Ranking System

nebula32

I have 0 Lua exerpience so I don't know if this is possible, but could a server run script collect data after each round and update a website (something similar to sc2ranks.com) which i'm happy to develop. I'm thinking some main grids could be displayed showing top 100 Alien/Marine commanders, Top 100 Fades etc.. And also be able to query specific information about a searched player such as average score per game/ winloss ratio as well as other things.
Just a vague question on my part.
Howard

Laosh'Ra

should not be a problem to implement this (although it's a lot of work), but there are already some threads discussing the significance of those values. what it comes down to is that our community has many different and rather strong oppinions about this so no matter how it is done, so there will be people massively complaining about it...

for example: even something as pure as win/loss ratio will depend on the people you play with (e.g. being an awesome commander won't help much if people don't listen to your orders). and knowing that every game matters (even if its 2vs3 or something), this might be a stressfull experience and dozends of possibilities to exploit the system.

sure, it could only be implemented on a few servers. but some people already complained about this creating an elitism which divides the community (or something like that). personally, i'd only like this for gather-games and/or clanwars where people are already required to use mics and are not allowed to go afk or w/e during the match.

invTempest

I'm sure you will see someone create some sort of a stat tracking system similar to HLStatsX, but the problem right now is that this information would be difficult to get from NS2 as the easiest method stat programs use to collect that data is from parsing the server log files. Problem here for NS2 is that the log files are very vague and don't tell you who killed what with what weapon or anything like that; It just shows that a player has died and even worse it doesn't connect player names to steamID's.

Until this kind of information is found in the log files, you will only see very limited LUA mods that collect this kind of data by hooking into the network variables. I'm sure UWE will make the logs more friendly down the road but I'd rather them focus on optimization and adding the final features.

As far as the idea behind a ranking system - This is completely up to the individual server owners / admins / communities to decide if a stat tracking or ranking system is best for their community. The information should just be for that communities servers and nothing more. Creating a public ranking system across a number of servers will create a lot of unintended consequences such as people leaving so they don't ruin their stats and purposefully stacking teams to further increase their own rankings.