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Update about API Communications


Gaile Gray.6029

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  • ArenaNet Staff

We wanted to catch you up on some API-related news. Lawton Campbell, who has been very involved with the API community over the last many months, received a promotion that will require his focus in other areas. That deserves a big “congrats” for Lawton, but that means that at the present time, we don’t have a specific ArenaNet representative who will be reviewing your requests and bug reports or posting as frequently as in the past.

But fear not! We remain committed to the API and to you folks who are so involved in the creation of marvelous tools and other great things through its use. ArenaNet is examining how we can provide the best support for the API in the long term. In the meantime, I will do my best to try to bring high-level concerns to the attention of the dev team, and devs will continue to be active in addressing issues and in reviewing and implementing some of your requests.

We’ll fill you in with more information when we know more, but in the meantime, thanks for your continued support of the API and for all you do!

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Lawton is one of the most down to earth Devs there is . Always in WVW playing with his guild and always willing to shoot the crap with you. We on YB wish him the best.I have known him for several years and I hope he know s his presence has been missed in WVW and the game in general. YB and Me aka "Twinkie " wish him the best in his promotion.Now if you see this post Lawton. ...get your backside back to WvW lol

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@Malediktus.9250 said:That does not sound all that well. That promotion has been a while ago and you still did not find a solution.

I'm okay with them taking a while to figure out a long-term solution for supporting the API. Much as I like @Lawton Campbell.8517 (and as glad as I am to see him deservedly promoted), it's bad for any core system to depend on any single person for support. The API should be treated as important enough to the community's experience as any other key mechanic; there should be redundant protections and multiple people who can step in as needed. Plus, better to have a couple people to brainstorm solutions to problems or key improvements.

So yeah, it's okay to take some time to set that up better than we've had in the past; the API is too important to depend one employee, no matter how stellar they are.

However, all the same, let's not wait for the right solution to support the API now. Bits of it aren't working today; they ought to be fixed without waiting for a long-term strategy of support. Maybe it's time to reconsider a priority or three.

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As someone said here before, having only one person responsible for a specific job is dangerous for a company. Particularly if that company enjoys consistent mobility and adjustments as a gaming entity. Anet really does need to invest in redundancy for most positions requiring responsibilities to its customers' needs as this game does.

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@lynspottery.6529 said:As someone said here before, having only one person responsible for a specific job is dangerous for a company. Particularly if that company enjoys consistent mobility and adjustments as a gaming entity. Anet really does need to invest in redundancy for most positions requiring responsibilities to its customers' needs as this game does.Seems to be the same with John Smith, ever since he left in April my account value went steadily downhill. I lost 70k gold value despite playing no less than before, but it is decreasing instead of increasing anyway.Not sure if he even got a proper replacement, probably not. If he got replaced then the new economy guy must have a completly different market philosophy.

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@Malediktus.9250 said:

@lynspottery.6529 said:As someone said here before, having only one person responsible for a specific job is dangerous for a company. Particularly if that company enjoys consistent mobility and adjustments as a gaming entity. Anet really does need to invest in redundancy for most positions requiring responsibilities to its customers' needs as this game does.Seems to be the same with John Smith, ever since he left in April my account value went steadily downhill. I lost 70k gold value despite playing no less than before, but it is decreasing instead of increasing anyway.Not sure if he even got a proper replacement, probably not. If he got replaced then the new economy guy must have a completly different market philosophy.

John Smith was never the only person responsible for balancing the economy.

The fact that account values have dropped is not evidence of any sort of problem with markets or the game. It's just evidence that the value of things you own is less. Whether that's good, bad, or neutral for the game is more complicated.

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@Illconceived Was Na.9781 said:

@lynspottery.6529 said:As someone said here before, having only one person responsible for a specific job is dangerous for a company. Particularly if that company enjoys consistent mobility and adjustments as a gaming entity. Anet really does need to invest in redundancy for most positions requiring responsibilities to its customers' needs as this game does.Seems to be the same with John Smith, ever since he left in April my account value went steadily downhill. I lost 70k gold value despite playing no less than before, but it is decreasing instead of increasing anyway.Not sure if he even got a proper replacement, probably not. If he got replaced then the new economy guy must have a completly different market philosophy.

John Smith was never the only person responsible for balancing the economy.

