Player stats that are important Options

[Stormtrooper]

I have a question for you. As a user or admin who likes to view their game play stats and the stats of an entire server what's most important to you? This is a very important question to better understand the gaming community. I need your feedback to help design the next generation of gamer stats.

Currently, a stats website generally gives you a list of players and some basic stats in a table.... boring! What can be done to spice that up a bit? What important should be immediately visible when you first view the player stats for your server? Do you want to see an overall view of the server? Do you want to see a list of the top 10 players? Do you want to see how players are fragging each other?

Do you want lots of pretty graphics and a complex website design, or something minimalistic? Do you prefer flash over dynamically generated images? Or maybe you fancy something like the google chart api?

Do you like to compare players or do you really only care if you're in the top10 and screw the rest?

Do you want 'forum signatures' that shows your ranking as an image that can be used in external forum sites?

Now is the time to express your desires, you never know something you mention may appear in PS4.0.

Thanks.

[l0gen]

Just some idea's

- The use of SourceMod to save stats, instead of FTP or the perl programs etc.
- Perhaps it's possible with SourceMod to exclude the bot kills and headshots points completely. (because we use SourceMod to save stats instead of logs?)
- The SourceMod plugin checks the mysql database with settings, at startup. So you don't have to config it trough FTP. (just change a setting in the control panel, click save and it also syncs with the server (just like Sourcebans does))
- Able to delete the stats of a cheater, and because the victims etc are logged, you could perhaps roll back the damage done to the victims. (eg. Give back points/skill remove the deaths caused by the cheater etc)
- Ingame stats trough the SourceMod plugin.
- Style your own front page, With modules you can switch disable or install even new ones.

Server:
- Chat Logging
- Total kicks, bans, joins, leaves, time outs etc. (list with last kicked/banned players)
- Graphs with server stats like how many players where on and how much FPS the server had, bandwidth it was using etc.
- When Steambans is running on the server, and it kicks someone because he is banned by Steambans. Display this in a list, with kicked/banned players etc. (if possible)
- Toplists; by kills, deaths, k/d, online time, kill or death streak, etc

Player:
- Signatures, avatars with some information.
- Session stats, with information like; playername, kd/ratio, and the current features it has.
- Chat History, last xx lines of chat.
- Total time played in a certain team, or in spectator mode.
- Last xx kills the player made, and who was the victim.
- League look ups, is the player playing in cal, enemydown or xray (anti cheat) if so, display it in his profile (including a link to his profile on the league site)


About the SourceMod plugin, this is something you can do a lot with.
Because you can hook many game events with it, and log them to a mysql database.
The only thing people need is to install SourceMod (which many people have already)
And have a mysql database, and a www to host the Psychostats on.

Then you don't need the perl stuff, where most of the people have problems with or just can't run it all the time (to have real-time stats)

I don't know if it's possible to log a lot of data real time with SM, but I have a live chat plugin running that displays the chat live on a page, and thats real time.
So why can kills etc not be logged?

Looking forward to PS4.0

[BuMHeD]

About the SourceMod plugin, this is something you can do a lot with.
Because you can hook many game events with it, and log them to a mysql database.
The only thing people need is to install SourceMod (which many people have already)
And have a mysql database, and a www to host the Psychostats on.

Then you don't need the perl stuff, where most of the people have problems with or just can't run it all the time (to have real-time stats)

Don't forget... there are still a lot of us playing the goldsrc engine... I'm not against expanding SourceMod's efficacy with PS4... but to build the engine around it would be short-sighted, IMO. Forgive me for being critical, but I'm adamantly stuck in the past (pre-Source), as are many players.

*~BuM~*

[Munra]

I really Like the idea of a source mod/metamod source plugin instead of perl.


However BuMHed as a very good point about the players on the Goldsrc engine. You would also issues even with different games. There are 3 different Source versions (i think) there is the EP1 , Orangebox and The L4D version, so there could be some issues with multi game support.

I really like the idea to be able to compare 2 or more players at a time. You know just by clicking 2 check boxes and hitting compare.


I would really like to see a flash design however I rather see it become easily customizable. Like setting you logo links and the ACP. Maybe even a way to change colors in the ACP with out having to create a CSS file. Or changing the location of the Iframes and the ability to add custom boxes or Iframes.

Oh I would also Love to see integration into invision power Board
See stat information under a users avatar would be super bad ass. I would take this over anything else.

I am sure I will come up with some more ideas but maybe the next ones you'll be able to use.

[k1ller]

I'm bit against the hype about SourceMod. There are stats of server plugins at http://www.sourcemod.net/newstats.php. Mattie EventScripts is at 28.35% and SourceMod at 23.19% currently. So basically having Psychostats for ES would have more potential users than SM. Metamod:Source then again is a completely different thing. It's unlikely that Psychostats will be re-implemented with any server plugin though.

