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Author Topic: AATracker.net - America's Army Stat Tracking.  (Read 9677 times)

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Online HellB0Y

AATracker.net - America's Army Stat Tracking.
« on: Thursday, May 04, 2023, 11:44:48 AM »
https://aatracker.net
https://aahonor.com
https://discord.aatracker.net <-- our community Discord server

It's been close to a month since we silently launched the AATracker Service, after multiple rewrites, bug fixes and testing it is finally in a mostly stable and accurate state. I had made a post here several months ago that I was working on a Discord bot / stat tracker in my spare time, and I've mostly scrapped that idea and launched https://aatracker.net, a web app to view your stats, tracked servers and what we call Virtual Honor, which is what your honor would be, calculated using tracked score + your frozen Assist honor. (Huge thank you to DeeDyLis and teddy_grizzly_bear for providing the formula to calculate honor as this is information I would never have been able to find on my own!).

(Virtual Honor is now synced with Assist Honor every 24hrs, see Teddy's post here: https://aao25.com/forum/news-82/(beta)-gaining-honor-and-honor-claims/)

The leaderboard provides you an overview of all tracked players and sort by kills, deaths, kdr, timeplayed, etc. Clicking a profile allows you to view map specific stats for that player.


Each player profile provides overall stats, progress towards your next honor level, as well as map specific charts / stats.



How does it work?

The AATracker service is a .net 6 application that queries a collection of AA2.5 servers at a regular interval using the Gamespy V2 protocol. In short, the application calculates score based on kills, deaths, leader, roe, etc returned by the query, as well as kills & deaths for each map you've played. Stats are saved when a player disconnects, the set changes, the map changes or should the server crash. The application can also detect quick reconnects and handle that accordingly so ensure stats remain accurate.
Basically, it works very similar to the way BattleTracker used to, albeit with less bells and whistles, and to my knowledge there is no masterserver we can reach out to so we rely on servers to be manually added to our list of servers to track (Although the process of adding servers / verifying they are a valid 2.5 server with cheats disabled has been automated).

What happened to the bot?
It still exists, although now it mostly used to manage the tracker / provide updates about which servers are tracked every 30 minutes


One neat feature added is the ability for some trusted server admins to start/stop/restart the gameserver via Discord as it's a pain to ssh into a box just to start or restart the gameserver.


And that's pretty much it! Some people have asked me why invest the time for a game with so few players, and I don't really have a solid answer besides curiosity and having nothing else to work on in my free time. With any luck perhaps it will help draw some players back, or at least retain the ones that we have!.

You can check it out at:
https://aatracker.net
https://aahonor.com

We have a community Discord server here:
https://discord.gg/6RdwmbJvp6
https://discord.aatracker.net

Although I would also encourage you to also check out the official 25 Assist Discord server
https://discord.gg/8gPWU7h9s3
« Last Edit: Monday, January 08, 2024, 15:54:48 PM by HellB0Y »

Offline teddy_grizzly_bear

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Re: AATracker.net - America's Army Stat Tracking.
« Reply #1 on: Tuesday, May 09, 2023, 04:18:23 AM »
This seems like great work!

In this day and age, I would have a few queries though:
1) Is there a way for people to opt out of being tracked? I'm not a lawyer nor an expert, but this seems like it would be be required by GDPR and other similar laws. In fact I'm not fully sure if opting people in by default is legal in the same respect. Hopefully you have (or at least can) do your own research. This may not be an issue with a small player base, but it can only take one user who feels their rights have been violated to take down your hard work.
2) How does virtual honor handle changes on the 25Assist side? I.e we can (though we don't at this time) edit honor on our side. Do you have a stored "frozen" honor value stored for each account or do you just rely on what you see on the server?

The reason for the last bit was that with this development, we may be able to actually update honor for people.
While I don't know of an automated way to do this right now, there probably would be one.
But until that, we may be able to do this semi-manually by:
a) Keeping track of users who've gained 1 (or more) honor points
b) Updating their honor to the proper value e.g every week

This is obviously not an ideal system, but given the small number of community members, it might be doable.
<image removed due to imgur stuff - probably for the best>

"Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true." Bertrand Russell

Online HellB0Y

Re: AATracker.net - America's Army Stat Tracking.
« Reply #2 on: Tuesday, May 09, 2023, 11:38:20 AM »
This seems like great work!

In this day and age, I would have a few queries though:
1) Is there a way for people to opt out of being tracked? I'm not a lawyer nor an expert, but this seems like it would be be required by GDPR and other similar laws. In fact I'm not fully sure if opting people in by default is legal in the same respect. Hopefully you have (or at least can) do your own research. This may not be an issue with a small player base, but it can only take one user who feels their rights have been violated to take down your hard work.
2) How does virtual honor handle changes on the 25Assist side? I.e we can (though we don't at this time) edit honor on our side. Do you have a stored "frozen" honor value stored for each account or do you just rely on what you see on the server?

