game history in ICO profile is useless if people can avoid losses.

First, the numbers being shown are not working (fix coming soon). Quitting the game is recorded in the database along with many other stats so their records will not look so hot when we put up the online stats website. You will still get a win recorded if the other player quits or surrenders.

This seems like the appropriate place to post this, because other threads have become quite cluttered and convoluted with posts on multiple topics (unit spam counters, player skill, clans, and stats, etc...):

"Irconclad Online doesn't include a ranking system. That wasn't by accident. It wasn't an oversight. It was precisely to discourage "playing to win at all costs" style of playing. If other people want to set up their own tournaments, that's fine. But I don't want the typical ICO game to consist of one player trying to play a fun game versus someone who has figured out that the best strategy is to quickly bulld 5 light frigates and just harrass the heck out of the other player's home world in the opening 5 minutes."

Frogboy said that in this thread (post 53), and the complete lack of insight, from a member of the dev team no less, this shows for the problem at hand is rather concerning. The apparent state of multiplayer right now could perhaps best be described as degenerate.

The problem with having no distinction between the two categories of players is that regardless of whether or not you're formally tracking the win ratios of players, and ranking them accordingly, they will still play in whichever style to which they are predisposed. I personally fall into the competitive player category, and have been playing in and organizing tournaments on national and international levels for various games over the past 8 years. A failure to differentiate between players such as myself, and players who take their gaming far less seriously, is very likely to result in alienating both groups and completely devastating the multi-player community.

If the "pro" player learns that the aforementioned five frigate rush is the most effective strategy, then regardless of whether their stats are being tracked or not, they will certainly still proceed to use that strategy in their matches, resulted in the frustration of less skilled players (as they lose with fairly little apparent chance of success) and the boredom of the skilled players (as no opponent will seem willing the invest the effort required to devise an effective counter to their strategy). This leads to a degenerate game. The meta-game can only evolve if players of comparable skill levels are able to interact and learn from one another's strategies, and learn how to counter those play styles with more effective ones.

By failing to include a ranking system, what you are accomplishing is:

A) Frustrating casual players by matching them with disproportionately skilled players who will trounce them thoroughly. This is very discouraging, and will probably lose a LOT of casual players, who might otherwise have developed their skills quite nicely, if only they'd had a more gradual immersion into the game's finer strategic points.

Boring serious players who can't find a player willing to stick out a tough match-up, or a player able to effectively counter their strategies. This will, in similar fashion, lose a LOT of serious players, because there will be no point to 80% of their games, and will probably move on to better regulated online formats.

C) Slowing the discovery of truly effective tactics in this game. As I briefly explained above, many new tactics and strategies will only emerge when a player is presented with a challenging strategy from a proportionately skilled opponent. The more difficult it is for these players to be properly matched up, the longer it will take for such discoveries to emerge, and the longer we are likely to be at the mercy of the same stale tactics everyone so dejectedly bemoans.

Stardock/Ironclad: The approach of wholly ignoring these issues will not result in an online community oriented towards fun, casual play. It will result in abandoned game lobbies and poor future sales as players, particularly those who, as I do, purchase games with the multi-player experience in mind, inform those they know of these deficiencies, rather than suggesting the purchase of this title (which I had never heard advertised, and only purchased because I was informed through word of mouth). In the current state I would be hesitant to advise another player of similar mind set purchase this title, and that numbers no small amount of potential players.

Thanks for your time and consideration.

frogboy already replied about his comment:


reply 17 https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/post.aspx?postid=303293&p=1

reply 24


hopefully adding competitive system doesn't take too long, like hopefully not months away.

(Oh god, this turned into the OT from hell. Apologies to OP. Maybe I should take all this and make it into its own thread? Nah. Maybe later.)

Reading these posts, I've been thinking about ways for us, the competitive players, to come up with such a system ourselves (at least for the time being), and I think I have a workable idea. I'm going to lay it out as it comes to me, so bear with me if it's not perfectly organized:

There would be a webpage where you register with your Stardock account (and here's my first question already: you can't attach your serial to multiple accounts, can you?). Then each time you win a game on ICO against someone else who is also registered on this webpage, you'd submit a win for yourself with the accompanying replay. The losing player would be sent a message asking him to confirm the result. If there is no activity from the losing player within 7 days, the win is automatically confirmed.

