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On January 07 2011 14:00 Fdragon wrote:Show nested quote +On January 07 2011 09:26 dementrio wrote:
in response to the recent hate, I support this because:
- I do not enjoy the ladder anymore, because I've grown tired of using the same strategies again and again, which I am forced to use against people who use their own same strategies again and again, on the same maps, again and again. Will this solve everything? I doubt it, but it will bring me back some interest in the game. Will Blizzard solve this, maybe better? It can be, but why should I wait months, maybe years, if things can be better now?
- without community mods and related development, the game will die much much sooner than it would otherwise. Saying that this kind of an effort will hurt the community downright stupid or in mala fide. Without a thriving mod scene there will simply be no community very soon; blizzard will let the game die when its focus will shift on the next game. imagine if the only multiplayer scene for brood war would have been battle.net. We probably wouldnt even have starcraft 2 today. Well hot damn You hate using the same strategies over and over again? Well then you're playing the wrong game. You are wrong you should have to keep using the same strat and perfect it much like SC1. On another note, I would not support a custom ladder on Bnet 2.0 because unless tournaments run off those maps it would hurt the player base as a whole looking to practice on the blizzard maps. Also the map pool isn't that bad right now with the removal of older maps such as kulas and desert oasis. Ninja Edit: We need to give SC2 more than 5 months to get actual balanced maps. Even BW had redonc maps during the first 10 years of its life and look at it now its doing pretty well with its map pool good maps take a hell of a lot of testing to actually balance out custom maps or blizzard maps.
That was 10 years ago. We're in 2011 to wait this long with this much uprage about the map pool is almost criminal all it requires is Blizzard to read a forum count the map pool whine posts look for some map makers and go here's Shakuras make this exact map in 5 shades of red.
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Although I don't expect much...
Has there been any reply from Blizzard on this issue?
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well at least we're making some progress
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On January 09 2011 01:02 linduxed wrote:
Has there been any reply from Blizzard on this issue?
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They didn't answer to my email yet.
Though we still cannot be 100% certain about the legality of this, we atleast know they do not care enough to respond in a timely manner (6 days).
Someone should try to post it on the B.net forums and see if we get a response there, or maybe someone who actually has the resources and knowledge to finish the project might want to try to contact Blizzard themselve.
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I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this yet, but why isn't there more pressure on blizzard to simply allow the creation of player-made ladders directly within the client?
I assume we can all agree that the ladder itself, and the ability to press a single button and find a player near your skill level almost instantly, is pretty amazing. But if Blizzard is as adamant about leaving the map issues to the playerbase as they say they are, it seems like creating an easy time for custom ladders is the most reasonable next step. Just think of the possibilities: variable amount of map vetoes; different bonus pool mechanics (or no bonus pool at all); private ladders for you and your friends, or your colleagues at work or school; separate rankings for different match-ups or different maps, or even rankings as specific as "PvZ on iccup God's Garden" vs. "PvT on iccup Fury".
I think we can all agree that Blizzard doesn't want to spend time worrying about creating maps when they could be improving the actual infrastructure of the game itself. Now that the chat channels are finally on the way, I think it's time to make known what's next on the list.
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I don't know if this has already been posted but there is a very simple solution to this which doesn't require complex custom maps. It only takes 4 steps:
1) You create a website similar to sc2ranks.com which scrapes freely available Bnet 2.0 match history from the web
2) You upload your desired maps with names like "ICCup Ladder - Refined Metalopolis"
3) People register their name and character code/bnet profile link with your ladder website
4) Periodically your website scrapes their profiles for wins/losses on "ICCup Ladder" maps and computes the current standings
No complex maps or local client needed, and since online blizzard profile data is impossible to fake the custom ladder system will be as secure as the normal Bnet 2.0 ladder.
