play.mg (help needed)

[titi]

Current page play.mg does too many things at once in my opinion. Thigs that are done there:

1. show list of games
2. show list of finished games of last 48 hours
3. refresh this list using no java script
4. refresh this list using java script + some kind of notification function
5. some kind of filter system ?
( 6. documentation of server api with mouse over hints )

I think this should all be seperated as this mixture gets more and more confusing for developers and users. Also new stats like the player stats should somehow be available there .
As I am not someone who has a lot of knowledge with web things, this all takes much much too long for me to do it myself. That's why I am not really willing to spend more time on this .

Maybe someone (new?) can help us here ? What we need is someone with MySQL/PHP/HTML/Javascript knowledge who can help us with this.
Who wants to help ?

[Omega]

I'm willing to take a look at it.

What I would do is I'd split this into three pages:

1. The current master server (but without the past games). This can refresh and supports desktop alerts (refresh works to a limited degree without JS). The filter system is already in-place and supported with and without JS. The filter is activated by clicking on a version. I would add a dropdown box or something to make it more obvious.
2. A list of past games (up to a certain date). We should be able to expand these to see the game's stats (as we already can with past games).
3. A proper high scores page, which would allow us to sort players by things like games played, time in game, etc. I think we could probably add other scoring techniques such as units created, killed, etc (since the endgame stats are sent). There isn't really any way of preventing cheating though. If implemented, the high scores should be considered "just for fun". I'm not really sure it's even worth the trouble given that you can create a HTTP request without even playing a game. And I don't see adding security as feasible or a good use of time.

I think the API should be better documented, too. I don't think there's any documentation besides the limited readme and reading the source files directly.

I would put these files on separate pages with the "current games" (#1 above) being the index page and the others being linked from that page.

[tomreyn]

I like Omega's approach. Regarding the "high scores page", I think we should give it a try (exposing this information for a while), and if it turns out this influences players too much and they misinterpret those lists as an incentive to submit fake reports or to rank up by not just playing normal games, we can always revert those high scores and just display normal statistics.

That's statistics like:

Mod statistics:

• most played maps
• most played techs
• most played factions
• most played scenarios
• most played tilesets

Server statistics:

• max # players / server, time played / server
• most used game server versions
• most commonly seen # of human / total players per game
• most used game server TCP ports
• most used server location (country) based on games played

Player statistics:

• # of players / time of day
• # games played / player
• most used game version
• most used operating system
• percentage of players (no names) disconnecting (whether or not voluntarily) before the end of a game (where the players' game time is remarkably lower than that of the game itself)
• most seen player location (country or "Unknown") based on # games played
• correlation of player location (country or "Unknown") to server location
• correlation of player location to time of day

Those are just some ideas, I bet a lot more is possible (and maybe some other statistics make more sense) and I'm not actually sure all of these are currently possible.

While I appreciate Omega's offer to help out with the these pages (very much!) we can definitely appreciate additional web developers and web designers, so don't hold back if you read this and can spare like an hour or two per week (or work on a one-time project).

[titi]

Yes I like omegas ideas too.

About the player statistics:
I would like to see that we use the "main" stats to motivate people to play MG very often and long, so the current "played games" ,"played hours" thing should be the main top 100 list.
But of course there can be other ( maybe customizable ) stats too.