Back from some time off and I see eestats is gone. Reading around people say LaF is hosting it now, but
#1, a universally essential tool being hosted by an alliance feels a bit off, and
#2, if I'm in the right place it doesn't properly work...?

None of the countries' news histories are loading here: https://eestats.lafamiglia-ee.eu/primary

Don't really know much about this sort of thing but the code for eestats seems to be on github. Searching the news with EE's in-game functionality is extremely unfriendly from a user interface POV. Eestats is attractive, simple, and helpful. I think this sort of feature should be incorporated into the game instead of left as an offsite tool.

You can say that it's "extremely unfriendly" if you want to but that doesn't give me any information on how to improve it.

This site seems to be currently working: https://li.servegame.com/...y.php?cnum=15&snum=11

Oh happy to elaborate. I appreciate your response.

First and foremost, with eestats you can click simply on a country and see its complete news history, all attacks of all attack types for the round. And then the other countries in that history are also clickable. Simple navigation and extremely useful functionality.

Next, with their market page, you can just click last 6 hours, last 12/24/48/72 hours, and see the outputs of different nice tables containing min/max/avg/totals of all goods that sell on the market. Maybe the in-game ability to search X hour intervals is more powerful overall, and can still be of use. But having to basically fill out a form entering multiple numbers and selecting a single commodity is a big step down in terms of useability, and the output isn't as clean as the tables eestats provides.

Additionally I like how on a country page you can then click the history button to open a log of every change of state on a country (nw or land), timestamped. But as obviously that can be quite long, so it's otherwise hidden, just waiting there available on demand. Misc stats page pop up info is nice too. Beyond that, I'd say the UI theming is also just so clean (color scheme, font size, etc.) so as to be maximally absorbable. Graphs are collapsed/uncollapsable too.

Thanks for the link. Without it i was realizing I would literally no longer be able to look up who I had retaliated against if more than a week had gone by. It looks like this site has made the effort to give DR calculation attempts also, which is new to me. I will also note, the laf hosted install of eestats seems to work everywhere except the for the news on Primary. They can probably fix that. But that brings me back to the original point, I don't see a reason people should have to go to external pages for this.

The game is intended to be fully playable without any third party tools. The Conquest server currently doesn't have any game feeds and we were all able to get through the first round together. It sounds like you want the ingame news search to go past 7 days? I can get rid of that limit and change it to cover the full round for the non-clan game servers.

With respect to third party tools, they are always going to be better (or at least different) from what the game offers because they only focus on a single thing, don't have our UI constraints, and don't have any of our obligations. There are a lot of different ways to show market data: ingame search does it one way, eestats has that table you mentioned, and LI's site has graphs. Players can pick and choose whatever format they like the best. I have no interest in trying to put those sites out of business.

Besides, there are reasons why players would want to check market data or NW changes while remaining logged out of the game. Third party sites can also offer data and visualizations for past rounds which really don't fit at all within a live round of the game.

Okay, maybe you’re not gonna take up this particular suggestion, totally fine ofc. just for a moment, though, putting aside what your ultimate decision will be, and putting aside initial gut reactions:

the news and market interfaces act like holdovers from the Mehul era, I think it’s fair to say? Much more intuitive when you look at the scores list and want to check a country out would be to click on that country, not to go to a separate news page and then run a search on their country number. I mentioned before also how you can get a more complete market picture faster and easier too. I would suggest there’s a case to be made for modernizing the display and navigation here.

In terms of the game being able to be played without third party sites, I would argue there is universal adoption of third party tools among competitive players (on any server that allows it). I dont suggest the game try to chase any little feature people have out there on their sites, but I believe the game should make more easily accessible the very core acts of looking up the country list, checking news, reading markets. Basic stuff that could be executed better for e2025 here in the year 2026.

Anyway I’ve said my piece, thanks again for giving me your ear

Many of the FFA functions have been broken on eestats for several months as well.

"Warning: mysqli_fetch_assoc() expects parameter 1 to be mysqli_result, bool given in /var/www/html/eestats.com/functions.inc on line 67"

Yes, you can make a case for modernizing the entire site. There are a lot of reasons that make that incredibly difficult and time consuming. I am trying to figure out ways to make the playing experience better for you via small improvements that can be accomplished in the short term.

For example, you pointed out that there are some scenarios on the Classic server where you need to search beyond the past 7 days of ingame news. I've already removed the 7 day limit on my development version and that change will be available in the game soon.

With respect to target searching, I could change the DR column in the advanced search results to be a link to ingame news for that country number and add links to attack, spy, or message the searched country in the news. So the flow would become:

1) Run advanced search to find targets.
2) Click on DR column on a potential target to see its news.
3) After reviewing the news, click one of the shortcut links to attack or spy it.

Would that be helpful?

That would be titty sprinkles