Orbus Gameworks

Pirates of the Burning Sea's Data API

Apr 17, 10:11 AM

So the fine folks at Flying Labs have released a data API for Pirates of the Burning Sea. (I discovered this through Sara Jensen Schubert since the PotBS news site lacks an RSS feed.) (*UPDATE*: Joe pointed me to the PotBS news RSS feed.)

The news post has a fair amount of technical detail, but I was more interested in the provided API documentation discussing the various stats made available to the public. Now, I don’t play PotBS, but I’ve heard a fair amount from the developers about how the game plays so that’s what I’m going on. Feel free to call BS (and I don’t mean “Burning Sea”) if something I assume about the game is entirely wrong.

First, there’s server status information. While pretty basic, this is also pretty useful, especially if you want to create a widget that monitors game server status for… some reason or another. Maybe your server went down and you want to passively monitor when it goes back up so you don’t have to constantly manually check the status in the launcher.

Then there’s port and landmark information. Ports and landmarks are basically big PvP points of contention; they are basically territory you conquer for your nation and are part of a more large-scale PvP than simple “ha I sunk ur ship.” The state information they provide is impressive; you could easily build a nice Flash or AJAX visualization of the PvP status of the whole world, featuring some pretty rich drilldown.

Finally, there’s nation scoreboard info, which is the leaderboard info for the different nations (French, English, Spanish, Pirate). Straightforward stuff as well.

I think the biggest value that could come out of this API is historical data. If some enterprising user actually scraped the leaderboard and port data on a daily or hourly basis, you could build some great visualizations of port conquering over time, how that relates to score changes, etc.

Now the Flying Labs devs write that they “have plans export more game data in this manner in several stages.” They plan on including “cargo types, consumables, skills, recipes, European traders [...] auction listings, [and] volume of money in the economy.” Eventually they will have character and society (basically guild) information as well, although it’s all tentative at this point.

I recommend that they really do get that character and society info out the door. That’s the kind of stuff that really hooks players: moreso than questions of economy, players want to know what their friends are up to, and they want to experiment with and show off aspects of their own characters. That’s where the value is in terms of engaging players long-term.

— Darius Kazemi