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Author Topic:   Multiplayer Leagues - a request

Grub posted 07-23-98 04:06 PM ET
Will this site keep a listing of players to contact for multiplayer games after release? (Or provide a forum for organizing multiplayer games?)
How about organizing multiplayer leagues (i.e. Novice Players, Rated Players, and Cutthroat Leagues) and list contact emails (provided by players) for each league? How about keeping track of a rating with each player - just a simple CGI that averages a player's iron man/multiplayer game scores weighted by difficulty and ratings of opponents in multiplayer games.
My biggest request would be to allow iron man and multiplayer games (at conclusion) to save encrypted log files which contain score, difficulty, and opponents data. The encryption doesn't have to be anything fancy. Then when a player has a multiplayer or iron man game they want to include in their score - they could e-mail the log file to your site and the CGI would update their rating.
If you don't want the maintenance of including player listings on your site, it would be greatly appreciated if you could provide encrypted log files for iron man/ multiplayer games and a simple utility to decode score, opponents, and difficulty information from a log file. I am sure various third party web sites would jump at the chance to host player listings and ratings if it could be done in a pseudo-secure way so that ratings would mean something.
I think it would add a lot of hype and playability to your game if it could be associated with some kind of permanent rating that players could work on over many games. See Player Ratings thread in Ideas for more background.
Grub posted 07-23-98 04:43 PM ET
I think it would be fun to invite highest rated players to a quarterly SMAC A-ROUND championship game, and then debrief or get a statement from players after about the game and what worked or didn't work. A description or history file of a championship game would be a lot of fun to look at for tips.
Grub posted 07-23-98 04:56 PM ET
It would be nice if the log file had some kind of game identifier as well - maybe a random number, to tell whether a game has already been used in computing score.
One final problem would be verifying that opponents in the game are authentic. Since ratings would probably only go so high based on computer/novice opponents and max out, the key to improving a rating would have to be playing other rated players, just like in chess.
To prevent someone from saying they just beat highly rated "Grim Reaper" and actually played their little sister and called her Grim Reaper (nothing against little sisters) does anyone have a solution?
Apocalypse posted 07-24-98 01:24 AM ET
I think SMAC leagues should be called Factions to better fit the game.
George Palmer posted 08-04-98 07:09 PM ET
You know with all this interest in internet multiplayer and with the improvements in games, we may not be far off from a "Dream Park" type of world a la Larry Niven.
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Author	Topic: Multiplayer Leagues - a request
Grub	posted 07-23-98 04:06 PM ET Will this site keep a listing of players to contact for multiplayer games after release? (Or provide a forum for organizing multiplayer games?) How about organizing multiplayer leagues (i.e. Novice Players, Rated Players, and Cutthroat Leagues) and list contact emails (provided by players) for each league? How about keeping track of a rating with each player - just a simple CGI that averages a player's iron man/multiplayer game scores weighted by difficulty and ratings of opponents in multiplayer games. My biggest request would be to allow iron man and multiplayer games (at conclusion) to save encrypted log files which contain score, difficulty, and opponents data. The encryption doesn't have to be anything fancy. Then when a player has a multiplayer or iron man game they want to include in their score - they could e-mail the log file to your site and the CGI would update their rating. If you don't want the maintenance of including player listings on your site, it would be greatly appreciated if you could provide encrypted log files for iron man/ multiplayer games and a simple utility to decode score, opponents, and difficulty information from a log file. I am sure various third party web sites would jump at the chance to host player listings and ratings if it could be done in a pseudo-secure way so that ratings would mean something. I think it would add a lot of hype and playability to your game if it could be associated with some kind of permanent rating that players could work on over many games. See Player Ratings thread in Ideas for more background.
Grub	posted 07-23-98 04:43 PM ET I think it would be fun to invite highest rated players to a quarterly SMAC A-ROUND championship game, and then debrief or get a statement from players after about the game and what worked or didn't work. A description or history file of a championship game would be a lot of fun to look at for tips.
Grub	posted 07-23-98 04:56 PM ET It would be nice if the log file had some kind of game identifier as well - maybe a random number, to tell whether a game has already been used in computing score. One final problem would be verifying that opponents in the game are authentic. Since ratings would probably only go so high based on computer/novice opponents and max out, the key to improving a rating would have to be playing other rated players, just like in chess. To prevent someone from saying they just beat highly rated "Grim Reaper" and actually played their little sister and called her Grim Reaper (nothing against little sisters) does anyone have a solution?
Apocalypse	posted 07-24-98 01:24 AM ET I think SMAC leagues should be called Factions to better fit the game.
George Palmer	posted 08-04-98 07:09 PM ET You know with all this interest in internet multiplayer and with the improvements in games, we may not be far off from a "Dream Park" type of world a la Larry Niven.