Lower the synchronisation frequency of the Hive’s public API to once every hour or less.
More information:
Although Hive’s public API is being used for amazing community creations like HiveTools or the Assistant stats bot, people have recently started abusing its functionalities for malicious purposes that worsen the player experience. A small group of users have created a tool that tracks individual players’ statistics and sends out alerts when these tracked players start playing games. This makes it incredibly easy to snipe anyone and make their experience on Hive less enjoyable.
It appears that people try to make money by selling tools like these for absurdly high prices and subscription fees. I don’t think it is in the Hive’s and its community’s interest to have (paid) tools like these around, only designed to worsen the player experience and earn money.
I don’t see a need for the Hive API to synchronise more often than once every hour. Checking the updated stats after every game can become an unhealthy obsession that can be prevented by lowering the API’s sync frequency. It might be less resource-demanding if the API server only has to track and update changes once an hour.
An alternative solution could be the change from a public API to a private one, granting access to trustworthy creators through an application process. This would require a lot more effort, though, and might not be worth it.
A better solution to this would be to pause all API updates when you are toggled offline until you either log off the server or toggle back online (similarly to hypixel)
As the person who made a hive tracker this would not change anything unless it updates once every 6 hours +
EDIT: Also “absuardly high prices” make the bot more limited making it less of a problem as less people have access to it. also it is increadibly easy to make a snipebot so if someone were to care enought about tracking players stats live they could easly make it using basic coding skills in a day
I think another fix would be a toggle on Hive where you can change whether your stats are shown on the API or not. There is already a toggle named “Share Activity Publicly”, but I’m not sure if it actually does anything:
Honestly, I don’t think restricting the API is the solution here. Tools like HiveTools, stat bots, stat trackers for sniping, etc have been around for a looooong time. I guess it’s becoming more visible along with assistant and other services frequently updating… feels like a classic case of one person had a bad time so now everyone has to suffer.
Zeux also said the bot is paid therefore there is less public access, yes I agree sniping is an issue but atleast it is somewhat restricted in terms of the people that can use it. Also if the API only updates once every hour (how zeux wants this to be resolved) it would still be possible to know roughly how a user plays (which you dont even need a tracker for that). Trackers or no trackers there will allways be snipers on hive, aslong as they play legit and they are not crossteaming it’s fair play imo. there are larger issues on the hive that need solving.
I think to make it private and give it only out to specific project hive have access to (assistant bot) would be the best option because I don’t really see a use in an open API even you can make nice things recent events shows people are always going to abuse those for their own desires and advantages (and make it even payed to ruin other players fun and experience)
Voted, i would recommend if hive make it privately and only giving access to the known bots (assistant bot), and giving it publicly like that might affect the hive environment in general and makes it unfun or even getting hard targeted by those who are using the bot to stop people from getting wins or having fun while playing.
“Unhealthy obsession” sounds like a personal issue that OP mentioned. Turning the API private would kill a lot of cool projects. Hive’s always supported community devs so it’d be a shame to walk that back tbh. And the truth is, even if it’s paid for, it doesn’t mean it’s bad. Plus, if someone wants to target a player they will do so regardless. This is like banning clocks because people check the time too often.
I don’t agree with this because I like checking my stats on discord after every game. I agree that there should be a setting on /toggles but don’t bundle it with offline mode, I also play mm a ton while using offline mode. And if anyone tries to target you that much in games without name tags (like mm) just apply a random costume.
I mean I get that. Maybe lower the frequency for PVP games, to like once every ten minutes. But every hour is still high. And keep non pvp games like mm at normal.
I am the Developer of Assistant and I can surely see the concern here but your suggestion is a nightmare to us developers and what we want to create for our community due to a small number of people abusing the intended purpose of the API
Firstly to prevent any of this, you can simply have the API be private and have API keys granted from in game or a developer portal so Hive always knows the requests being made.
Secondly you can just toggle your online status in game to prevent people seeing you online and sniping you. I understand that polling the API is quite the way you can snipe people but a bigger issue is /f list that practically exists so that’s a bigger problem
At Assistant we do our best to prevent sniping as it’s not something I condone myself either but we cannot add barriers as people can simply bypass it by using the API directly.
Authentication is key and that’s just the only way you can reduce sniping chances. Any other measure just seems like a distress for us developers as we do leaderboards ourselves tracking over thousands of players per hour with the intention of updating stats and not sniping.
Hive planned to add API keys and I can confirm it exists but just for specific purposes like higher rate limit. I vote for Hive adding API keys for authentication globally and not this specific suggestion as it would cause more problems than solutions
Let me know if you have any questions which I can address
Voted!
