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Providing Gaming Stats to the Community
tivarius writes "Teamxbox is running an article to get the gaming community's opinion on having the developers of games provide feeds of stats for their games, ala Halo 2. This will allow gaming clans and other groups to keep up with their stats on their own sites." From the article: Note that many on-line PC games have had leaderboards available for a considerable number of years. Specifically, I remember several friends and myself writing Battle.net daemons that allowed us to not only play StarCraft/Brood Wars together, but also enabled us to track stats for every game that we played... that seems like eons ago, especially considering the technological progressions that have been made circa 1998." We have discussed this topic previously.
So if I'm on a lucky streak, people can go check my records, then realize that they are being skewled by a n00b.
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One of the best ones is the Halo 2 RSS Excel Workbook", which reads the RSS feed and provides pivot-table capabilities.
An RSS to CSV utility has been created for simplifying analysis.
Several Cold Fusion/Flash entries have been made to parse the RSS.
And, of course, I'm currently working on a Halo 2 Statistics Tracking Utility, which pulls in a bit more than just RSS. Right now it just throws everything into a database (I released this bit early so that people could get started archiving), but a useful UI beta should be coming out this month.
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That Bungie.net's Halo 2 Stats are really cool. They don't always show every game you played, although most of the time things show up as they should. If only their website didn't suck, and I'd also like to be able to access those same stats from the game itself, which you can't do. The fact that there's an RSS feed for them is an even better added bonus, in that for those of us that can't actually hit Bungie.net from work (like me) you can have a stats page that'll go fetch the RSS for you so that you can rub the results in a co-worker's face the next day. Excellent.
I wish other game companies would do this as well, like UBISoft with their Tom Clancy line of games. It's also nice to be able to check your friend's stats to see how often they play, which weapons they use, and how they're fairing online, so that the next time you play them, you'll know that they have a tendency to run a certain route, or go straight for the shotgun, for example. An invaluable tool.
For those not familiar, you gain persistent server stats, and the better you are, the higher rank you have, and the more class/weapon options you have.
For a game with a "commander" position such as Battlefield 2, I think this is absolutely essential as it does a lot to prevent fucktards from ruining the game. I just wish they'd do something like that for vehicles. I mean, I can fly through the middle of the carrier in Desert Combat in a jet upside down...no easy feat...and I wish I had something that let me flaunt my skill a bit (hey, everybody likes to be recognized). And while part of me wishes the requirements to fly planes and such were really high to let me fly more often...I realize that there are times when your team is screwed unless the last remaining noob can get airborn and get his ass over to a flag to capture it.
But definitely make the stats viewable in-game.
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/. is a bunch of nerds at a million typewriters. It's not a political conspiracy determined to undermine your beliefs.
I've got a setup that automatically uploads and parses my stats to my web page any time I play Quake III Arena. It generates pictures and text showing my stats just like they are shown in the default Q3A interface. Wish I still had time to play as often as I used to...
Check it out if you like:
http://yakko.cs.wmich.edu/~rattles/gaming/quake/
Erik http://yakko.cs.wmich.edu/~rattles
As a long time player of both console and pc based games I can say it's about damn time.
I do wonder what they'll eventually decide on to implement this with... PHP/mySQL?
The more power you put into player's hands the better. They will constantly come up with creative solutions the game companies never would have thought of. Hope more companies run with this.
What I'm waiting to see is for some fuctionality to be made available through cell phones. It would be useful to do some maintenace type stuff through one.
It is pretty sweet. I'm not much of a stats guy but the detail that is tracked is unreal. How many head shots, overlay maps to see where you were when you were shot, how many shots fired, etc
* Matt Williams came up w/ a Perl script to pull down the data and aggregate it into a few html pages. It takes a while to pull it down.
There is also an issue about the sheer amount of data being tracked so Bungie has already said that the data won't be tracked forever.
* -H2SA - Halo 2 Stats Aggregator by Matt Williams under the GNU Public License, Version 2.
....... Thus ends my attempt at wit or whatever
Ummmmm... what?
The sad thing is that the part that got quoted in the article summary is written better than most of the rest of the article. "innumerable amount of things come to fruition"? Was this translated from the Japanese through French or something?
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Simple, because there are too many servers with nothing besides a CD-key authication system in between them all. Take Counter-Strike for example (PC version since the Xbox version would be different due to Xbox Live). There are thousands and thousands of different servers running different maps, with different mods (we've all seen low-grav/restricted weapons servers) with seemingly differently selected opponents. How are you supposed to track such a cluster of unorganized, uncoodinately, unrestricted servers fairly? Don't say you'll create a central system either cause that would basicly be a free Xbox Live system which no company would host due to bandwidth and data storage costs.
Can they publish stats on MY gameplay without my permission? Isn't this against the Data Protection Act (UK)?
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