Here are some brief stats on challenges, updated live:
positech.co.uk/gratuitousspa … scores.php (top of screen)
I’ll probably do a far more in-depth thing, once the campaign is done.
Neat!
It would be cool to see a top-100 (or even top-1000) list of most-fun challenges, eventually.
Challenge leaderboards?
I know what I’ll be doing tonight.
Edit: UPDATE:
I completely forgot to do any challenges.
I think Leader Boards or Ranking is a great idea (modded content scares me a little on this).
I would love to see (even code the PHP) for Leaderboards by time period:
Daily, weekly, monthly (they reset at the appropriate interval):
Number of games offline
Number of challenges
win/loss ratio offline
win/loss ratio challenges
weighted win/loss ratio challenges (hard to beat challenges are worth more)
Something like:
Daily:
Player Games Challenges W/L G W/L C W W/L C
Ramcat 12 4 50% 33% 98
strask 23 15 67% 44% 123
cliffski 145 76 98% 90% 600Something like that. Are there other stats we should show on the leaderboard? Campaign stats would be nice (number of games etc… but daily is probably too fast for “campaign”).
An ELO rating for each player would be good. Google that, the maths are not obvious but it is a fair way of ranking a player’s abilities. We can then challenge others around our own skill level. 
I just went back and looked at these stats, and I got really sad. I will never be on these boards. I am not a modder. I have nothing against them, just not my style of play (except for fleet graphics, that, I would do IF I was sure I could recover everything and not break it). Or had a game provided on/off switch for properly named ship graphics to swap in/out.
I also looked at the stats:
Total player-designed online challenge fleets: 33368
New challenges posted in last 24 hours: 208
Challenge victories in the last 24 hours: 470
New survival mode scores in the last 24 hours: 22
Now those are some cool stats. I actually participated in those stats. I wouldn’t mind seeing “Challenge losses…” either.
Then I began to think about the campaign,
And I got sad again. Modders will race through the campaign because their ships will never lose. Or at any event, they have a significant advantage.
That being said, I began to wonder about the idea of a leaderboard for the modders and the straight players. The real question is: would the modding community respect the straight board and not get around the apps checks for modded content?
I feel this way about leaderboards in general.
I dislike the current system of challenging people online, since I have no desire to compete with every single person who has ever played a particular mission. It would be cool if I could just compete with a small group of friends or a league or just the forum community or something and have only those stats. Of course, if we did that, we’d also want some inter-league competition…
There are some people who want to be world champions, and i’m just not one of them. Competition against the world via the internet does not appeal to me. Knowing that I’ve beat a huge number of faceless, nameless opponents I’ll never know doesn’t appeal to me. I want to know my enemy.
Maybe I’m a minority in that; I’m not sure.
So I always get sad when people start talking about stats and leaderboards and I usually figure I’ll never be on those. I’m much more about experimenting with different fleet designs than trying to tailor-design fleets to beat particular challenges.
As for modded content, I don’t think its fair to just assume everyone who does well must use modded content or that everyone who uses modded content does so to gain some kind of selfish advantage. The implication that modded ships will never lose is ridiculous. Some of us do try to make balanced mods. Some of us make modifications to the modules (both friendly and enemy ships) based on what likely makes the most sense or makes the game more fun. My enhanced armor mod, for example, makes Alliance challenges much harder, because it improves the effectiveness of all armor, across the board. I don’t do this to gain an advantage – I do this because it makes the battle more fun and interesting to me.
Even those mods that are overpowered compared to standard races are usually designed with the intent of pitting them against similarly modded races, not just to decimate other people’s challenges. I haven’t tried most of the mods or met most of the modders, but I’d be willing to bet most of us do try to balance out our mods as much as possible, and collaborate with each other online to address balance issues and receive feedback. If we don’t succeed, it’s because we don’t have enough feedback or because we are still learning the craft.
I do like your idea of on/off switches for mods.
That was my exact reason for this suggestion: http://www.positech.co.uk/forums/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=5245#p35038 I like the idea of playing with a small community of friends, and finding new friends through small games. Back in the day…we played “Global Wars” (a Risk varient) on The Chess Board (a BBS). It had a nice leaderboard system that promoted good competative play and fun.
I don’t, let me explain:
Borktastic 975446 rebel
Augment 932659 rebel
subnuke678 885233 federation
Capt. BeeDub 471150 federation
follick 451175 federation
I doubt these scores are straight content. They are modders. With straight content I score less than 60,000. This is way beyond doing well, my highest score is less than 6% of the highest score.
I would never lose with this mod. My point is, modders can run the leaderboard or (at the very least) best the very best unmodded score possible. Now, that said, I agree with Pandarsenic’s sentiments and use of this mod. There are a few challenges that seem “bad” that I would like to blow up.
Actually I enjoyed your comments in the fighter thread http://www.positech.co.uk/forums/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=5295, where you talk about this. Your comments on the modded game play have inspired my thoughts that will be in an upcomming thread. I would love to see you publish this to Cliffski so, perhaps, he will rework the Alliance into a suitable race for competative play. I do think there are “honest” reasons to mod, and I think modders can provide Cliffski with some of the footwork done for new modules, races, balancing, etc… GO modders GO.
But, and this is important and the crux of my previous question, I can’t compete on score with modded content (no one can). Those 900,000 point scores to my 60,000 make playing the game NO FUN if that is the only leaderboard. For me, I would like to optimize a fleet for one of the “endless” matches, but what’s the point? Without modded content I cannot compete. Cetiah Nova, I think you are one of the guys who would respect the seperate boards and not cheat.
If there were two boards, would the modding community follow your example?
Actually, I knew you didn’t, and it was a foolish thing for me to say in the first place.
Even without looking over the numbers, I have no reason to doubt your conclusions that the highest score used some overpowered mods.
Most of what I wrote above was just a knee-jerk reaction to what seemed, albeit indirectly, to be lumping people who mod their own private games to cheat with the same people who mod the game to enhance it and share their mods with the community. Since I had just used my mod as a way of suggesting how the game could be made better in another thread, I guess I took it a bit more personally than I otherwise would have.
I haven’t produced a finished mod yet, and I’m still playing with numbers and trying to learn the ins and outs of the game, but I respect the other modders on this board, both for trying to add variety and for trying to improve the game. I especially admire the modders who help out Cliffski and the community by making mods at the request of posters and create mods that address requests posted to the Suggestions area. I wish the term wasn’t becoming so derogatory and synonymous with cheating.
If only we can get leaderboards for each mod… or have filters on the leaderboard page to filter out people who used particular mods. I’m not quite sure how we’d do that without some kind of internet based registry, or at least a local volunteer registry in the form of a text file that would upload mod information along with the score. We can’t have the text file just automatically detect mods because it might detect mods you’re not using, such as a distinct race, and then you would get filtered for no reason… but if it was voluntary, I could just type “Enhanced Armor Mod” or some kind of code like “CNEAM031” into the text file to let everyone know I use this mod on all challenges and retaliations. It would then be fairly easy to setup a filter that can filter out those entries from leaderboard lists and challenge lists. It’s the best idea I can think of.
Putting all the modded folks together on a different list doesn’t quite seem fair, because that will put some people who put “frigate droid bay” in their game in the same category as those who put a “Death Star” in their game.
I don’t personally care because, as I said, leaderboards don’t concern me. I know I’ll never reach the top. But if we’re going to try to come up with theories and ideas to improve competitive fairness, we should try to do so for everybody, if we can.