Problem with: api/reviews

Is there any problem with reviews? (http://www.giantbomb.com/api/reviews/?api_key=[key]&format=json)

the response I get is: {"error":"OK","limit":100,"offset":0,"number_of_page_results":0,"number_of_total_results":null,"status_code":1,"results":[],"version":"1.0"}

Am I the only one that faces this error?

@vaggelis I am getting the same results for that call, and it is the same regardless of the format so json doesn't have anything to do with it.

Hey there @vaggelis,

How is this for you now? I am getting good results, are you?

@penguinpowered How is this for you now? Is it ok?

Thanks!

Hey @jslack :

The results look good now. I also went and looked at a lot of the /releases release date data and it seems to be better? I'll need to run my app against it tomorrow as I don't have the code at home to be sure. There is still some really odd / broken data in that api though that I would love to get fixed or at least have the ability to fix :)

Thanks

@penguinpowered Ok, as far as odd/broken data, I'd love to have a look! We have a ton of stuff in our database, so it's really hard to guarantee it's always all good. I'd love to see your api request, and I can look at the data.

Thanks!

@jslack i'm still trying to dig into wth is going on but I have at least some examples I can provide pretty easily:

http://www.giantbomb.com/api/releases/?api_key=<key>&sort=release_date:desc&offset=0

If you take a look at the first couple of entries in that result set they are set to be released in a far far away future.. I bet they will be AMAZING, though I bet the release date will change between now and then ;).

That is the general structure of the API call I am using to build my calendar, and I just keep bumping up the offset until I get to a few pages in a row with no "expected_release_date" values set at which point I know I'm into all of the games already released. Oddly enough there are some blaring omissions from this output, such as Warlords of Draenor, which shows pretty reasonable expecte_release_date fields when you look at the game specifically, but never seems to show up in the releases output when ordered by release_date the way I do.

http://www.giantbomb.com/api/game/3030-44468/?api_key=<key> (looks good)

http://www.giantbomb.com/api/releases/?api_key=<key>&sort=release_date:desc&offset=400 (you see all the other games coming out on the 13th but no WoD)

With that sort of data oddity my concern is that it is more than just a one off and that I am somehow missing a lot of other things. I did also notice there seem to be a lot more games in the db now marked with just an expected release date in 2014 but no month / day than there had been a few weeks ago, to the point that I had to change the algorithm I used to determine when to stop my queries to allow for a lot of nebulous release dates.

Hope this helps and thanks!

@penguinpowered: Hey there!

Thanks for the specifics. Allow me to explain. A couple of things are going on here.

First, in general, future release dates blow. We have a "central" games database, that multiple sites pull data from. Since we don't allow empty fields, sometimes those fields come back with like: 2097-01-01 or some other random release date, that data people / publishers / data importers decided was appropriate. Of course, we don't have any insider information the public doesn't about real release dates, so sometimes our data team has to guess at that stuff. Believe me, I know this sucks, and we're sometimes stuck doing integrity checks on dates, and we filter before output too. A good rule of thumb might be, if the date is > 2+ years in the future, consider it wrong/inaccurate.

Next, this query: http://www.giantbomb.com/api/game/3030-44468/?api_key=<key> (looks good) is querying on "game". 3030 is code for game, and 44468 is the id of the game. In this query: http://www.giantbomb.com/api/releases/... you are querying on releases (which, are different from games). In the case of Draenor, since it's not out yet, it doesn't have associated releases (although, sometimes games DO have associated releases, but this one doesn't, yet). It's usually updated when our data team has that data. So the reason that it's missing from that release query is that no records exist yet (yea, I know that sucks).

I want to help you out on this. Is there a possibility that you can try querying games instead on that second query? http://www.giantbomb.com/api/game(s)/... (use plural if you want to pipe in multiple ids)? We actually return a `releases` field on the game entity, so it might provide what you are looking for.

I agree with you, on the nebulous release data, even on our production sites, we have to do secondary filtering on all of our output to account for that. Video Games is weird.

Let me know what else I can do to help you. Feel free to ping back here, I'm happy to help in any way that I can. Let's figure out how to get your app getting proper api results.

@jslack thanks a ton for all your time and information!