The fact that account values have dropped is not evidence of any sort of problem with markets or the game. It's just evidence that the value of things you own is less. Whether that's good, bad, or neutral for the game is more complicated.Well he was the head analyst, so he had the final say in everything. Besides items like Mini Karka and the jetpack skin cost less now than when they were LS1 rewards despite 5 years of inflation. It is save to say that John Smith would never have allowed this to happen. Same with many crafting materials which are at an multiple year all time low. - but I guess we are getting offtopic here
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Well, first, congrats to Lawton about his well deserved promotion. And thank you Gaile to let us know about it, good job about communicating with us as usual.

But, then Gaile, it appears ArenaNet is still lingering in the usual management issues. It's not normal Lawton's role has not been replaced already nor his change of position has been anticipated. This leaves the API in limbo space with plenty of features not finished or older parts breaking as the game moves forward with new features.

It's not the 1st time in Guild Wars history (and this includes the 1st game) that people getting promoted to new positions within ArenaNet or moving to a different job in another company make new development or even interesting pet project to completely fall apart. And in this particular case we are talking about the very backbone of several critical fan sites who are keeping the game rich and alive to the community (and those surfaced to replace the much talked and never realized mobile experience from ArenaNet that you guys advertised years ago).

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@Malediktus.9250 said:

@lynspottery.6529 said:As someone said here before, having only one person responsible for a specific job is dangerous for a company. Particularly if that company enjoys consistent mobility and adjustments as a gaming entity. Anet really does need to invest in redundancy for most positions requiring responsibilities to its customers' needs as this game does.Seems to be the same with John Smith, ever since he left in April my account value went steadily downhill. I lost 70k gold value despite playing no less than before, but it is decreasing instead of increasing anyway.Not sure if he even got a proper replacement, probably not. If he got replaced then the new economy guy must have a completly different market philosophy.

John Smith was never the only person responsible for balancing the economy.

The fact that account values have dropped is not evidence of any sort of problem with markets or the game. It's just evidence that the value of things you own is less. Whether that's good, bad, or neutral for the game is more complicated.Well he was the head analyst, so he had the final say in everything. Besides items like Mini Karka and the jetpack skin cost less now than when they were LS1 rewards despite 5 years of inflation. It is save to say that John Smith would never have allowed this to happen. Same with many crafting materials which are at an multiple year all time low. - but I guess we are getting offtopic here

It's not safe to say that Smith would have or wouldn't have done anything. He set up systems in which values of old items decreased and he was present for AB/ML, which decreased values of mats much as Istan ML did. (Prices are far lower now, because they still hadn't quite recovered after AB/ML.) And if you didn't want to go off topic, why did you bring up something that was completely unrelated to the API?

Smith was never solely responsible for any core system; we was part of a team, even if he was the final deciding vote. In contrast, to the best of our knowledge, the API has only had one person responsible for keeping it going at a time, sometimes getting help from others. We've seen problems persist when that single person is on vacation, prioritized to other projects, and, yeah promoted. (Also in contrast: people complain about the economy whether it's up or down, whereas mostly people are either happy with the API or blissfully ignorant of its existence.)

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@Malediktus.9250 said:

@"lynspottery.6529" said:As someone said here before, having only one person responsible for a specific job is dangerous for a company. Particularly if that company enjoys consistent mobility and adjustments as a gaming entity. Anet really does need to invest in redundancy for most positions requiring responsibilities to its customers' needs as this game does.Seems to be the same with John Smith, ever since he left in April my account value went steadily downhill.
I lost 70k gold value despite playing no less than before, but it is decreasing instead of increasing anyway
.Not sure if he even got a proper replacement, probably not. If he got replaced then the new economy guy must have a completly different market philosophy.

No problems on that front here and I even played less than before. so it must be a l2p issue on your end ;)

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  • ArenaNet Staff

Hi all,

We are sorry for the delay in responses. We are aware of the API issues and working internally to find the best way to address them. Mike L and I will be doing our best to keep an eye on the forums and Github, so please continue to bring issues to our attention. We have identified a few things that we can fix in the short term, and are solidifying plans for handling the API moving forward.

Thank you for making our community so awesome!

~ylan

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@Ylan Salsbury.4972 said:We are sorry for the delay in responses.Thanks for acknowledging that :)

Mike L and I will be doing our best to keep an eye on the forums and Github, so please continue to bring issues to our attention.We have identified a few things that we can fix in the short term, and are solidifying plans for handling the API moving forward.Cool. I'm glad to hear there's a short-term as well as a long-term plan.

Thanks for taking time to keep us updated. Even a short post goes a long way towards making folks feel better about the status quo (even when it doesn't change the immediate situation).

