A Thank You Amongst The Fire - Regarding the JSON API

[sheyworth_XBL]

Look, I am with everyone else that, honestly, maybe shipping the game with this much needing to be patched was a bad idea.

BUT.

I wanted to speak out about something different for once. Everyone else can keep complaining.

I'm a web developer who loved the fact that you had a decent but not wonderful API in 2020. I wanted to say thank you, probably to the web team, for expanding on that API this year. I wrote a tweet in one of the "what are you hoping gets improved" threads in Twitter back in 2020 and stated that a better API would really start to open up the market for developers like myself to help promote your game and you did exactly that.

The json files are incredibly detailed now, you guys made sure you touched absolutely everything that was missing from card details in previous years, it's fast - even when both the site and the game are slow or crashing - and I'm excited for what this means for 2022 and beyond if you continue to keep expanding it.

On the note of expanding it, as a developer myself, and someone who wants to specifically try to make streaming better and with more interesting or more baseball-esque details, I wanted to reach out here on ideas of what I think would be absolutely excellent for devs to be able to control and what would also improve streaming (IMO) as a result.

• Expand the APIs to include your previous box scores and games played. I'd love to create a ticker that felt just like a real sports channel, showing my previous games I've won and lost, summarizing some of the key details of the game.
• Webhooks - you know you have a flipping community - take advantage of it! Provide us webhooks that we can tie into for following players that we are currently buying and selling. How amazing would it be to have a site or app that notified you when someone outbid you? How much more competitive would that make the market?
• Leaderboard API - I'm a very strong player but I'm not Top 50 - but would be incredible both for competition and for marketing the game if your top streamers could get a developer to tie into a leaderboard and pull the data every 5 minutes to show where a particular guy stands amongst his competition. Hell, even if it's as simple as just spitting out a guy's "place" - like "currently in 201st place" would seriously help potential viewers understand which streams are the best to watch for competition and which ones are just for entertainment.
• I'd also find it quite incredible to quickly pull your Ranked Seasons, Battle Royale or Event Lineup to make a ticker showing off your lineup pre-game. I understand that it shows it on screen at points, but I have some friends that only tune in for the gameplay and struggle to figure out who is coming up next, who just batted etc because my strike zone 2 view focuses on the hitting and not the player.

Otherwise - great job on this one specific thing! I know your team will work out the rest - it's disappointing and frustrating - I'd have rather seen the game shipped two weeks late then deal with two weeks of losing progress, but that's the past and this is now, and it's time to give some praise where it's due.

Shane