Hello everyone,

First of all, for those who don't know what Census is (or why you should care), it has two flavours:

• Realtime "streaming" API which the likes of Recursion, PS2Alerts, Voidwell, fisu and many more applications use to collect data about Alerts, Deaths (kills), Experience ticks etc
• Static API which provides contextual data such as items, attachments, map data such as current state of the map, lattice links to facilities, etc

Today I'm going to talk about the state of Census in general and what we, the API community, face every day when we use it.

Static API - a forgotten child

Since the dawn of the containment sites update, there has been a breakage between the Static API and whatever hydrates its data from the game. This means that there has been no new data added to Census since then.

Our rough estimate of a date it started occurring is 28th April 2021.

Big ticket items that are missing:

• Oshur data - we had no choice but to scrape the data from the PTS game client and jury-rig a "response" from Census in all applications which use maps or do things with facilities
• Any weapon, attachment, adjustments to existing weapons, new items, vehicles (chimera, deliverer, wasp, lodestar as they are technically new vehicles)

As you can imagine with the Arsenal update Census is now heavily out of date with current reality. This means websites that display any form of weapon data are completely inaccurate, apps that show differences between two guns, stuff like that.

We'd like to see this hydration restored, and better measures / tests put in place to ensure it doesn't fall so vastly out of sync in the future.

Additionally as of late the API is becoming increasingly unresponsive, where requests for map data quite simply time out after ~90 seconds. This causes huge problems for apps like mine that depend on map state.

Streaming API - wonky donkey

The streaming API thankfully isn't in as much of an horrifically poor state as the static version, but it still has some major issues:

• No Deaths / Facility events (plus others) are coming from SolTech , meaning Recursion for example does not work for those players
• team_id which we've been heavily requesting ever since the NSO update continues to be forgotten about (team_id would tell us what faction NSO are playing on rather than us having to guess their faction)
• Connections to worlds continue to get randomly dropped - we have to implement some form of health checks in our applications to detect if we stop getting events from a server as we just randomly stop getting data for a server
• Heartbeats that just outright lie - it has no way of telling us that we suddenly stop getting certain events from servers, which is heavily related to the previous point. Or it's purpose is misunderstood in the API community.

DBG - Help us to help you

We as developers spend literal months (some of us, years) of our free time creating tools and services for the player community to use and continue to feel engaged with the game. You can ask any long term player and they have likely used if not exclusively use Recursion for example. Many will have used various contextual stat sites over the years, some may heavily only be fully engaged with the game because of these tools.

I know from previous discussions that no developer wants to touch Census with a barge pole as it appears to be a zombie service - as in no one knows how or cares enough to fix it - and that in the end of the day features to the game will always take priority over it as it makes the most commercial sense.

However, what you may not realise is for the sake of fixing a few issues highlighted in this post, you will re-engage the willpower of many many API developers who are extremely passionate people, they will continue to create high quality and more importantly to you, high engagement, applications which in turn will contribute to result in a engaged player base buying Daybreak Cash.

In light of the recent issues with Census (someone forgot to renew the SSL certs again breaking all our apps) and the recent fact that PC alerts were also not coming through recently, Census is in dire need of attention.

Please do good DBG and at least take a look into scoping out what it would take to perform these major fixes. We're not asking you to fix everything wrong with Census, we're asking you nicely to give it a bit of love.

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