I'd love to have the ability to check out my stats / milestone progress from the web. The UI for doing that currently is a bit cumbersome and there's so much information there that you can't even page through it all during the break between games. It's also nice to be able to link to that sort of thing and compare it to your friends.
Yeah - stats are awesome! I'd also kinda like the devs to do something with PHP/GD so that it generates pics with stats embedded in them in the form img = uberent.com/stats/statview.php?type=1&player=DigitalArchmage Types of pics it returns could be whatever pre-formatted stats pics you can dream up. kills/deaths. I know someone who could freelance this :ugeek:
This would require setting up servers to collect data from XBL users at the very minimum, which would be pretty costly. I doubt Uber has that kind of income to afford such a thing, what with them only having one single product on the market and all.
The data is already being collected is it not? I'm assuming that's how the leaderboards work. I don't want anything fancy. Hell, a crudely formatted text file with nothing more than the stats from in-game updated once a night would be incredible. I'm pretty sure the community would take that and do something amazing with it.
It shouldn't be expensive at all. Given: The data is on a stats server. The "tricky" part is getting the data to a web stats server (making the reasonable assumption you don't want the website to access the stats server directly, even with just R/O access, which is a fine security measure). Devs (and I'm assuming they have control over the data on the stats server) could probably run a cron every so often (hour/day, whatever) to get the data over to something the website likes (MySQL = free). And at that point, it's cake. The kind of cake that isn't a lie.
Yeah, I guess just having something set up to grab data from the leaderboards wouldn't be much trouble at all.
That's really too bad. Obviously it's not impossible (look at bf1943) but the fact that they don't have a way to do it sucks. I wonder if there's a way to read the 'save' data if you had it on a usb stick. Someone could write an app that parses it and uploads it somewhere.
That's probably a bad idea since it's so easy to mod using USB drives. If the point was to show off...Well, we'd end up with a *LOT* of people that have reached round 9999999999 in Blitz mode, earned 9 googolplexes worth of money, earned every single protag 999999999 times, have a K/D ratio of...You get my point. If it's not used to show off...Well, what's the point?
Reading the other thread, it looks like devs don't have write access to the XBL leaderboards (cause they needed MS help to get rid of obvious hackers). Was kinda afraid of that. Assuming the same holds true for read access, some report would have to be made that pushes data. It's best if the script placed the data into the target DB directly, but even if it were crude, such as emailing an XML once a night, it could be done from there. (I say this wanting to brainstorm even a creative solution - not to say "this isn't hard" - I'm guessing the security/polices/MS does not make this trivial. Approvals, blah, etc.). Anyone with access to the leaderboards (anyone with XBL, in other words) could transfer data by hand from inside of MNC. Stepping up from that would be to OCR the leaderboard screens or sniff and parse the data (I'm sure both would be fun-- but the latter sounds especially riddled with MS challenges. Or maybe it's plain text. Who knows). I won't bother trying - i used to be nuts enough to tackle challenges like that, but not these days (and I'm sure a smarter solution exists). Anyway, not criticizing, just discussing. I don't know the relationship with MS, but I would understand that it governs a lot of what can be done (politics and contracts alone). By the way, it's cool that you (devs) are around so much in your forums, and are as willing as you are to talk about stuff like this. Maybe I hit on something that will get some balls rolling! Just don't hax my Support pro so I auto-miss .
They don't have save files, but surely they have to keep some of that data locally, no? I'm sure it would keep track of your lifetime earnings somewhere if you just pulled out the network cable and played local blitz, right?
