private by design XML API. It was not possible for anybody to verify your KM unless you provide them with API credentials. You were also able to revoke those credentials at any time. All proofs provided by API were proofs only to a specific entity, to whom you decided to share this data. Everybody else had to TRUST that entity not to lie about your kill mails. And this was true for ALL kill mails. However, from time to time CCP experiments with making parts of kill mail stream public. This caused little good so far.
With ESI once you post KM link it is effectively public forever which raises a lot of privacy issues.
IMHO kill mails are not content.
If I understand your main argument is that kill mails motivate people to engage in PvP beacause kill mails facilitate some rating or reputation system. However, given the nature of PvP in EVE where you will hardly have a fair match up, I would argue that kill mails show nothing. Not on a scale of a single pilot at least. Maybe you can tell a few things about relative power of bigger entities like corporations or alliances but not about individuals.
On the other hand we already have other metrics, that measure power of big entities like the amount of controlled space. I think it would be great if CCP gave more things to capture and hold for people, that do not want to live specifically in NS and cannot participate in SOV wars. Maybe a public counter of how many days Large upwell structures were held by certain groups? Or how much time in total these srtuctures were in space before you destroyed them (making anything old a much more interesting target and giving flow to the economy)?
For individual pilots, there could be derivative ratings, that are developed and assigned by owners of these corporations based on their activity in fleets and even PvE, because all those successfull efforts never happen without well organized logistics and industry wing.
Either way the idea the kill mails are a good way of indicating your âratingâ feels ridiculous to me.
Egotists do.
Also, Donald, we told you before you canât post here. EVE is a spaceship game, not a girl.
In my alliance of 600+ daily active members, I donât know a single person who unironically believes this.
It has been explained to you by other people, yet you keep insisting on this misinterpretation of omething being public. Available to a large group of people is not public.
The war kill mails are the only kill mails that are public at the moment. And yet you can control access to your kill mails at all steps. You just have to avoid kills during wars, i.e. by not being war eligible. Your kill mails being public as result of war is your consientious choice. What you are proposing in OP is to make all kill mails unconditionally public.
I am basing this on 9 years of observing how things evolve in this game. No one here proposes anything that would prevent whole combat groups to be still fond of their own killboards or even third party ones. This functionality is already in game and functions well.
Just as an example of such experiment, maybe even unintended - at some point it became possible for members of NPC corps to look up kill mails of each other even if those were NPC only. How in your opinion this helped to create content?
Again, for the people who are already interested in sharing their own PvP stats your proposal is irrelevant because they can already do so and are quite motivated to post every single kill because why not ruin stats of your opponents while improving your owm? As for the purpose of data crunching that you aim for the killmails might be an interesting source of statistics on destruction of ships and modules but you already get a good overview from existing data and MER.
Can you be more specific here?
Since the data zkillboard displays does not belong to zkillboard you are likely not prevented by any law to scrape kill mails. If I am not mistaken they also provide rather convinient API. One major limitation for CCP if they would create such public API would be that many industrialists will try to scrape it for stats creating huge additional load. With zkillboard in between CCP shares load in effective manner.
In what way, exactly? I feel there is some kind of misconception here on your side. If CCP will facilitate some new leaderboards that you will be able to dominate without having a claim in NS or at least some assets in space that you will be forced to defend or to loose your reputation it will not necessarily make you a recognized PvP group, that people will respect, because all achievements are onyl as good as people see them. Being able to hit players who have either a) lower numbers b) improper equipment (with respect to your fleet) or c) just low experience in PvP does contribute to your KB stats but does not indicate, that you are good at PvP. Because there is another way how you can skew your KB stats even if they are forced to be public - by avoiding fights that you consider risky. There is one pure PvP event with fair fight rules that is Alliance tournament. Everything else is just open world PvP which is never fair. Thus deserves no ranking because ranks would have little or no prediction power.
I just gave you an example of what can be used as a reliable metric of success for PvP groups.
I fail to see what problems you are referring to. Apart from pure NPC loss mails which would not facilitate any PvP.
Can you provide an example of such manipulation?
