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Messages - HellB0Y

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31
Feedback & Suggestions / Re: AATracker's "Load More Matches" function
« on: Saturday, January 20, 2024, 11:25:29 AM »
Hi!

This isn't really Assist related thing but I wanted to give a little feedback/shout out to the AATracker dev for making our experience a bit more pleasant once again :cool:

I was going to write some day and ask if there is any way to see exact stats from older matches than those in one's Recent Matches list. I'm very fond of one special match of Pipeline I played a while ago and sadly I didn't remember to take a screenshot of the stats page of that match in time. It was lost from my Recent Matches list.

I just went to check on AATracker page if there is anyone playing and surprisingly there was a button called "Load More Matches" on my personal stats page. I could bring up all my matches since the Tracker has been tracking my rounds! Nice!

Are all those specific match statistics kept indefinitely in the database or are they somehow summed up (after some time or some number of matches) to keep the database size in control?

Both Assist and AATracker are beautiful things! Thank you devs! Please, keep up the good work :style:

Hey!

Thank you for the kind words. I finally managed to get around to allowing more match history to be loaded last night so it is awesome to see someone noticing, appreciating and providing feedback so soon. I really appreciate it!.

Unfortunately in this case you're correct that match statistics aren't held indefinitely. Specifically, the most recent 2000 matches are kept with the oldest falling off when a new one has started. This typically means a match will remain in a player / servers history for 1 - 2 months depending on how active the game is. I may look at increasing this number if possible, perhaps to 4000, if I am able.

I also agree with you about Assist. I'm very glad we can play this game in 2024. See you in-game!.

32
Feedback & Suggestions / Re: Official map only servers needed
« on: Thursday, January 18, 2024, 11:09:54 AM »
The original AA experience died since the start of assist... they decide now.

What would remain of the original AA experience if not for Assist? Grainy 360p YouTube videos with no ability to actually play the game?.

Custom maps existed when the army ran the game, as did the ability for server owners / admins to swap to them. Seems to me the most notable difference is accessibility seeing as several custom maps ship with the game so players have the option to stay or leave (as opposed to not being able to load in at all) should the server switch to a custom map.

Finally, the game released 22 years ago now (or thereabouts?). It's no surprise that returning players would want to play the maps they are most familiar with. Conversely, it comes as no surprise that some players who have stuck around may prefer some variety. Rather than advocating for the removal of choice, I would suggest taking initiative and trying to seed one of the many empty servers on a 'classic' map or firing up a server where you can control the map choice. (If memory serves you have a Pipeline exclusive server, anyhow).

As for poorly performing, I mean.. it's 2024 and the game runs well (arguably too well) on modern hardware. Most maps will perform fine on integrated graphics which can't be said for most 3d games of today.

33
General Chat / Re: AATracker.net - America's Army Stat Tracking.
« on: Wednesday, December 27, 2023, 11:16:59 AM »
If you don't mind, I'd love to re-invent the website style. That is if you trust me with your site. I understand if you do not.

That could be cool!. The frontend code is a bit of a mess to say the least and I've been slowly starting to clean it up a touch haha send me a message on Discord and we'll chat?.

34
General Chat / Re: AATracker.net - America's Army Stat Tracking.
« 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!.

35
Feedback & Suggestions / Re: servers
« on: Friday, September 08, 2023, 21:13:31 PM »
2. There is no additional cost associated with running a server. I.e back in the official days you had pay the US Amry for "honor", which meant you didn't really want to run an empty server. Though many competition-specific servers were just ran without honor.

Touching on this point, I recall the price of an honor server being far too much for my younger self to afford, so I've taken a trip to the Wayback Machine to see what it would have cost to rent an honor server / purchase honor for an AA server around 2007.

Gameservers.com:


AAHonor.com


These prices are pretty crazy even by todays standards. So in addition to the point that Teddy made, with modern hardware you are able to run, in some cases, multiple servers on a single machine for a fraction of the price it would have cost in the past (perhaps 1/10th or less).

As for the main point of this thread, I've noticed what you're describing generally happens if some players don't like the map that is being played, or the ping of the populated server isn't ideal for them. It's fairly rare, but I can't imagine consolidating the server list would really change that. Aside from that, you would have to restrict who has the ability to spin up a server, and I personally think it is cool that America's Army allows anyone to do so which is becoming less and less common in modern games unfortunately.

36
Wow, thank you for sharing!. I had always wanted to pick up this game when I was young, but was never able to find it. Information was also a touch scarce so I had no idea there was multiplayer, that the maps were (mostly) the same, and that a lot of the same models / textures / sounds were used. The videos are really cool to see what I missed out on!.

37
General Chat / Re: AATracker.net - America's Army Stat Tracking.
« 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.

38
General Chat / Re: AATracker.net - America's Army Stat Tracking.
« 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!.

39
General Chat / Re: AATracker.net - America's Army Stat Tracking.
« on: Friday, May 26, 2023, 23:58:17 PM »

40
General Chat / Re: AATracker.net - America's Army Stat Tracking.
« 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!.

41
General Chat / Re: AATracker.net - America's Army Stat Tracking.
« 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.

42
General Chat / Re: AATracker.net - America's Army Stat Tracking.
« 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!


43
News / Re: [BETA] Gaining honor and honor claims
« on: Thursday, May 18, 2023, 11:24:05 AM »
Thanks everyone, and huge shoutout to Teddy for his work in making this possible!.

44
General Chat / Re: AATracker.net - America's Army Stat Tracking.
« 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!.

45
General Chat / 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

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