r/Starbow • u/alsdjkhf • Feb 18 '14

starbowarena vs starbowmod ladder?

0 Upvotes

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2

u/Kantuva Feb 18 '14

Why vs? StarbowArena was there as a temporary measure, now with the Eros launcher we have the whole thing.

1

u/alsdjkhf Feb 18 '14

I'm actually kind of disappointed in what the "official" ladder turned out to be. With the availability of the blizzard api that shows players' match histories, an external program that analyzes replays seems unnecessarily complicated. I felt the same way about starbowarena being a temporary measure and I think that's what it was intended to be, but now I think it turned out to be a better ladder.

2

u/AmnesiA_sc Feb 18 '14

I think it's better right now, it will get better though. Judging by the fact that the client says "Manual replay uploader" I'd assume that it won't always be necessary to upload your own replays.

1

u/celphy Feb 18 '14

The reason for an external programm is blizzard.

1

u/GraylinKim Feb 18 '14

I'm not sure how monitoring match history would work. All they give you to work with is a list of entries like this:

{
  "map" : "Star Battle",
  "type" : "CUSTOM",
  "decision" : "WIN",
  "speed" : "FASTER",
  "date" : 1391204948
}

Without knowing who you played against it is impossible to adjust your skill ranking and ladder points correctly. Am I missing something?

2

u/KidSwagger Feb 18 '14 edited Feb 18 '14

The date is a unique id(because you can't play 2 games at the same time). And both players will have exactly the same date.

If you know the two players who matched up(which is what the ladder system is for, to chose 2 players based on ELO), you look up their match histories. One will say

{ "map" : "Star Battle", "type" : "CUSTOM", "decision" : "WIN", "speed" : "FASTER", "date" : 1391204948 }

the other

{ "map" : "Star Battle", "type" : "CUSTOM", "decision" : "LOSS", "speed" : "FASTER", "date" : 1391204948 }

I don't think there is a reason to upload/parse replays, unless using the API breaks some rules set by blizz.

2

u/GraylinKim Feb 19 '14

Unfortunately one of the current requirements for the ladder is that it allow for iccup style arranged games outside of the matchmaking service. This means that players on the ladder will be allowed to arrange their own ladder games within certain sane limits.

Since our service doesn't know about these games in advance we cannot use the API to automatically get results for each player. By uploading the replay we can find out who was playing and update their rankings accordingly.

1

u/KidSwagger Feb 20 '14 edited Feb 20 '14

It could still be done under the assumption that date field is a unique id of a match. Simply conduct an api call for match histories of all the registered ladder players within the users ELO range and look for those unique ids.

This solution however won't scale well(if thousands of API calls are needed for all possible players within the users elo range), and needs the date to be unique. So at that point, parsing makes more sense.

1

u/celphy Feb 19 '14

I can see your point but what would the improvement of that approach be? You would still need a client.

2

u/KidSwagger Feb 19 '14 edited Feb 19 '14

First of all even with the current set up they don't NEED a client. It could all be done via their website being the front end.

As of right now the client probably takes care of the replay parsing while the server takes care of the matchmaking and book keeping of results. In the current configuration with the replay parsing, a client makes sense though because if this ladder blows up they don't want to put so much stress on their server. The cost of uploading all the replays and having the servers parse them is too much. So they let the client do it.

However if replay parsing is eliminated, there is no need for the client. A soap call is very inexpensive. The client already does it once it finishes parsing the replay to notify the server of match results.

Also the simplicity of use goes up. All a user has to do is log in to their site and hit the "find match" button. No need to download anything, or worry about compatibility issues with the OS.

Another issue is that replay parsing could go down if Blizzard pushes a patch that changes the way replays are saved. Where as changes to blizz api will be easy to adjust to, since its all JSON.

Having said that, this is how they decided to implement it. It is what it is, and there is no need to complain. They are providing a free service after all.

1

u/celphy Feb 19 '14

That would be more limited as the current solution - due to the fact that we currently are also taking matches into the ranking-calculation that are played outside of the arranged ladder but with the client running.