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  • ArenaNet Staff

Hey all,

I wanted to check in as well and give you all a bit of insight into what's going on with the APIs right now. Our first priority is triage; as Ylan mentioned, the two of us will directly be watching GitHub and this forum for reports and feedback on what's most important to you. Once we have established some general ordering for what will be tackled, we're working on finding multiple folks from the GW2 engineering team who can contribute to keeping the APIs up to date and solid. As several people have identified already, having the entire API project tasked to one person is suboptimal in a lot of ways. So we want to address that specifically going forward.

I'm sure you all can appreciate how huge a game like GW2 is and how much effort goes into keeping it living and fresh; so hopefully it isn't a surprise when I say that we have a lot going on and a lot of competing demands on the team's time and attention. While the APIs are something we are very much interested in maintaining and supporting for the future, we do appreciate your understanding that sometimes other things are higher priorities, and so we are trying very hard not to promise things right now. That said, as things do solidify and become clearer, we will definitely be keeping the community up to date.

One loosely related thing I would love some community feedback on - how do you all feel about GitHub and specifically how we've been using it up until now? Is there anything that you would like to see changed in terms of how we collect API requests and track the associated development work?

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@"MikeLewis.7496" said:Hey all,

I wanted to check in as well and give you all a bit of insight into what's going on with the APIs right now. Our first priority is triage; as Ylan mentioned, the two of us will directly be watching GitHub and this forum for reports and feedback on what's most important to you. Once we have established some general ordering for what will be tackled, we're working on finding multiple folks from the GW2 engineering team who can contribute to keeping the APIs up to date and solid. As several people have identified already, having the entire API project tasked to one person is suboptimal in a lot of ways. So we want to address that specifically going forward.

I'm sure you all can appreciate how huge a game like GW2 is and how much effort goes into keeping it living and fresh; so hopefully it isn't a surprise when I say that we have a lot going on and a lot of competing demands on the team's time and attention. While the APIs are something we are very much interested in maintaining and supporting for the future, we do appreciate your understanding that sometimes other things are higher priorities, and so we are trying very hard not to promise things right now. That said, as things do solidify and become clearer, we will definitely be keeping the community up to date.

One loosely related thing I would love some community feedback on - how do you all feel about GitHub and specifically how we've been using it up until now? Is there anything that you would like to see changed in terms of how we collect API requests and track the associated development work?

Thats generally a good choice going forward, in my opinion.

Some thoughts:

I think you should treat API development and maintenance differently. While its obviously nice, if the API is being developed further, the first focus should be that the current API works, bugs a fixed in a more timely manner and that after every major update, the new items, unlocks achievements etc. are being whitelisted.

Concerning Github:

I dont use it but I am mostly a "consumer" of the API, making use of it through 3rd party tools and dont directly develop tools myself.

But I guess its a better platform to talk with API devs from the community because most regular players dont understand whats being said there anyways. I guess you should also try to split feedback on development and bug reports somehow.

For example, I use trading post tools quite alot in order to keep track of all my trading but for nearly 4 weeks now, the transaction api seems broken. So I just need to know where I should put in a bug report for this (done on this forum already) and where I can see the current status of the bug.

A subreddit dedicated to the gw2 API might also be a good idea to get good feedback but i guess you guys would prefer, if it was moderated by someone from the community.

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@MikeLewis.7496 said:Hey all,

I wanted to check in as well and give you all a bit of insight into what's going on with the APIs right now. Our first priority is triage; as Ylan mentioned, the two of us will directly be watching GitHub and this forum for reports and feedback on what's most important to you. Once we have established some general ordering for what will be tackled, we're working on finding multiple folks from the GW2 engineering team who can contribute to keeping the APIs up to date and solid. As several people have identified already, having the entire API project tasked to one person is suboptimal in a lot of ways. So we want to address that specifically going forward.

I'm sure you all can appreciate how huge a game like GW2 is and how much effort goes into keeping it living and fresh; so hopefully it isn't a surprise when I say that we have a lot going on and a lot of competing demands on the team's time and attention. While the APIs are something we are very much interested in maintaining and supporting for the future, we do appreciate your understanding that sometimes other things are higher priorities, and so we are trying very hard not to promise things right now. That said, as things do solidify and become clearer, we will definitely be keeping the community up to date.

One loosely related thing I would love some community feedback on - how do you all feel about GitHub and specifically how we've been using it up until now? Is there anything that you would like to see changed in terms of how we collect API requests and track the associated development work?

You'll most likely get the most feedback off of the gitter chat associated to the API repo, as most of the developers of the bigger projects are on there as well.I think handling the development with PR's is probably best as for now, forum will probably get a little to hard to follow once you have to push things back.

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