[Poetic] The Killmail Monopoly
The Killmail Monopoly
Eve-Kill (also affiliated with zKillboard) and Battleclinic will continue to have a complete monopoly on killmail applications. I'm not blaming them, mind you. It's not their fault. And in EVE-Kill's case, they do the best job they can of giving the data they collect from CCP back to the community.
Why does this monopoly exist? How does this monopoly exist? It all comes down to the manner in which CCP serves up killmail data from the API. Given an API key for a character, only one call can be made to the killmail API per hour, and whichever site makes that call first gets the data, any other site that makes the call in the same hour is served up with an error. So if you give your API to site A and site B, and then at 14:00 site B pulls your killmail data, then only site B will have that data. If site A makes the same call at 14:10, it receives an error. If at 15:05, site A makes the call, it will get the next chunk of killmail data. If at 15:10 site B makes its call, it gets nothing.
(Edit: CCP already has a fix for this on SiSi. Multiple calls per API key per hour without errors being thrown.)
Players, naturally, give up their APIs to the biggest killmail sites available. If you happen to have a new twist on the killmail idea, you've little chance at collecting any player or corporate API information. Players (and directors) are going to keep their API with the biggest repository, no matter if you have an even cooler implementation.
To see your idea come to fruition, you could just collect killmails straight from zKillboard's API. They actually have a very flexible API system that allows data to be collected on a number of filters. The problem, though, is that EVE-Kill/zKill don't have the resources for a robust system. Their API is down occasionally. You can only make a single call every sixty seconds. And you can only collect two hundred killmails per call. So your application is always going to be well behind EVE-Kill in terms of up-to-date information.
EVE-Kill could also decide to block your data collection, if they didn't like how you are using their data or how you are competing. (I'm not saying they would cut off a competitor, but they could, and they'd be within their rights to do so.)
None of this, having to rely on a third-party developer for data collection, is ideal. This is really where CCP should be fixing and improving its killmail API to allow access to anyone, at anytime, to the data. Preferably making killmails public data, removing the need for API keys and the like. This would immediately expand the killmail offerings available, create real competition and variance in the space.
I know, some of you are straight up highsec gankers and pirates, and you don't want your kills on the grid. You want to maintain as low a profile as possible. If all killmail data was public, not requiring API keys, then you'd lose that low profile. I can think of one reasonably simple solution to the problem.
Simply, delay all killmails by ten minutes. Allow any player who has recorded the final blow on a ship to obfuscate that kill for a fee. Perhaps 10% of the value of the ship plus cargo. Or perhaps just 25% of the hull value. Some non-trivial value, at any rate. It works as a nice ISK sink. The player has ten minutes to pay this fee from the moment the kill is recorded into the database. Once that fee is paid, the kill will never be transmitted out of the database via the API. I would keep this payment system to the individual, not implement it at a corporate level. Seems like a fairly easy fix, it allows people that want to keep a low-profile to do so, and allows 99% of all killmails to be available to all developers.
Allow killmail retrieval to be a public API call, and we would see a boom in killmail applications. We would see a lot more variety. We'd see a lot more ingenious uses for the data. We'd see a lot of cleverness out of the developer ranks.
As it stands, as long as the killmail API works as it currently does, nobody is going to offer their API to some upstart. There shouldn't even be a decision on who to give killmail API keys to, they should simply be public. Let competition flourish.
Source: The Killmail Monopoly