Well, look at flip for instance, he's number 6 on the ladder, having only played 120 odd rounds in the past 3 weeks.
Let's say flip changes his name or chooses not to play any more. His ladder score is a good one and tough for many to beat, he will stay around the top of the ladder forever.
I'm sure this will happen with many names over time, the ladder will become flooded with no longer playing players. Not good.

But, if the ladder only shows the past 3 weeks, they are always current players, who need to play consitantly well.
Another reason. as players improve, it becomes realistic to be able to climb the ladder. If you have weeks of poor stats to your name, with it only showing your last 3 you can keep your name and still climb the ladder.

Maybe one day Infamous will find something better to do, and we'll all stand a chance at the top spot.

i posted an idea befor^^
remove those guys who didnt play 1 or more weeks with that name (inactive)
their stats stay saved but the wont show up. they will show up if they come back and play with that name^^
if u have poor stats ur a bad player and never climb up.. if ur team is good its easy to climb up ^^
look at me, i started with around 22 points and now i climbed up to 31 points with so many games played and i keep climbing
even if i climb very slowly
everybody has a chance to get on top.. play in the server against inf and beat him and his team with ur team
its not realistic that bad players are at top, is it?

Speaking of the ladder, I quite like my rank (69)

Why not have something like ddl has, if you don't play you start to lose a certain amount of points over time

I love them the way they are. I've just overtaken flip! And he's pretty good. Although I must be honest, I've never met him on the grid.
He's 7 and and I'm 6. I think that pretty much confirms the accuracy of the new ladder system.

You should make it based on IPs somehow, because quite frankly, it would be impossible for me to be ranked high at all .

I agree with Durka, and Durka you should do that with your stats too cause quite frankly, my names/aliases get used

Here's what you SHOULD do. Yes, its a bit complicated.

Duplicate all fields in the current database and call them DAILY_[Field Name]. Start by copying the current (I'll call them OVERALL) values into the DAILY values. Then, reduce everything in the DAILY fields to the ratio of the minimum required number of rounds required to be ranked, I believe it is 100 currently? Whenever people play, add points to both the OVERALL and to the DAILY. At the end of each day, simply have a script go in and reduce all the DAILY values back down to a ratio of the minimum required number of rounds. Tah-dah... A fair method of keeping a current ranking that doesn't get a player stuck in an old average, yet the overall averages are still there if they want to see them. Get the best of both worlds.

Need an example? I've got 609 total rounds played, 431 won (70.77% won), 1109 points (1.82 pts per round). This OVERALL remains and is incremented appropriately as it is now. The DAILY however will drop down to 100 total rounds played, 70.77 won and 182 points (note that they are still 70.77% won and 1.82 pts per round, just based on only 100 rounds instead of 609). The DAILY values are used to calculate a daily sort ladder. The OVERALL values are used to calculate an overall sort ladder.

Now, there is still a problem of players getting to 100 rounds and then stopping, never playing again. Their scores are set in stone, unmovable, as they should be. However, all you need to do is add a DAYS_SINCE_LAST_PLAY column and reduce their sort value by a factor of the number of days. For example, lets say once a week is acceptable. SORT_VALUE - (DAYS_SINCE_LAST_PLAY / 7). They would essentially lose one sort point value for each week they do not play, but would immediately get that lost ground back if they play again. Sound fair?

Lastly, the biggest problem I see is that the scores are totally based on name only. If I wanted to be cruel and get myself into position one I could do it by playing (preferrably from another IP address) under their names and lose, crash and TK as much as possible. This is not fair to the players who have worked so hard get ranked well. This, I do not have a good solution for. My only suggestion is to keep points separate in the database based on name and IP address (not just name), but combined for the final output. This way, if it were determined that someone was cheating by playing as someone else, that someone (based on IP) could be blocked and all bad scores eliminated from the good scores without any loss or guessing involved. And to address what Durka and Genki just brought up, it could also be possible to combine scores of different aliases this way too. It should NOT be done automatically though, since sometimes different actual players use the same IP.

Thanks for reading. Now, anyone a good enough programmer to put all this together? hehe

If anyone still doesn't understand why this would work, let me know and I can possibly explain it better.

i heard about plans of implementing auth system in upcoming version of arma. it would be helpful. also notice that one can have dynamicly assigned ip address.