As far as I know for every KM 2 pilots get a copy. If you killed someone there is nothing that can prevent you from sharing this data unless you donât give a hooch about killboards and prefer secrecy instead. And for at least 90% of players in EVE posting a kill to killboard is number 1 action after getting a mail.
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That does not sound like a âproperâ player group if you cannot agree that with leadership. There is nothing that prevents them technically to respect your request. But that is just my opinion. Feel free to disregard it. Just be aware that it exists and other people might share it.
Do you have anything to prove your opinion on the matter? If not then, again, you donât have to use mine as a truth either, of course. After all you and I definitely had different game experience. Otherwise we would not have came to opposite conclusions.
You can check this claim yourself. Stop posting any of your own losses to KB and check how much will end up not posted by the other party on average. I doubt the error from unposted kills is really that big with respect to overall poor quality of KMs as metric.
Of course people are not posting own losses. This is a natural behavior and I see no harm in it. The interested party here is killer. If killer has no interest in posting a kill then they have this right. If you suggest that everyone should post those kills eventually you basically force people to reveal their tactics, locations, even daily prime time. Guess how much damage you would do to PvP if you force gatecamp KMs to be posted even with a 24h delay, if this camp is a regular event, rather then a one time incursion? I wonder if someone ever extorted money for not posting a KM of some blingy PvE ship flown by a member of a reputable PvP corp. People do accept ransoms after all. This also affects KM stats.
Ok. So you donât want to disclose the intent. No problem. What stops you from scraping data from ZKB yourself? Have you tried to query ZKB owners if they can provide you with the access you need? They might even give you direct API to their db. As I said before if CCP would ever think of releasing this data stream it would be very bulky for them to handle fair access to data for everybody. ZKB, however is a powerfull enough aggregator. They might be able to actually resolving your problem without CCPs intervention.
The only level playing field in EvE is AT. Everything else is skewed by design. Even duel mechanics allow for dishonesty and unfair play. So I donât see how accurate and precise KMs, even with additional information such as full navigation and activity log of every ship around place of kill for the last 20 minutes will help.
However, even assuming such perfect system can be established, what purpose would it serve apart from nourishment of self-esteem of a few in top X positions there? The abstract metric has nothing to do with real power in game. Just as in real world your ability to run fast does not make you the best fighter let alone the most powerful man on the planet. There are games where rules are set in such way that you can generate ranking of individuals or rather teams. EvE is simply does not belong to that class because there is no repeatable environment, that is necessary to test skills of players/teams. No situation can be repeated. No conclusions can be drawn from that chaos of events.
As I said above you can test this claim yourself. Please let me know if you will have any definite data on this one. But I doubt that this issue is that big.
Reasons:
- People who donât want their kills posted to reduce intel on themselves will loose control over this.
- This will shift load, that ZKB handles now for free to CCP servers and likely multiply it by a large factor, because there will be many people interested in having close to real time or even just accurate FULL dump of all kills. This information is so valuable to industry, that there will be incentive to scrape this stream if it is easily available. And that will create huge additional loads on ESI servers which are not the fastest thing to work with already nowadays.
- Perfect intelligence not on specific person but on a state of PvP in general might create unnecessary positive feedback loops in the system. Imagine if you got a perfect dataset that would allow you to train a predictor of your chance of killing player X based on your current hull and fit and their recent fits in that hull and global stats on effectiveness of fits against each other. Would you still initiate a fight if that predictor would give you a 20% chance of victory despite your gut feeling?
I think your data would be more accurate if it was 100% self reporting. Dude-bro with his 20 afk rorq miners not being included in pvp stats makes a lot more sense to me.
i.e you are positioned 300 out of 5000 toons that actively participate in pvp is more accurate imho than position 300 out of 500,000 toons that have ever spent a single day in pod goo.
Awesome, if itâs all automated I can do twice as much manipulation! I donât even have to upload the kills any more.
Oh right, you just want free intel. Iâm with you now.
Nah, I donât like this idea.
Lucas Kell has a lot to say, he says it a lot, if you read what he says really closely you will realize he has nothing to say, and he says it a lot! He has an OPINION, and if you canât handle that he has an OPINION, well thatâs just too bad cuz you are gonna hear it again and again, and again and again, and heâs gonna let you know that his OPINION can be found elsewhere. 
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