Reminder: EverQuest Census is ~80% Complete

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Feldon, Jun 8, 2018.

  1. Feldon New Member

    You may not know the name Zoltaroth. He was the lead programmer on EverQuest II for years. One of the last things he did at SOE was converting EQ Live from flat file to a database system. During that process, he spent a lot of time building what's necessary for Census to work on EQ.

    What is Census? It's a public API that would allow anyone to make a site like Magelo, but with 10 times the features.

    Zoltaroth has since left and gone to work for Amazon Fresh. I've contacted Holly to ask if the work on EQ could be finished, but I was told that there are no plans for the EQ team to do the last bit of work necessary for EQ to support Census. And that makes me a sad panda.
    Elskidor likes this.
  2. Elskidor Augur

    Hey Feldon. Good to see you're still around and kicking. I loved your contributions to eq2 back when I played, but I'm not sure I understand your post though. Is this just a reminder that the project is nearly done but will never be complete, or is there something we can do to help?
  3. feeltheburn Augur

  4. CatsPaws No response to your post cause your on ignore

    You want a census on how many of us would like to see a census? Not sure I am reading this right. :confused: Are you offering to pick it up?
  5. Smokezz The Bane Crew

    Looks more like a stir the drama pot post.
    Sagarmatha likes this.
  6. segap Augur

    Let's see.... if the choice is a website that I can visit and see that everyone else is wearing the exact same gear as me, has the exact same AA as me and is the same level as me, OR the code team working on improving various little things in the game and fixing bugs... hmm, yep, I want the website

    The game is so cookie cutter these days, I could care less about such things. I just want them doing stuff that makes the actual playing the game part better. Otherwise, there's no reason to play and no reason to even think about looking at what other people might have. Magelo, as is, is good enough for the purpose of reviewing guild applicants.
  7. Gidono https://everquest.allakhazam.com

    The EQ dev team doesn't work on the census site since that is up to the web team to work on. It would be nice to have a API to pull data from instead of using packet sniffers in order to find item info.
    Nniki likes this.
  8. Jyve Augur

    From what's doable in EQ2/H1Z1 for this kind of thing? Yeah, would be awesomely incredible to get a built in way to see what's going on without people having to use packet sniffers etc.
    But for comparison on fixing other stuff, new things? yeah, it's rough. Don't know how '80% complete' it is, another few days or months etc.
    Nniki likes this.
  9. Fanra https://everquest.fanra.info

    Anyone wondering about what Census is can read this excerpt from my SOE Live 2012 After Action Report, where they talked about it. Nothing was ever heard again.

    SOE Live 2012 - After Action Report

    Player Panel: Making Data Sexah - Building Fan and Player Sites with SOE Data Feed:

    This is titled a Player Panel but it was more of a SOE panel. SOE described their service which provides anyone with the raw data from their games. Currently working for EQ II and planned for EQ and SOE's other games.

    Basically, you can request the same information as you get in-game on items, spells and other things. You can also get information on players.

    Known in-house at SOE as "Census".

    When it is finally working for EQ, it should enable EQ Players to be reactivated. It will also allow anyone (re: Fan Sites) to pull the data as well. So if you have a quest on your web site, you can link the reward directly from SOE.

    For those concerned about in-game privacy, there will be an option to "opt-out" of allowing everyone to see your characters.

    For EQ, most of this information on spells and items is already available from sites like Lucy's, Allakhazam's, Magelo and other sites. Census will allow those sites to be more accurate and enable them to get the information with less effort, they won't have to rely on players sending in the information. Other sites will also be able to get the information without having to build their own database from scratch.

    Census will not reveal an item until at least one player has discovered it.
  10. Angahran Augur


    I'd find it very interesting to see a list of items that have never dropped, listed by zone.
    If it could show if they were mob drops vs quest rewards that would be nice to know.

