Many of you already know that I’ve moved the C:SI Weekly Statistics to the Official Combat: Samurai Island Website, which has been a goal of mine for quite some time :

Because I’ve finally moved the stats to their rightful home on the web, I will be removing them from my site at some point in the near future, most likely today.

Another thing I’d like to mention about the statistics is that I’m working on extending the information that can be retrieved by the community.  I’ve gotten a lot of requests from admins and owners of C:SI-themed sims for the ability to track more detailed information for individual sims, so I’m trying to incorporate enhanced functionality where-ever and when-ever I can.

For now, that basically consists of the ability to track wins and losses for a given region on a weekly basis rather than just for all time (previously you could only get historic totals), as this gives a more current view of fight activity :

There are some pros and cons to the method I’ve used to gather and store this information, mostly as a result of the criteria that I used when designing how it would work :

1. It must not break any existing functionality.  This is absolutely the #1 priority, and the safest way to ensure that it doesn’t break existing functionality is to ensure that it doesn’t touch existing code and data.
2. It must not overburden the database or web server.  We have a pretty good hosting plan with plenty of horsepower for our needs, but every hosting plan has it’s limits, and it was important to make sure that this didn’t cause us to exceed those limits.
3. It should not require any extra work from the other devs.  We all have a full plate, and nobody has the time to do everything that sounds interesting.  This means that I had to find a way to implement it without causing weapon or script updates, or really anything else that would make the others have to work on it.

Because of those criteria, what I have ended up doing is creating an in-world LSL script separate from the weapon scripts, which reports the relevant data to our website for storage. 

On the pro side, this means that #1 and #3 above are met.  It’s entirely independent of the normal C:SI script and data, so it shouldn’t cause any problems with the existing system.  There is a little control over #2 as well, since by making the script myself I have some control over the polling interval, though of course nothing is bullet-proof.

On the cons side, however, is the fact that it is *entirely* opt-in on a per-region basis.  While this may not be considered a con by many, it does at the very least mean that if you want your region to be tracked, you have to know about the system and also know that you need to ask me for the relevant scripts.  Not every region owner will know about this at first, and I suspect many will not be interested in any case.  So the weekly win/loss records per region will not be universally available, at least while the system is in it’s current incarnation.

I’m sure there are still many kinks to be worked out, and there are currently only two regions actively involved (Phoenix Syndicate and Samurai Edo), but I’m hopeful that this is a good start and that people who run C:SI-themed regions will be interested in participating.

As always, I welcome your thoughts and opinions, leave ‘em after the beep!

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