The reason for the last bit was that with this development, we may be able to actually update honor for people.
While I don't know of an automated way to do this right now, there probably would be one.
But until that, we may be able to do this semi-manually by:
a) Keeping track of users who've gained 1 (or more) honor points
b) Updating their honor to the proper value e.g every week

This is obviously not an ideal system, but given the small number of community members, it might be doable.

Hey Teddy, thank you for the feedback!.

To address the points you brought up:

1. As of today, no. Will there be? Yes, likely this week actually, as I've had this on my mind since development began. It is a difficult issue to solve as there is (currently) no way to verify that someone is who they say they are. I am not an expert by any means either, I've worked in software with organizations that handle large amounts of PII however I wasn't involved in compliance, just implementation!. Nothing is stored apart from display name. No IP addresses, emails, there is no way to even determine the Assist auth account the display name is tied to, so is this considered PII?. I could see how someone could argue both cases. GDPR aside, I think it is important to have the ability to opt out so regardless of what the answer is, the ability to opt out will be here very shortly. (It will be a manual process for the time being, unfortunately. Although I will see if I can conjure up an idea to automate the process).

2. Yes, there is currently a stored "frozen" honor value for each player. Basically, the first time a player is seen, the honor level reported by the server is what will be stored. This will be the starting point used to calculate virtual honor. If the server reports a different honor level, the stored value won't be updated. For example, if I have 30 honor, the virtual honor on the aatracker website will always be calculated from that starting point, regardless if my honor was bumped to 31 in Assist.

The prospect of that is very cool! I think the one thing that most players seem to miss is the ability to gain honor in game, and if it was able to come back, even in a very simple form, people would appreciate that!. I haven't given automation much thought in that sense, however it should be doable. Currently, Virtual Honor is calculated server side and provided to the client when rendering the page. Automation would likely be easier if it was stored, and potentially more performant as the # of players and score grows, but again something to look into!.

Offline teddy_grizzly_bear

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Re: AATracker.net - America's Army Stat Tracking.
« Reply #3 on: Wednesday, May 10, 2023, 03:00:32 AM »
Hey Teddy, thank you for the feedback!.

To address the points you brought up:

1. As of today, no. Will there be? Yes, likely this week actually, as I've had this on my mind since development began. It is a difficult issue to solve as there is (currently) no way to verify that someone is who they say they are. I am not an expert by any means either, I've worked in software with organizations that handle large amounts of PII however I wasn't involved in compliance, just implementation!. Nothing is stored apart from display name. No IP addresses, emails, there is no way to even determine the Assist auth account the display name is tied to, so is this considered PII?. I could see how someone could argue both cases. GDPR aside, I think it is important to have the ability to opt out so regardless of what the answer is, the ability to opt out will be here very shortly. (It will be a manual process for the time being, unfortunately. Although I will see if I can conjure up an idea to automate the process).

2. Yes, there is currently a stored "frozen" honor value for each player. Basically, the first time a player is seen, the honor level reported by the server is what will be stored. This will be the starting point used to calculate virtual honor. If the server reports a different honor level, the stored value won't be updated. For example, if I have 30 honor, the virtual honor on the aatracker website will always be calculated from that starting point, regardless if my honor was bumped to 31 in Assist.

The prospect of that is very cool! I think the one thing that most players seem to miss is the ability to gain honor in game, and if it was able to come back, even in a very simple form, people would appreciate that!. I haven't given automation much thought in that sense, however it should be doable. Currently, Virtual Honor is calculated server side and provided to the client when rendering the page. Automation would likely be easier if it was stored, and potentially more performant as the # of players and score grows, but again something to look into!.
I would personally not consider this PII. But again, not an expert. But like you said, some might argue that it is. So better safe than sorry. So it's great you've thought about it!

As for the honor, that's why I brought it up. People like to be able to progress. And as of now, that's not really possible.
And the way you've described would cover the vast majority of our use case even if we were to update honor on our side to show a difference in game as well since you'd just use the original first-join-honor.
However, there's the matter of honor claims. We've abandoned it for now since there was no way to gain honor anyway. But if honor gain became possible again, we might want to allow honor claims based on evidence again. But that would require somewhat manual intervention on your side. Though this could probably be done manually due to the small number of players and a smaller number still trying to claim honor.

I'll shoot you a PM as well to see if we can work something out.
<image removed due to imgur stuff - probably for the best>

"Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true." Bertrand Russell

Online HellB0Y

Re: AATracker.net - America's Army Stat Tracking.
« Reply #4 on: Thursday, May 18, 2023, 11:32:26 AM »
Visual representation of your progress towards your next honor level as well as some basic charts outlining your map specific stats has been added!


Offline TomHighway64

Re: AATracker.net - America's Army Stat Tracking.
« Reply #5 on: Sunday, May 21, 2023, 12:32:42 PM »
Very good work , I also think progressing back to a workable soltion for increasing honour will be very much welcomed.
Hooah !

Online HellB0Y

Re: AATracker.net - America's Army Stat Tracking.
« Reply #6 on: Sunday, May 21, 2023, 22:09:21 PM »
Very good work , I also think progressing back to a workable soltion for increasing honour will be very much welcomed.
Hooah !