    Last I heard there were something like 5000 quests that had never been completed.
  11. IblisTheMage Augur

    I would comment that it would add more things that could break, without it being transparent to me how it would be better for players, or earn more money for Daybreak.
  12. Act of Valor The Newest Member

    No, that's ridiculous. Its probably is somewhere around 100 or less.
  13. Febb Augur

    One of the devs said there wasn't anything players haven't discovered already. The amount of quests that haven't been completed yet is because the quests are broken or never finished on their side.
  14. Feldon New Member

    I guess I should explain what Census is. Census is Daybreak's game API available to the public that allows anyone to make their OWN website and make tools to display characters, guilds, items, spells, recipes, house items, factions, achievements, leaderboards, quests, item discoveries, AA profiles, etc. Census has existed since 2013 and fansites like mine are using it extensively for Everquest II, DCUO, and Planetside 2.

    I could written my post nicer, but honestly, the way I have been treated by Daybreak lately it's hard to keep a buoyant tone. The point I was making is that most of the work necessary for EverQuest to have an API has already been completed, however players didn't know about it, so nobody is bugging the EQ Live team to finish the work. It's a shame that what's been done is just sitting there unused.

    Fan sites that let you see AAs, item setups, spell upgrades, etc. have been invaluable for EQ2. I would think similar websites for EQ would be appreciated and benefit players greatly. If you haven't looked at EQ2 in a while, a LOT of complexity has been piled on with all kinds of overlapping systems. Keeping it all straight is something I wouldn't want to imagine without sites like Dragon's Armory and mine.

    As for adding instability to the game, the way Census would work for EQ is, the developers would just go through and pick certain parts of the data that are published. So the worst thing that can happen is some quest or item or spell leaks to the public before it was intended. It's just data replication. Census tweaks *shouldn't* break the game. And the web team has nothing to do with it btw.

    I know we're not allowed to do "campaigns" to get a feature added, so not sure how folks can get their desire for such a feature to the dev's ears.
    Elskidor and Fanra like this.
  15. Feldon New Member

  16. IblisTheMage Augur

    Is that like Magelo?

    We have sites like eqresources, zam, raidloot, magelo etc etc; is there something that we are not getting today with those sites?
  17. kizant Augur

    I propose shutting down the EQ2 servers and then moving their two best devs to EQ1. Then someone can implement the rest of this Census stuff. Which I actually would like to have done. I've got a few ideas for how I'd want to use it.
  18. Jumbur Improved Familiar

    I would guess the biggest thing about "census-driven" websites, is that they are automatically synced to the official servers, and updated in (more or less) realtime? unlike magelo, zam, raidloot, eqresource etc...without relying on third-party data-miners.

    Basically "eqplayers.com on roids", but for more than just char listings.

    A lot of guild-sites would probably benefit from this on their "roster-section". Not to mention all the the sites like magelo, zam, raidloot, eqresource, etc... can automatically get database updates after the patches changes something etc...

    Who knows? maybe we could even get a version of http://www.elitegamerslounge.com/home/progress/ that was more reliable updated, and maybe even linked together with all the guild-rosters on the various websites.
    They could even track "progression-competition" and "server firsts" on the various servers, like that neat progression-page sony did for the first progression server(Combine? I think).

    Imagine something like this being updated with guild-names, in realtime.[IMG]

    It would probably be popular in some circles, where the progression race is serious business.
    Nniki and Xianzu_Monk_Tunare like this.
  19. Xianzu_Monk_Tunare Augur

    The Census system did everything that EQ Players did and more, except that it was an API which sites like Magelo, eqresources, Zam, Raidloot, and such could use to pull the information. It has been something that they were working on since even before SOE did away with EQ Players. EQ2 was the test bed, but as the OP mentioned EQ never was added because they had to convert EQ from the flat file system to a database system. If the EQ Census were to be completed and the API for it released, then all of the aforementioned sites would use that API (Magelo already said they would way back when it was originally announced).

    The question really comes down to what that last 20% is that needs done. If it is something that someone outside the Dev team could do for the most part (I am sure that there are some parts which would need to be tied in yet), then possibly this could be done with minimal if any impact upon the time of the EQ team. Now the cost for finishing it would likely need to come from somewhere else though; I personally would say this is actually something that could realistically be crowd funded and done if DBG decided to do so.
  20. Yinla Ye Ol' Dragon

    I miss EQplayers, checking if a name is available on a server was great and I hate having to fight with magelo to get it to work every time I have an upgrade.