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Your Halo 2 Stats Via RSS

Posted by Zonk on from the view-your-shame-or-triumph dept.

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."

1 of 34 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Worthless Feature by Osty · · Score: 3, Insightful

    And you need a Passport Account to boot

    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.

    who needs to know every kill in every game of every player in every universe. It's stupid

    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!