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On January 11 2011 05:51 GameEnder wrote:
I don't know if this has already been posted but there is a very simple solution to this which doesn't require complex custom maps. It only takes 4 steps:
1) You create a website similar to sc2ranks.com which scrapes freely available Bnet 2.0 match history from the web
2) You upload your desired maps with names like "ICCup Ladder - Refined Metalopolis"
3) People register their name and character code/bnet profile link with your ladder website
4) Periodically your website scrapes their profiles for wins/losses on "ICCup Ladder" maps and computes the current standings
No complex maps or local client needed, and since online blizzard profile data is impossible to fake the custom ladder system will be as secure as the normal Bnet 2.0 ladder.
how's it gonna know if you won or lost on an iccup map... is it going to check your entire game history for the entire week? that seems very inefficient
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On January 11 2011 06:41 Keitzer wrote:how's it gonna know if you won or lost on an iccup map... is it going to check your entire game history for the entire week? that seems very inefficient
Yes it will find victories and defeats by parsing the win and loss records from the profiles. You would probably update once a day for each registered player, and on-demand at player request. If you wanted to get fancy you can update less frequently on players that don't player that often.
It really doesn't take them much computational power, it just like viewing a few thousand webpages a day. You could probably even used the SC2 Ranks API: http://www.sc2ranks.com/api so you would not actually have to do any having text processing.
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On January 11 2011 07:32 GameEnder wrote:Show nested quote +On January 11 2011 06:41 Keitzer wrote:how's it gonna know if you won or lost on an iccup map... is it going to check your entire game history for the entire week? that seems very inefficient Yes it will find victories and defeats by parsing the win and loss records from the profiles. You would probably update once a day for each registered player, and on-demand at player request. If you wanted to get fancy you can update less frequently on players that don't player that often. It really doesn't take them much computational power, it just like viewing a few thousand webpages a day. You could probably even used the SC2 Ranks API: http://www.sc2ranks.com/api so you would not actually have to do any having text processing.
Good idea, but battle net only shows on which map you won, not against whom (or is there a way?). So, you cannot figure out how many points to give the player for a win.
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On January 11 2011 07:53 Ludwigvan wrote:Show nested quote +On January 11 2011 07:32 GameEnder wrote:On January 11 2011 06:41 Keitzer wrote:how's it gonna know if you won or lost on an iccup map... is it going to check your entire game history for the entire week? that seems very inefficient Yes it will find victories and defeats by parsing the win and loss records from the profiles. You would probably update once a day for each registered player, and on-demand at player request. If you wanted to get fancy you can update less frequently on players that don't player that often. It really doesn't take them much computational power, it just like viewing a few thousand webpages a day. You could probably even used the SC2 Ranks API: http://www.sc2ranks.com/api so you would not actually have to do any having text processing. Good idea, but battle net only shows on which map you won, not against whom (or is there a way?). So, you cannot figure out how many points to give the player for a win.
Ok so this is a problem which essentially brings us almost all the way back to square one (at least until they update the online version of battle.net). You can at least use online data to make sure they are playing the games their client says they are playing, and winning the ones they say they win. You just can't verify they played with the person the local client reports them playing with.
In order trust a client you have to establish a secure way of knowing the information the players local client sends you is true. The issue you have is that you can't have any secrets (in the cryptography sense) inside the map or the local client. With my limited cyrpto knowledge this makes it almost impossible to sign results and send them to the server.
Given you can't trust the information anyone one client sends to you just need both clients to report the match results to the server (along with the replays) so that one individual player can't game the system. If you are worried about groups gaming the system they could just as easily message each over something like MSN and agree to throw games.
In fact this whole system could be easily implemented in something like SC2 Gears.
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On January 11 2011 07:53 Ludwigvan wrote:Show nested quote +On January 11 2011 07:32 GameEnder wrote:On January 11 2011 06:41 Keitzer wrote:how's it gonna know if you won or lost on an iccup map... is it going to check your entire game history for the entire week? that seems very inefficient Yes it will find victories and defeats by parsing the win and loss records from the profiles. You would probably update once a day for each registered player, and on-demand at player request. If you wanted to get fancy you can update less frequently on players that don't player that often. It really doesn't take them much computational power, it just like viewing a few thousand webpages a day. You could probably even used the SC2 Ranks API: http://www.sc2ranks.com/api so you would not actually have to do any having text processing. Good idea, but battle net only shows on which map you won, not against whom (or is there a way?).
