ESOhead and data access
 

So I thought this warranted its own topic. I just got done reading Kentarii's farewell post and something he said caught my eye.

So wait wait wait....Why is ESOHEAD not sharing this data openly? :confused: Considering "their" data is the efforts of this very community (including myself) and the fruits of the public openly sharing their data with them... That data belongs to the community, to the players, to the developers, and to those that donated it in the spirit of data SHARING and collective contribution. It's now that same community that ESOhead is now shutting out by denying access to the very data that was shared with them to openly further the games documentation and developers? Seriously? How can anyone justify this?

I MUST be missing something here?

Yes and no. ESOHead earns income from people viewing ads. Simply making everything they have accessible to anyone by download would negate the need to visit the website.

As for people 'sharing' their data, major POIs aren't that difficult to find by anyone. What ESOHead is typically good for is harvesting or chest locating. But one can easily go find that some of the areas are very incomplete for many of these things. That's because people aren't really sharing much anymore.

Funny ESOhead didn't mention that when turning to the community to donate, upload and share. I think if anyone would have thought that ESOhead was going to turn around, lock it down and use it solely to be used to further their own commercial interest... no one would have participated.

Then why even bother collecting it to begin with. They should have done it themselves, and not duped the ESO community into doing so for them... apparently it was hard "enough".

Right... The fact of the matter is ESOhead has done absolutely nothing of use with the data. Pathetically, they have also prevented developers from making use of it as well. Why? for a few AD pennies?

I can't imagine why.....

POI data can be accessed with a simple api command loop through all the zones, you can store this data to saved variables and then use it anywhere you want. All other data (npcs, vendors etc.) is another story.

Sharlikran once wanted to create a questing addon which displays starting positions of quests (kinda like skyshards or lorebooks addon) and asked for my help. He told me he simply asked the admins and they answered he was allowed to use the data of esohead's map as long he uses the data only for the addon and not for other websites etc.
(I don't have the email anymore, so I can not guarantee for the correctness of above statement. Maybe I remember it wrong.)
So as far as I know we are allowed to use the data. Simply tell the admins what you want to do with it and ask them.

Btw the data is openly available, the json files which contain the data can be accessed via simple http request. The real question is: Are we allowed to use them? (And am I allowed to post the link^^)