War, what you're suggesting is quite possible now. Each player has a score, dumps, suicides, etc total for each day. The current ladder just looks at the last 21 days is all. Data before that is still there, just not shown.
I'm not convinced what you're suggesting is actually an improvement on the current system. True, it will flush out non players, but it still makes it very difficult to climb the ranks as you improve, you have to carry all your baggage with you. Your only hope would be to change your name, I'd rather not encourage this.

I love the dynamic feel of the ladder now, it changes daily as people's bad/good days are knocked off. People drop of completely, others join. The data is always relatively fresh.

Authentication. It wouldn't be too much work to add an authentication system to CTWF, it could even be linked to the forum username, since the forum and CTWF both run off the same database. But I think, if you had to register on the forums before you could play, the place would be almost deserted.
OK, you say, just for the the ladder. Then the ladder would be very small and far less interesting.

Trouble with using ip address instead of name is those on a dynamic ip that reguarly changes would essentially be excluded from the ladders.
And what me, I play from 2 different locations. I'd be on the ladder twice.

Until (if) tron gets some kind of overall authentication, I'm afriad we're stuck with what we have.

Ed> Each player has a score, dumps, suicides, etc total for each day.
Ed> The current ladder just looks at the last 21 days is all.

Okay, I was not aware of this. Sounds good to me the way it is.

I also do not recommend authentication.

Ed> Trouble with using ip address instead of name is those on a dynamic ip that reguarly
Ed> changes would essentially be excluded from the ladders. And what me,
Ed> I play from 2 different locations. I'd be on the ladder twice.

No, what I tried to convey was that the scores would be kept separately for different IP addresses and names, but they would be automatically combined when reporting the scores, so it would be no different than it is now. The only difference would be that it would be easy to separate the BAD points out from the GOOD points if it were determined that someone was faking another players name in order to harm their rank. That is all.

That's a good plan. I will take a look at the parse script when I have time, see how easily it can be implemented.

I'm also thinking about adding matches won and lost column just for fun.
Just awarding a win/loss based on the results of round 12 is inaccurate and can be too easily cheated.
I'm thinking it will count how many rounds you've been on the winning/losing team. If that exceeds 8 rounds you get a win/lose round point if your team wins/loses.
This would mean you cannot leave on the last couple of rounds or switch to the other team if you're losing.
If you're on the winning team at the end. but have spent most of the time on the losing one, you lose.
As long as you've been on the winning/losing team for 8 rounds or more, you get points accordingly.
What do you think?

Personally, I don't even think its necessary. It's fun to reach for the match win, especially when you are far behind and make a huge comeback. But, for ranking purposes, the individual round counts are far better determinants? (IMHO)

I agree the win matches shouldn't be used for ranking, it could be another field shown on the ladders. Just for fun.

Mayhem is now being fed into the same (now modified) ladder system.
Won/lost Matches is also logged. Time played is logged. May become useful for something.
I will build a web page to display the stats once (if) there's enough data in there to make it worthwhile. It's a bit slow there at the moment.

[quote="ed"]If you see Infamous on the grid, can you all kill him! He's currently top of 6 out of the 7 categories![/quote]

That's not very nice. If Infamous got that score on his own (without cheating) he deserves it. I've been struggling to get to 2nd place! I was like 0.05 ladder points from second place when a bunch of newbies came in and just totally screwed defense (getting in my way and creating holes for opponents by suiciding into my trail) and generally losing us most of the rounds and I dropped down over 4 ladder points because of it (to 4th place). I was getting VERY UPSET with them because they just refused to block or attack and instead just hovered around my defense.

In retrospect, I should have just left the server and come back at a later time. But, I assumed I could talk some sense into them. I was wrong. It is amazing how damaging they actually were to my ladder score.

This is just a warning for others trying to climb ranks... It can't be done with noobies going out of there way to screw you up. It would be just fine if the noobies would all go away from me and suicide or get dumped, I can usually handle multiple attacks on my defense and get lots of kill points that way, so long as I had enough time to set up def.



Oh, and another thing. For non-noobies... Stop screwing around after winning (or losing) a round by trying to kill your teammates. It might not lose points, but it does count for the ranks now. And sometimes, it does attribute the points to the last opponent which was near the dumped teammate.