That's what I wondered. I was told it requires memory reading. I don't know what that is but apparently it's bad.
On January 05 2011 08:23 MavercK wrote:Show nested quote +On January 05 2011 08:11 SixtusTheFifth wrote:On January 04 2011 04:48 Prfx wrote:
>Cheating: SC2Banks can be edited with notepad to fake results. This too can be prevented. The easiest method would be to let the map create a hash file for the result and let the server validate it. This can be done with STARCODE (1)
Is there a way to monitor results without storing a file on a persons computer? In my match history I can see all the custom games I've played, the result and who the other players were. If I played a custom 1v1, could a program look up my profile and my opponents, confirm we played each other on the same map at the same time and record the result? that would require memory reading. which is against blizzard's ToS.
Ninja Edit: New question. If Blizzard could be convinced to add who you played against to the public information, would that solve the problem - legally I mean?
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On January 11 2011 08:31 SixtusTheFifth wrote:Ninja Edit: New question. If Blizzard could be convinced to add who you played against to the public information, would that solve the problem - legally I mean?
Well the only problem is an easy and verifiable way to track games and yes it would solve that problem. The other option is to just have program like SC2 gears which uploads replays of games played on certain maps to a central server would also work since you can cross check the two replays.
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The bigger problem is actually finding games.
Though I guess with chat channels that isn't that big a deal anymore since your custom ladder can simply have a chat channel for each rank or something.
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Can't you see who someone played against by checking their match history and then clicking the specific match? Or are we talking about something else?
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The program should archive your replays for you and also keep track of your game history. If one match gets reported as win from both players, then you should get noticed and be given the choice to automatically upload the replay to the server, or accept defeat. the replay should then be reviewed by an admin, who would take actions like warn/ban the player that was trying to cheat.
now that i think again, the cheating player could propably change the replay being uploaded to one where he wins against the opponent in another match, so this means it could just as well be cheated this way.
another thing that could be done is the admin adding both/one player as their friend, and looking at the match history of that day, which could unfortunately be very time consuming :/
one last idea would be just dropping the game from being rated if the replays dont clear the case, but logging the incident. if it happens often for a player, he is propably trying to cheat the system.
the last idea is very little work for the admins, while the friendlist thing would be 100% secure.
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On January 11 2011 11:09 FrostOtter wrote:
Can't you see who someone played against by checking their match history and then clicking the specific match? Or are we talking about something else?
Yes you can click on it in Starcraft 2, but not on their webpage, that would be needed for crawling.
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On January 11 2011 05:51 GameEnder wrote:
I don't know if this has already been posted but there is a very simple solution to this which doesn't require complex custom maps. It only takes 4 steps:
1) You create a website similar to sc2ranks.com which scrapes freely available Bnet 2.0 match history from the web
2) You upload your desired maps with names like "ICCup Ladder - Refined Metalopolis"
3) People register their name and character code/bnet profile link with your ladder website
4) Periodically your website scrapes their profiles for wins/losses on "ICCup Ladder" maps and computes the current standings
No complex maps or local client needed, and since online blizzard profile data is impossible to fake the custom ladder system will be as secure as the normal Bnet 2.0 ladder.
This doesn't work.
Replay solution is also bad, inefficient and people don't want their replays automatically sent elsewhere.
So far the sc2banks file solution seems to be the best one. I'd love to help but I'm pretty clueless when it comes to coding. It certainly looks very possible and awesome, someone just needs to do it 
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Somehow, I don't see the point of this.
While BNet 2.0 isn't perfect by a long shot, and the matchmaking system can be a little broken at times, doesn't playing games on a seperate ladder complicate things more than they need to be? Is this not why there are tournaments?
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EPT