I think you helped me find exactly what is wrong with Warlords of Draenor and why it isn't showing up properly in the releases output. There is no releases field for that game:

http://www.giantbomb.com/api/game/3030-44468/?api_key=<key>

Which I compared to Shadow of Mordor, which does have all the appropriate release entries:

http://www.giantbomb.com/api/game/3030-44484/?api_key=<key>

For all the other games that I am interested in / have noticed, they seem to pretty consistently have the releases area filled in, and if that releases part of the game is filled in I am betting it also shows up appropriately in the /releases API output. So I am sure I could re-work the code to use /games instead of /releases and do some sorting on maybe the expected_release_year and just gobble all those up, parse out the releases and fill in the data into the calendar, but since that releases part of WoD specifically doesn't exist it really wouldn't fix the issue so sticking with /releases seems to be just as effective, as far as I can tell.

It is also VERY odd to have expected_release fields directly in the game entity but then releases also have expected_release values since they can be different for different regions and platforms. For WoD I suppose I could assume it is PC / USA? or PC / All? But this isn't a valid place to derive this information for most games which are cross platform / multi-regional.

So, the APIs seem to be working well, it is just a data integrity issue. I was really hoping it would be the Wiki that fed into that in some way, so that I could help to directly improve the API output when I noticed things were wrong, but as far as I can tell that isn't the case.

@penguinpowered: Ya, you seem to have a good grasp of how it's working now.

Believe me, we deal with these issues on the site too. We actually expose almost every piece of our own data to the public. The stuff you are able to see is also what we see. And you can also see how we struggle with the same data integrity issues you do. It's not like we - the staff - actual sit there are input game data, on the phone with publishers. Data completeness has always been an issue, we never know what we are going to get. We do our best to manipulate and populate that data when we know more (thus why a wiki system is a good idea), but unfortunately we have to account for lack of data in lots of errors. It actually makes building parts of this site difficult. It would seem simple to build templates around consistent sets of data, but when dealing with broken data and broken/incomplete game relationship data, things get really funky.

Some publishers are also certainly better than others for releasing information. I'm not sure if Blizzard is always the best at releasing information before games are released.

I hope your app is working as intended. Would be happy to help in any way that we can.

@jslack thanks so much for your time and communication.

I appreciate the data being out of your control and populated via external sources. If it is helpful to know when it is broken then when I notice this is the case I am more than happy to mention it. If not then I will just let the anomalies be what they are and try to supplement the release data manually when necessary.

Here is a link to the calendar made with your api: https://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=1iiiid4e35autcukkei4f4kgf4%40group.calendar.google.com

Hope you are having a great week and playing many... many games!

@penguinpowered: Very cool! I've bookmarked your calendar, this is awesome. Think I'm gonna sync my ical with it. You should go ahead and make a seperate post/blog post about this and share it, neat!

And yes, playing many games. Destiny, COD:AW, and then Far Cry, Assasins Creed and Dragon Age are all coming out... ahhhhh.

Hey @marino, check this thing out: https://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=1iiiid4e35autcukkei4f4kgf4%40group.calendar.google.com

@jslack thanks kindly for the kudos and I'm happy you like it. That is exactly why I made it in the first place, just to track games coming out myself. I had looked for a reliable Google game calendar for years and they were all very poorly maintained. I saw that someone else had made a calendar based on the data from your API which looked decent but I couldn't hook it up to my Google Calendar, and there are a few others now based on your API but seem to break things out per platform, and I like just having one game release feed.

Currently I still execute the code that does the release processing and calendar modification manually every couple of days. I hope to automate that, probably by having it run as a cron type job in Google App Engine. I'm a little torn about what to do with games that have been already released. There is some use to having them stay in the calendar for some period of time. I might also try to do some additional color coding based on platform / region.

Any feedback is most welcomed!

I hadn't made any blog posts yet and wasn't sure how those were exposed / processed. I didn't know if anyone else would even notice, but I am happy to get the calendar a bit more exposure since I think quite a few people will like using it.

@penguinpowered: We have the community spotlight on the site. If you hit Marino up, he can probably get you added to that, sending traffic to your post! Might be worthwhile.

Also, I think having previously released games is cool, for a period of time I guess, Maybe have them colour coded as well, so you know they are already released.