(I know you want to scream at me already, pointing out all the things that are wrong with this, but please bear with me for another moment as I go through the rest of the features)

The replay the winning player has to send would be kept on site for about 7 days (or until a certain quota of diskspace usage is reached) (after which the replay's checksum could be archived forever to check if the player tries to upload the same replay twice) in case an admin wants to check the legitimacy of the win (or that any game happened at all).

If the designated loser responds that he did NOT lose that game (or that the game never happened), we are in conflict. The designated winner can either say "oops, my bad" and the entry is simply removed, OR there can be an unresolved conflict, in which case the game data is dumped too, but each player has the other player's nick entered into their "blacklist", meaning that they can no longer report wins against that player (unless both parties agree to mutually revoke the blacklist status). This simply means "oh oh, this player does not play fair, don't play games with him/her anymore". (Hah! Her! As if! ;P)

The page would then create a ladder of players. Winning against a player of much higher standing than your own would win you a lot of status points, while winning to someone much lower than you would give you much less.

Now there are a million ways to game this system and either cheat your way up or simply break the system and make it no fun for anyone in it. Obviously. What I'm hoping, though, is that someone who seeks out an additional webpage to add that competitive aspect to their game experience is serious about playing this game and thus wouldn't waste time on ruining it for everyone else. Essentially I'm hoping for a sort of wikipedia effect where there will be much more people interested in making the system work than there would be interested in breaking it.

There are many more things that get in the way of this system:

1) It requires activity on the player's side. You need to look up your enemy, find out if he's registered, then log a win, upload the replay (remember to keep the replay as well) etc. This will discourage people from actually doing it.

--> yes, but in the absence of another system for ranking this amount of activity might still be acceptable for hardcore players

2) Replays can be HUGE. Uploading them will take forever, eat up tons of bandwidth, bankrupt the owner of the server, etc.

--> well, not really. Replays can be compressed rather well; up to 90% reduction in size are entirely possible. This brings even a large replay down to less than one megabyte, and many high def pictures are that size. On the server side, bandwidth is really not that expensive anymore these days. Unless we'll have 100,000 active users on that site (yeah right) I don't think this will be a problem on the server side.

3) Logging that win and uploading that replay will take a lot of time! I want to spend my time playing, not registering the outcome of my game!

--> and you will be spending most of your time playing. What's 10 minutes of uploading a replay compared to 4 hours of playing?

4) People will break and abuse this system.

--> yes they will. As Dave Gahan reminds us, people are people. Still I think that with a semi-decent statistics module, it will be easy to spot those trying to game the system, and then we can simply ban their account from it. Since I understand that you can't just create a new account and attach your serial to it whenever you want to, that should be a simple and effective measure. Also, like I said earlier, I think those people will be a minority.

5) Well, you can talk the talk. But do you expect coders and server admins to fall from the sky?

--> no, I don't. But I think I could walk the walk. I have set up database driven webpages like this from scratch before, and I have about four years experience working with a CMS. I also have a server that should be able to take the load, up to a point. I don't foresee this becoming a HUGE success anyway, so I think my server should be able to handle a few dozen submissions a day. However, there are two things I'd like to know before dedicating the time and effort to making this happen:

a) do people like the idea? Is there sufficient demand for something like this?

what are Ironclad's plans for the immediate future? I read that frogboy said SOMETHING like this would be added somewhere "down the line". In the other post we spoke of tournaments. Did he mean a ladder by that or actual one-time, register and be there at the right time tournament like things? Because the latter wouldn't get us anywhere, I think.

So if Ironclad are going to add a workable ladder-like thingie to ICO soon, I can just put this idea away, but if it doesn't look like that will happen and if there's enough demand for this, I'd sit down and hack something out. I'm not a great coder by any measure, so I'll definitely solicit help from any volunteer.