Myrgard

Hey guys,

Just wanted to give the heads up that I'll be switching over to the "new" web site in the near future that is hosted directly by the metaserver instead of a separate web app. The main benefit is lower hosting costs and maintenance for me, but it also makes it easier for me to update going forward as well, time permitting.

The vast majority of features will be the same as the old site, but one bit that was kind of hacky before that I need to find a better solution for in the new setup is the ranking stuff. Thus for the time being I'll have to disable the ranked rooms until I sort out a better (technical) way of doing it. I know some folks will be mad, but that's just how it is at this point given my time/resources. Nothing else functionality-wise should be affected and the new site will have a few useful little tweaks (ex. ability to see steam profile links for registered users which is handy for tournaments).

I don't have an exact date/time for this change, but probably in the next week or two.

Cheers,
punkUser

The main benefit is lower hosting costs and maintenance for me

You selfish bastard. How dare you?

Will stats / record keeping be reserved only for tournaments?

All stats are recorded for every game played on the metaserver, so nothing is being lost here. It's just a question of how to aggregate them.

All ranked rooms did was basically aggregate games played in there while not including games played in other rooms. It would be fairly easy for me to maintain that aspect if desired (i.e. have the ingame stats show your aggregated stats for all games in ranked rooms). The bit that needs a bit of rework is how it handled scoring and icons.

So let me know if it's desirable to still have ranked rooms and show wins/losses/dmg stats and so on as today (with a reset) without the "points", ranks and icons part of it.

What does the code look like for the ranked part? Some equations? Maybe some of the mathletes could grok.

Shame that the original bungie.net math was buried in an unmarked grave. I always wondered how things were counted in those heady days.

Is the metaserver hosting pricey? I can imagine the bandwidth from the proxy hosting could add up. And the RAM requirements?

Being able to pull from overall stats for ranked games only we could build something like the old leader board and display rank that way. Perhaps as a stepping stone to work out the math.

I think the rank icons themselves are part of the game. Just as the Metaserver is part of the game. So if we need to work on the system that gives the icons purpose, then we are working on keeping the game intact.

Ranked gives unranked purpose. And vice versa.

I'm not going to go into this in detail again as you can find it in the archives, but suffice it to say ranked is completely pointless without a much larger player base. Hence why the current GoS stuff basically just gives you points for winning games. Bungie's system was just ELO, like everyone else. Very simple, lots of flaws, but any system is decent enough with a large player base. There's not (even close to...) enough players to bother doing any "proper" ranking. Thus all we're "losing" here is rank icons, which didn't mean much beyond how much you played anyways.

Given the continued confusion it seems like it might be better to just remove the ranked rooms with the update since apparently they don't do what people think they do anyways

Metaserver hosting cost is not terrible or anything, but it's bigger than it needs to be given the traffic at the moment. Additionally it's in two separate "pieces" (metaserver vs. web site): unifying them both makes things cheaper and makes my life easier going forward.

don't kill ranked, make it better

There's always the possibility of doing something else with it in the future, but as I've explained there's really no way to make it any "better" than it was unless we get thousands of players all of a sudden (I probably know more about this than everyone else here combined so don't waste your time arguing). So while it's easy for me to arbitrarily assign icons based on [insert your statistic here], accept that it's likely never going to be any more meaningful than that.

After a few weeks I may open it back up to just show stats based on games you play in ranked rooms, which is pretty similar to what it did before. I can make up some arbitrary win ratio or something to drive what icon you get, but everything like that will ultimately lead to abuse.

I don't think you understand what people want with ranked. People don't care for some well designed elo system that helps prove who the best players are; everyone knows who the best players are already. People want a ranked system that is fun whether it proves anything or not [getting points and losing points for wins/losses].

It doesn't matter much to me as I don't play outside of tournaments, but I'm sure the people that do play would find that more enjoyable whether the points system makes great sense or not.

The ranked system does allow for a sort of loose knit ongoing tournament. Your rank shows your activity. It goes on your record. It's for keeps. The icons are an exceptional part to the nostalgia as well.

In the year prior, we had seasonal tournaments: (MWC, summer; TCC, fall; TWDS, winter; TSS, spring). We're already in august with no sign of a fall tournament, Milk posted in June about the FFA League but unless he updates more I doubt it will happen.

Events like the ones I mentioned above kept people active on myth, aside from playing the game itself; but, some also prefer the ranked environment over tournaments or cooperative-vs-AI style games. Tournaments are often based on scheduled matches with deadlines, or fall to pieces. Ranked was based on simply signing on at one's leisure with moments or hours to spare for enjoyment.

IMO, not here to argue; here's how I think rank should be changed quite a bit if reintroduced: Most players whom prefer player-vs-player over player-vs-ai, enjoy 2team and FFA more than 1v1. 1v1 tournaments work with very few of those who play Myth these days, both attempted this year failed in actually finishing for different reasons (and the only successful ones I can remember from the past few years were private among 2 players). Therefore, if ranked is reintroduced, I suggest setting the minimum players back to the traditional 4 player. This gets rid of 3-player ffas and lopsided 1v1s effecting rank gain, and promotes the ranked users to practice the preferred hosted events by TOs and lobby hosts alike (2Teams, FFA).

Regardless, with little to no upcoming "Myth tournaments", taking away ranked all together is going to be doing less to keep players signing on.

You should keep it around for those who continue to use your server, whether you make changes to it or not.

I agree with the 4 player requirement.