Thank you! I certainly hope so as well!.

Someone PM'd me regarding opting out, I will not name them out of respect for their privacy however if you read this. I am unable to respond to your message, but I do have news regarding opting out.

As of this evening, players who wish to opt out will not have their profile displayed on the AATracker website nor will their account be included in Assist honor updates.

As of 2023-05-21, your AATracker profile is not linked to your Assist account. Should you opt out and change your Assist display name, the tracking service will view you as a new player and begin tracking stats. You'll just need to contact us and we'll opt you out again manually.
Name changes on Assist now update your profile on AATracker which means opted-out players should remain opted out should they change their name.
« Last Edit: Monday, June 05, 2023, 21:33:46 PM by HellB0Y »

Online HellB0Y

Re: AATracker.net - America's Army Stat Tracking.
« Reply #7 on: Friday, May 26, 2023, 22:47:32 PM »
A very basic implementation of map specific leaderboards has been implemented!.

Clicking the underlined map name on a profile will now redirect you to the leader board specific for that map. Clicking elsewhere will continue to expand your map specific stats.





More cool stuff is in the works, including match history (very early stages currently but it is coming along well). The Assist Staff badge has been made more distinctive and I've done a fair amount of work on the tracking service itself. It is not only multithreaded but also fully asynchronous to ensure it remains performant with all of the servers we currently have online!.
« Last Edit: Friday, May 26, 2023, 23:38:48 PM by HellB0Y »

Offline Nick

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Re: AATracker.net - America's Army Stat Tracking.
« Reply #8 on: Friday, May 26, 2023, 23:47:11 PM »
Looking great brotha!

Online HellB0Y

Re: AATracker.net - America's Army Stat Tracking.
« Reply #9 on: Friday, May 26, 2023, 23:58:17 PM »

Online HellB0Y

Re: AATracker.net - America's Army Stat Tracking.
« Reply #10 on: Tuesday, May 30, 2023, 22:02:51 PM »
The first iteration of match history is live.


Each profile now includes a recent matches section (provided you have played recently). This lists the 10 most recent matches you were tracked in game. Clicking on the match title will bring you to an overview of every player who was connected (long enough to be tracked) during said match, as well as a break down of their score and the duration of the match.



This is super early but has been working as expected under normal circumstances, so should you notice any weirdness please bear with me!.
« Last Edit: Monday, June 05, 2023, 21:34:16 PM by HellB0Y »

Offline ICON-BoMBer

Re: AATracker.net - America's Army Stat Tracking.
« Reply #11 on: Wednesday, May 31, 2023, 14:46:02 PM »
when does a server start tracking your session? 2 vs 2? 4 vs 4?
I played 2 hours straight and I got 3 sessions. ( not to many people joined at that time)
« Last Edit: Wednesday, May 31, 2023, 14:49:32 PM by ICON-BoMBer »

Online HellB0Y

Re: AATracker.net - America's Army Stat Tracking.
« Reply #12 on: Wednesday, May 31, 2023, 15:19:51 PM »
when does a server start tracking your session? 2 vs 2? 4 vs 4?
I played 2 hours straight and I got 3 sessions. ( not to many people joined at that time)

At the moment, a session is created / stats are tracked as soon as 3 players are in a server. If a server falls below 3 players within 3 minutes of the session being created, the session will not display on the website however the stats accumulated during those 3 minutes will still be added to your profile.

Online HellB0Y

Re: AATracker.net - America's Army Stat Tracking.
« Reply #13 on: Friday, December 22, 2023, 23:55:03 PM »
It's been a moment since I've provided any updates, however more has changed than I am able to quickly summarize here (I've neglected the forums in favor of posting quick updates to the Discord server).

The first, and most notable of which, is a significant UI overhaul. I still do not claim to be a web designer to any extent, however it was time to dedicate some time towards making the presentation of stats more palatable.


Secondly, alias history is live. (Very much inspired by Steam's implementation of the same feature).


Each server on the servers page now displays 10 most recent matches on that server


And finally, the homepage has been made a touch more lively by including the 5 most recent matches across ALL tracked servers, as well as a server list preview (sorted by player count descending when applicable). A new background service to reduce the wait time when querying servers has made this possible. There are still some kinks to work out, however I will note this change is specific to the website itself. The tracking application has a vastly more forgiving retry policy / timeout threshold so a "far away" tracked server appearing offline does not indicate that it is not being tracked.(I do hope to address this in the near future).
It's also snowing to help drum up the holiday spirit.


A few other small changes (made some time ago) likely not noted elsewhere in this thread:
- If you want to add your server to the list of tracked servers, you can do so via the Servers page.
- Each server displays a flag corresponding with the country it is hosted in.

Happy Holidays everyone!.
« Last Edit: Saturday, December 23, 2023, 00:04:33 AM by HellB0Y »

Offline Nick

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Re: AATracker.net - America's Army Stat Tracking.
« Reply #14 on: Saturday, December 23, 2023, 00:48:09 AM »
Looking good, Happy Holidays!

 

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