Although TeamLiquid has always been an invaluable source of progaming-related information, I’ve often thought that we were still lacking a decent, dedicated tool which would gather and provide access to all the objective data in a natural, instinctive way.
Who’s this player? What’s his korean name? Does he have aka’s? Which team is he in? How old is he? How good is he on < insert map name >? Did he ever achieve anything? How long has he been around for?... Those are just random examples, and just a little fraction of what the Team Liquid Progaming Database can answer. Yet, this is precisely the kind of extremely basic data which often was a real pain in the butt to retrieve in the past— at least for us non-koreans.
Progamizer was the first step towards filling that gap. But despite being a handy tool and all, it had its obvious limits and could definitely not be used as the base for anything bigger. This is why, after getting promoted at TL, I knew that building something completely new would be the only way to go, as well as the most exciting thing I could do here as both a developer and a (big) SC/progaming fan in general.
The First Step
Today, a few months later and with the (sometimes huge) help of several fellows —whom I’ll give proper thanks to below— I’m finally proud to present you the first version of the Team Liquid Progaming Database which the staff has been calling TLPD.
You can also access it at any time using the right side of the site by clicking the topmost banner:
I won’t delve into details of what TLPD can do here— because it’s hopefully straightforward enough. I would like to point out one little thing though: this database is still far from complete. Literally tons of things could be added or improved in the future. A few relevant examples: the current version doesn’t store 2v2’s, doesn’t group games as series, and doesn’t handle “random” properly. It could also have its own ranking system for players, allow user voting on games/VODs, or even display charts and the likes. In short, let’s just say what you can use right now is TLPD 1.0 and that it still has a really deep potential for evolution.
A Team Concept
I’d like to thank all the people who’ve helped me out with this project. This includes (random order for most): - SonuvBob, whom I bothered on MSN a whole lot. Bob kept giving me great suggestions and feedback on just about everything, while inputing tons of data to the database. He's always sounded just as excited as me regarding this project and therefore I’m pretty confident he’ll remain an invaluable help for the next versions ; - VioleTAK, for basically updating more than 500 friggin’ youtube VODs in something like two days after being promoted. Just fucking insane ; - our beloved Manifesto7, who has no equal when it comes to hyping things up. From the quiz challenge thread to the amazing preview news and including the writeup TL contest, he took care of everything ; - KizZBG, aka the author of approximately 100% of the graphic stuff you can see on TLPD (TL's right side column excluded). Icons, banner, little arrows... it's all his doing ; - Taiche, who sent us a whole pack with almost all the maps' pics (taken from his great RepASM software) along with their associated data, including size, tileset and start locations ; - GTR-2-Go, who updated most of these map pics/data to the database, and who’s been submitting all the proleague games for two weeks now ; - thedeadhaji, for adding the rest of the games from the last two weeks plus all the remaining VODs (about 50) ; - zXk3, for creating the graphic stuff on TL's right side tab, i.e. the nice header button as well as the magnifying glass icon ; - DJEtterStyle, for maintaining the Power Rank whose top-3 is now also displayed on TLPD's front page ; - all the (rest of the) staff in general, especially Carnac, Klogon and Manablue ; - and finally Kennigit and Jathin for their nice suggestions.
... I hope I didn’t forget anyone.
Feel free to leave your questions/suggestions/bug reports in the TLPD Feedback Thread.
A few things to note: So far there's only YouTube vods, in the future there will be Google and direct-dl links, so the count will shoot up big time. Also in plans is an option to insert notes, and a bar of sorts to show VOD quality (low/med/high), the note will be important since right now there are some (not many) batch VODs (example: full Bo3 sets, same VOD for all 3 games, the note will say "Game2 starts at xx:xx). Random note: sAviOr currently leading the VOD count with 77, Boxer follows with 70, NaDa third with 69 :-)
Really neat and useful application you made here. I just got a small request of modification: make it easier to click a specific game (the + sign), bigger or with more padding or something. Love the tabs and integrated VOD:s.
really nice ^^ I can help gather info from the KeSPA website, if you'd like. Hehe, this kinda helped me a lot because a bunch of my classmates ask what the hell am I writing in Korean sometimes on the whiteboard, when we get the chance. And I even list stuff on a different notebook. I finally corrected my wrong stuffs! really nice~ ^^
wow, you are so insanely crazy awesome... such a clean and nice interface... wowowowowow
just one thing, i notice that the VODs are sometimes hard to notice... I think VODs are what makes this feature so freaking awesome... if you can make them show up more conspiculously in the games list, that'd be great...
most of us (myself included) are unworthy. i thank PoP and the rest who made this tool for sharing the fruits of your labour, even with dirty uncontributing peasants like myself.
everything is unbelievable.. except one small thing. i dunno about others, but Nal_rA 's nickname is the Dreamer Protoss and Anytime is God of death (or sa-shin) . hope its added =p
This is not only one of the coolest things I have ever had the pleasure of using, but it's also one of the most addictive. I've been all over the database since PoP allowed us to poke around and it's been incredible!
Only after having access to such a resource did I realize just how ignorant I was. This will go down as one of the most important contributions to the SC Progaming community, ever!
Thank you so much for your work guys! PoP and all the people doing data entry, bob, vio, haji, and everyone else involved. This is a really special project and you're the people that made it happen.
On July 28 2007 19:21 Dark_Luster wrote: everything is unbelievable.. except one small thing. i dunno about others, but Nal_rA 's nickname is the Dreamer Protoss and Anytime is God of death (or sa-shin) . hope its added =p
This is really a very usefull tool and i greatly appreciate it ! I don't even want to imagine how hard it has been to gather and order all these information, really nice team effort as usual team liquid.
I can suggest one or two things but I won't now because this is just too amazing !
I also don't think you should use [NC]...YellOw as an AKA, because.. well, a clan tag doesn't exactly constitute an AKA. Then you'd have to add YellOw_LegenD and some other random stuff from other clans.
Well, even though TL.net may have some influence we are not the ultimative authority when it comes to giving Korean map names an English name. Namja Iyagi has been called Namja Iyagi everywhere, because the Korean mapmakers used that name themselves. It's only relatively recently that they have started putting Korean/Chinese character as the actual name in the Mapeditor (i.e. the one you see on the right side in the lobby when you create a game). I think the first one where they did this were Iron Curtain and Peaks. It's happening more often now and there really isn't any perfect solution for it. WGT uses Fantasy as the mapname for example.
reason I brought it up was 'cause I was looking for mong hwan and didn't find it; I tried monghwan, mong hwan, mong-hwan, etc etc, and finally I was like d'oh! use fantasy.
but it'd be more convenient. not really vital. just a suggestion, really.
EPT![[image loading]](/tlpd/images/tlpd_logo.jpg){kind=logo}
![[image loading]](/mirror/layout/tlpd.png)
really nice~ ^^
