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arenanet / api-cdi

Collaborative Development Initiative for Public APIs
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Add additional information to v2/builds #234

Open Ruhrpottpatriot opened 8 years ago

Ruhrpottpatriot commented 8 years ago

The build endpoint is pretty sparse right now. Why not up it a little bit? Every build represents a particular patch of the game, so why not make that information public? This means if a user queries the v2/build url he gets a list of all game builds if he queries v2/build/{buildId} he gets additional information about the build, like publish/release date and patchnotes. A corresponding build request could look like this:

{
    "id": 58420,
    "release_date": 2007-08-31T16:47+00:00 //ISO 8601 date
    "patch_notes": "some arbitrary patch notes text, formatted or unformatted"
}

This could benefit multiple users and sites who quickly want to display patch notes. A site querying the api would then always get the official patch notes and webmasters wouldn't have to look to the official site or the wiki to get the latest patch notes. This almost eliminates translation and copy errors ans speeds up lookup, thus increasing user satisfaction. Of course this endpoint would be localised.

lye commented 8 years ago

Neither the release date nor the patch notes are available in a structured format -- might be able to listen for an event to grab the release time programmatically, but the release notes would basically be proxying a request to the forums which I'm fairly unwilling to do.

Ruhrpottpatriot commented 8 years ago

That's a shame. But I won't give up so easy :)

To make this work I suggest another change, not to the API, but to the launcher. I suggest adding a tab to the launcher, called "Patch Notes", which would display the patch notes in an orderly manner and users can see before logging (or directly after) the latest patch notes while they are patching. I like this feature in the League of Legends launcher a lot, thus I immediately thought of it now.

To show this data to the user the patch notes would have to be stored in a structured format somewhere. Slapping a time stamp to that storage should be relatively easy (right?)

This change would have two benefits:

  1. Patch notes can be read while patching
  2. Patch notes can be made available via API for users to grab.
sliekens commented 8 years ago

Can we get an RSS feed for the patch notes? It should be easy enough to correlate /v2/build in its current form with individual RSS entries.

darthmaim commented 8 years ago

https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/info/updates.rss ?