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Your Halo 2 Stats Via RSS
An interesting feature of Halo 2 was mentioned in a post on personal site davextreme.com - Multiplayer Stat RSS Feeds. His post (quoted with permission): "Really cool thing I discovered today about Bungie.net's stat tracking: RSS feeds. Not only do they track every single kill in every single multiplayer game (along with who did it, how it was done, and where it was done), but they put all this data into a feed you can subscribe to and never miss out on post-game scrutiny. Of course, to get to all of it you have to go through a really obnoxious sign-up process (which involves -- shudder -- getting a Microsoft Passport account), but once you've finally gotten signed in, associated your gamertag with your Passport, and found the stats page, there should be an orange XML button. Pop that into your favorite newsreader, and you're ready to obsessively review every single frag."
You're stupid. There's no real argument against passport other than it's from MS. You don't have to give passport any more info than you want to.
Exposing data to users is something more services should do.
This just makes it really easy for those hugeass php script forum sig images with everybodies l33t stats in them. *Sigh*
Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. -Anonymous
From what they were saying about "XBox TV" a few weeks back, combined with these RSS feeds and integrated into the Xbox Live system, it could very well amount to the equivalent of the amateur leagues in sports at the very least. If it were segregated in some level by region, it would be even moreso. For example, in the amateur sports leagues, there are often a lot more players than the big leagues, but tend to have a few stand-outs overall, and many local areas will have a few outstanding players or teams. They aren't as well known as the star quarterback for the nearest big league football team, and would probably never be recognized on the street outside their home town, but they get enough recognition that if they walk into a local sports bar, they can nab drinks on the house.
A system like that could be automated to a limited extent. People could look at the best players' games, or they could limit it to games with players in their area.
Televised stuff would probably stay limited to the best professional competitive players in a semi-organized league, I think. Things like the top quarter of the players in one of the bit conventions maybe (Like with any tournament, the lower you go in the rankings, the more sheer airtime it takes to broadcast, so you usually have to cut it off fairly high, and do a highlight reel of the lower levels of the tournament to show how far the remaining players have come).
The main problem with coupling just stuff off Xbox Live with TV broadcast is that a lot of people on Xbox live aren't good players (and a lot more are just idiots), so you have a very low ratio of games worth televising to those that aren't, and a hard time to sift through to find the good games and still be fair and not overrepresent a few players who play either very well or just very much.
One way or the other, unless the population in general can find a way to be inspired by gamers or driven to some level of team loyalty (the way people in Detroit get angry any time you point out how badly the Lions and Tigers have been doing the last decade or so), it'll be limited to gamers gaining recognition among other gamers. Not a bad thing at all, and I'd like it a lot, but its still a closed community in that case, and there's no real gain in overall recognition or legitamacy as a sport.
Same thing applies on TechTV: The bulk of its viewers are gamers already, and I seriously doubt anybody who doesn't like video games watches it. People who do well enough to make it on the air will gain some recognition as gamers, but it won't be the sort of, "Hey, check it out, it's the Saginaw County Quake Champion at table six!" sort of recognition that can come from even amateur sports. MTV might be one channel that would buy into broadcasting games. They've usually been willing to try new things to try to appeal to adolescent audeinces. It's a step up, but again, you're broadcasting to an audience that probably largely accepts games already. Then is the fact that it's MTV. I remember a somewhat hostile response to MTV's video game awards by some gamers.
I think to gain widespread recognition and acceptance on par with other sports, it'd have to make it onto more mainstream media that nongamers, and particularly nongamers outside the typical gamer age range watch. ESPN and other sports networks already carries some little league and minor league sports, as well as less recognized sports like paintball, poker, fishing, and so on. Hell, I saw a four hour caber toss tournament on ESPN once, so they're not afraid of investing considerable airtime into unusual things (Unusual to a mostly US audience, anyway)
Not saying it can't be done, though. If log rolling, burger eating, and sharpshooting can make it to ESPN, I see no reason why Quake or WarCraft can't also. It'll really just take a network exec willing to risk a couple hours a week and a few advertising slots in prime time to try it out.
Of course, you already had to have a passport if you have a Live! account. If you don't have a Live! account, this is obviously useless to you.
Do you keep track of the miles per gallon you get in your car? Do you follow your bank account, tracking where you spend your money? Do you follow any sports team? Even high school teams track stats. Maybe this is stupid for you, but this is an excellent feature even as a novelty item. Why? Because:
- It can enable competitions. You can give prizes for most kills, most wins, most deaths, or even most times you killed someone from behind.
- Halo 2 supports clans. Clans can range from a group of friends who typically play together to semi-professional groups of gamers who hold scheduled practices. For the former, tracking stats gives you something to brag about when you win. For the latter, the stat tracking and game viewer give you the ability to analyze your clan's performance and work on your weak spots.
- Bragging rights. For example, 21 kills, 1 death, 0 shots fired. Without stats I could still regale my coworkers with a description of the game, but now I can also point to my prowess (the fact that I haven't duplicated that feat is also obvious by looking at the rest of my stats).
Stats are cool. Just because you don't think so doesn't make them "stupid". Kudos to Bungie for going above and beyond with the Halo 2 multiplayer component, and I'm looking forward to what more they can do with this!