The Energon Pub

A few other threads have discussed the need to automate tournament results; that's something we can do on our side of the game and not just by the site developers. In the past (pre-crash) I worked out regular expressions would completely parse a Mission or Arena result so that if run by an automated piece of code the code could know (a) damage dealt per hit, (b) know weapon or tactic used, (c) capture stats of the bots at mission time, etc. In short the HTML Seibertron generates is done via PHP scripts so its possible (and frankly easy) to reverse engineer those results.

I share this for tournament organizers as an option to collect statistics; my personal limitation is in developing the processing code - but if co-volunteers could help I can provide workflow and the expressions. Collecting statistics / validating results could be done then by feeding a URL to a piece of automated software which rips out the necessary pieces of the HTML and knows how to make sense of the results.

So, if this conversation is worth pursuing, my first question would be "What combat results would be most useful to pick out?" Results will be determined by the processing code - but the expressions need to provide the needed data. For instance, automation to calculate 100%+ strafe takes some extra effort as it's not a single hit against a single target so it needs planned for. If the conversation is not worthwhile, I'll just return to slagging and being slagged.

Last Note: My planning / processing has been done entirely by using specific URLs out of respect for site performance. I would not feel it appropriate to do anything more (e.g. iterating over all missions between X and Y and tabulating results for characters in list Z) without site approval.

the majority of tournemants i've run have been based on mission numbers, whichever side wins the most number of even numbered missions or missions ending in 0, or 5 or a combinations, and generally go off who won the mission, so only 4 regex to parse, but the hard bit is going through all the bloody mission logs to check for that sentence.

Well, the reason we were doing missions that only ended in 0 or 5 (or in some cases even numbers) was to cut down in the amount of work done by the scorekeeper(s). If it was automated to check each mission for the results needed for the purpose of the tournament, then we would not be confined by the restriction we implemented before.

Hoistimus wrote:Well, the reason we were doing missions that only ended in 0 or 5 (or in some cases even numbers) was to cut down in the amount of work done by the scorekeeper(s).

It also added a bit of strategy to the game.

Of course, it also added a bit of frustration, when you could go 3hrs without getting a 0 or 5 mission. Less of an issue now with our narrow level range though.

A way to automate tourneys so you could pick a mission type, number or even target faction is hypothetically possible, it has been done in the past for those who remember the '05/'06 xmas tourney, but it would a involve a lot of programmer-heavy work which we are currently trying to avoid, but thats not to say it wont ever be considered.

What would it need to look for, if it was automated though?

Mission #id ranges and results (0&5's, odd/even, etc.)
Player/team #id's and kills
Individual bot #id's and kills
Specific alt types or classes
Highest scoring bot id#
Mission winning faction
Who kills Who
Number of kills gained by character id#

...any others you guys can think of?



What Id prefer to do for now is recruit a couple of 'counters' from all 4 factions who would be willing to step in help the organiser score tourneys, and in return for their time be given a reward for their efforts (details can be determined, in the past it has been an alt attached to their profile.)

could we add "who wins the mission" to that list psych?

Yeah.

Edit: ive added

Highest scoring bot id#
Mission winning faction
Who kills Who
Number of kills gained by character id#

Wingspan, on a sidenote and using your idea above, would you be able to create something that could follow Caelus' Zombie plague idea here?

Psychout wrote:Wingspan, on a sidenote and using your idea above, would you be able to create something that could follow Caelus' Zombie plague idea here?

You're just interested in last-character standing right? And that the characters are in enough missions so they are risking infection? If I understand the above then - Yes (short answer)

It requires processing each mission in order (by number) and tracking the results (who's infected / not infected) at the end; those results go into the processing of the next mission. The automation would have to specifically handle the repair check and would need to know what hits count (weapons, tactics, or all). Naturally, strafe is more interesting and more evil in this scenario - but feasible (long answer)

Key things needed up-front
- List of teams / characters participating (to ignore the rabble)
- Mission Start / End #s
- Schedule for when the community should be updated (daily, twice a day, etc....)
- What kind of "back end" we store all the data in (e.g. who wants to stand up a MySQL DB or do we really try and cludge Excel)
- Volunteer(s) to help with writing the HTML parsing and data processing
(consultant / geek answer)

Caelus wrote:

Hoistimus wrote:Well, the reason we were doing missions that only ended in 0 or 5 (or in some cases even numbers) was to cut down in the amount of work done by the scorekeeper(s).

It also added a bit of strategy to the game.

Yes, exactly.

All my recent tournies have been intentended to generate more strategic play (becuase it's far more fun for me as a player, so i asume it'd be the same of others), with (admitedly) only minor success.
The point still stands though, frankly if a tournie was run with every mission counting, the beast factions wouldnt stand a chance, and the Bots would probably be backside bothered by the Cons too.

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As for automated tournie results generating, Im personaly not a fan. The reason I run my tourniments and games is cuase I love gathering in the results and marking everyhting and putting nicly formated results tables up (I really miss HTML posts for that).

I wouldnt stand against it, but I wouldnt use it.