I always took the victories:attempts as giving an objective indication of the difficulty of a challenge - a map with few wins and lots of attempts suggests that, gosh, people tried pretty hard to beat that one.
But I just realised… While you can only ‘win’ once, for the statistics, every time you play it after that, you still add to the ‘attempts’ count. So if I play a new challenge, and beat it 10 ways with 10 different fleets… The challenge will then show 1 victory and 10 attempts, which I find a little misleading.
I have two solutions:
Perhaps once you’ve defeated a challenge, subsequent attempts should no longer add to the total either?
or
Add a third stat, ‘defeats’, which increases on each failed attempt someone makes before they manage to defeat the challenge, from which point onwards they only increase the attempts value, not the victory/defeat scores. This way attempts would continue to indicate the popularity of a challenge, and you could still gauge the difficulty based on the victory/defeat ratio.
This has now been done (at the server). In future, all plays of a challenge which you have beaten get ignored. This will not correct any existing stats, but for posts of new challenges, the change is made
This doesn’t really have to do much with the loses/victories count but… Is there currently a timeout in place for challenges? I was browsing the challenges online and it seems like there is a billion up. Just some sort of system where if a challenge doesn’t get played for a week (a completely arbitrary time) it automatically gets taken down would be nice to keep the online challenges moving. Please forgive me if there is a system like this in place, I was just noticing that there seems to be a lot of 0/0 “Defeat my fleet, pesky human” challenges up at the moment.
I am planning on pruning a lot of the older challenges at some point, especially as they would have been put together with older builds of the game anyway
Cool, that’s nice to know. I figured something like that would happen as we get closer to release anyway. But, just for future reference, is there some sort of timed system in place for auto deleting older/not played challenges? If not you might want to just so you can decrease the load on the challenge server/keep the challenges menu at least somewhat clean. Obviously this is very low priority though
No it makes good sense, although its also a complex topic, because what if people upload really awesome challenges that people enjoy fighting against? I think its true that I need some cunning logic that only deletes old challenges with under X plays and Y ratings and so on…
Could it at least prune challenges that contain illegal ships? Currently, some challenges are now crazy easy since the illegal ships just don’t get to play, leaving a few hapless frigates to get wasted.
Maybe keep a ‘last played’ timestamp on the server. Prune challenges that haven’t been played in a couple of months.
You could also record a game version number on challenges.
One thing I’d really like, would be to be able to see how many points the opposing force spent, on the deployment screen. (Both to help identify broken challenges, and just so that when someone puts up a challenge that only uses half the points, then I know to field less points myself.)
Another thing would be to record the points spent on a challenge when it’s uploaded. Then, when a player opens the challenge, have it calculate the value of the legal ships - if the values differ by more than, say, 5%, pop up a warning so the player knows they’re playing a challenge that might have become broken. If you wanted to get really clever, you could script something up to do this and prune out these ones.
I’ll get a proper system in place at some point. For now, i just deleted 135 challenges where they were from a build before races got entered in the challenge list, and where there had been no attempts at the challenge.