Trev had some ideas as far as points go:



I suggest a very simple ranking system, as it's been, but with a set number of top ranks as I said before.

So, for 2-team games:

+2 points per win awarded to each player on the winning team.
-1 point deducted from each player on the losing team.
No points awarded to either team on a tie.

For FFA:

2 points for first place.
1 point for second place.
0 points for third place.
-1 points for 4th and under.

That's it. Nothing to it. No huge major gains or losses possible. Top ranks can't lose a ton of points to low ranks, and low can't skyrocket to the top vs highs.

Top 8 ranks follow classic comet/sun/eclipse/moon/moon/crescent x3
Rank 9th-14th get emp crown, 15th-22nd get lord, 23rd-30th prince. 6 emps, 8 lords, 10 princes.

This system would work for both skill and activity, since obviously the more you win the more pts you'll get. But also if you spam a ton of game and have an off day or night, you could still end up with a small net gain to your overall points

More from Trevelyan:

And of course 4-person minimum brought back for ranked

This system would work for both skill and activity, since obviously the more you win the more pts you'll get. But also if you spam a ton of game and have an off day or night, you could still end up with a small net gain to your overall points

Lose 5 games, win 3. Net gain of 1 point

So newer players aren't super turned off by it and stick around for more games

Guys let's get real for a second: giving points for playing games is what it did before, and I said I can basically turn that sort of simple thing back on the future again. But that's basically all it's going to do, and if people are fine with that, great.

Beyond that I really don't care to hear every individuals ideas of how many "points" X/Y/Z/whatever should be worth and whatever variant you think will save the community or make everyone happy or whatever other shit. It's all equivalent to just basically giving people icons for numbers of wins... i.e. simple "level" progression, nothing to do with "ranking". That's pretty much what the old system did, it just gave you more points if there were more people in the game to encourage larger games. Again, if everyone is fine with that, that sort of thing can be turned on again at some point in the future, but make no mistake all its doing is assigning you an icon based on your wins and such.

So really let's not start this silliness again. If you're fine with just having an icon that gets fancier as you get more wins, cool - you can say "that would be great!" here and I'll look at getting something like that enabled again. Beyond that, I *really* don't care to hear people's ranking manifestos as there's no point in making it any more complicated than that.

"You should keep it around for those who continue to use your server, whether you make changes to it or not."

This is not something I just "turned off" for no reason - this is something that was tied awkwardly to some code in the old web site, so it simply doesn't exist in the new one. So for now it's not there, but in the future I can add something very simple back (like icons based on some aggregated stat).

Garnish's idea would be good and it seems like a pretty simple scoring system to implement.

Reading comprehension... sigh...

Alright guys, this will be simpler if I just say no and you guys bitch and get over it so there you go: not doing it. I'll continue to support tournaments as best as possible (you're welcome ) but lets just close the conversation on ranked.

I imagine that the only reason GoS has lasted this long is because there aren't enough people to truly annoy punkuser.

Ahh this thread is giving me nostalgia to the good old days of mass revolution against our pro-bono hosting benefactors....

punkuser (very condescendingly)) ''sure ill do this ranked thingy EVEN THOUGH YOURE ALL REALLY DUMB. don't even give suggestions i know better than all of you combined''

after asmo's one meaningless post

punkuser ''THE OFFER IS OFF THE TABLE, NEENER NEENER''

sharkdrivingabus wrote:I imagine that the only reason GoS has lasted this long is because there aren't enough people to truly annoy punkuser.

Ahh this thread is giving me nostalgia to the good old days of mass revolution against our pro-bono hosting benefactors....

lol, good humor, indeed

I feel your pain punkUser

PunkUser just preparing for his future acting career in Grumpy Old Men 3.

tirri wrote:punkuser (very condescendingly))

If you're being honest you'll admit people deserve it (and more)

And yeah, just to be clear I have no intention of shutting down GoS or even stopping development. The point that many seem to have missed here is that it was a significant amount of effort to move the web site over to be hosted directly by the metaserver even if it's not obvious to you visiting the site (which is the point...), so it's not as if I'm not doing anything.

Ultimately I'm in charge of how I spend my limited myth development time, and increasingly wasting part of that time explaining it to the community (over and over...) doesn't seem worth it

PunkUser,

Thank you for reassuring us all that the lights will stay on. When the server went down for a weekend, people got nervous enough to say things like, "What? Is Myth finally dead?" For obvious reasons, that's how important the server is.

For the technical people, would you mind posting some notes of your progress and findings as you go along? As nice as it is for a black box to just work, there is some entertainment value in learning how it is working.

ID RATHER THE SERVER BURN THAN NOT HAVE RANKED

garnish wrote: For the technical people, would you mind posting some notes of your progress and findings as you go along? As nice as it is for a black box to just work, there is some entertainment value in learning how it is working.

That's what I try to do with the occasional posts here, but it obviously gets tiring if that status updates of all the work I'm doing on my spare time are just met with childish myth bitching Yes I know that's the norm in the community, but I'll remind folks that I'm under no obligation to continue to humor you. As I've said from day 1: I do this stuff because I love Myth and while I haven't had a lot of time to play myself lately, nothing about that situation has changed. Despite what some people think, approximately 0% of my motivation comes from the community "appreciation", else this would have never happened in the first place

tirri wrote:ID RATHER THE SERVER BURN THAN NOT HAVE RANKED

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=how+to+edit+your+hosts+file
Just add gateofstorms.net in there and your wishes will magically be granted by the mythical technology fairy!