I think the new cool thing will be udp streaming to Psychostats backend and the backend can then react to events in-game - and that requires no server plugins at all.

With udp streaming it'll be probably quite much easier for stats hosters (like d4fseeker) too to host statistics for server admins who cannot run required software for Psychostats (ie. MySQL, Perl, PHP) themselves.

@ About the topic
Plain and simple statistics in tables are good.

[d4fseeker]

I'm against Psychostats running on server-side at all
Sure, some admins would love it but there are two big disadvantages:
a) for webbased stats you need either a local webserver (OUCH!!!) on the GS-server or you need remote webspace with access to mysql.
B ) it would slow down the server and take up more cpu.

While ( a ) doesn't seem to be a big deal - webspace being extremely cheap today - you would ruin all advantages of a "download&use"-package.
Furthermore many gameserver provider neither like connections to external databases nor provide one on the local machine for speed reasons.
The same is valid for webservers, so you would effectively ruin the Psychostats-"experience" for more people than it would help.

( B ) is for hosters and therefore also for the customers a problem, as psychostats parses a lot of stats and thus requires a whole lot more CPU power than
crude low-level stats included in most admin plugins. Additionally the mysql-connection would yet again slow down the server and use up bandwith,
so no hoster would be too happy to host such a plugin.
One could also mention that with ingame-based plugins multi-server stats would become much harder if not impossible to realise.


I think that the only disadvantage to PS is that, it is implimented in a scripting language and therefore requires somewhat more cpu power than e.g. a C++-implimention.
But this is no big disadvantage as I have found out that (when sharing the same machine) MySQL is hitting the 100% mark a LOT faster than Psychostats when processing ftp-based logs, so that hardly counts

In my opinion, Psychostats capability to run either stream-, ftp-, sftp-, local, and with some addition even httpproxy-based logfiles is a HUGE market advantage above a plugin only covering a narrow perspective.
For instance many leagues do not allow you to 'taint' your server with any non-approved plugins and other than Detox, Steambans or other anticheat-plugins I NEVER saw such a thing than sourcemod allowed.

Everyone not willing or not able to afford webspace including the necessary power to run psychostats or even a (virtual) server can use free-hosters like me.
It's exactly for these people that I created, run and extend the psychostats-hosting.

With udp streaming it'll be probably quite much easier for stats hosters (like d4fseeker) too to host statistics for server admins who cannot run required software for Psychostats (ie. MySQL, Perl, PHP) themselves.

Unfortunately, except if Storm makes a huge breakthrough and recodes everything in C++ with minimalistic memory footprint in mind, realtime-stats will only be offered as commercial offer (expected at roughly 1$/month or 0.75€/month) due to PS3.2's quite large RAM usage of roughly 14MB. 14 MB not seeming to be very much, I would in the long run not be able to provide the required RAM. The money obtained in selling the so-called "premium"-pack (Realtime-Upgrade, faster response time, backup servers, configuration of the game-/webserver by our staff...) would be used to upgrade the over-stressed hardware and add database servers in the US.

On the other hand I'm currenly working hard on two different projects:
~ a re-implemtation of the log-download algorithm, adding a "prefetcher" which downloads the logs in a whole to the local server before parsing them,
thus removing the need for PS to download the logs itself and so accelate the process. As a consequence unused or incorrectly configured servers are skipped,
as are any that have not yet added logs.
First tests have shown a increase of the update time by roughly 50-70% in peak time and up to 90% overnight.
So I'll try to keep the update rate of the ftp-based logs below 2-3min, which should be fairly near the desired 'realtime'

~ a webbased pluginless system for GoldSrc/Source-servers giving the gameservers functions like 'rank' without the need for ingame plugins.
I'm currently trying to obtain a database-access key to Steambans so that the plugin could ban cheaters too.

Imho both the gameserver and psychostats itself should be kept as simple and small as possible (so-called KISS principle), which would reduce the amount of possible problems and bugs and also lead to a easier to maintain system for Storm itself.
Anything can be ADDED to Psychostats, be in in form of ingame plugins, external scripts or includes to Psychostats itself, but REMOVING is extremely hard.

[forbisc]

Suggestions:

-Forum Signatures Built into the release
-Tracking stats as local to a server or "global/total" rankings as well
-Awards should be redone IMO make them less linear and add awards for specific games possibly give players ribbons that they can display in forum signatures
-Miniature google map on player profile page, allows you to see everyones geoip location.
-Some sort of in-game deal, i personally know alot of people would use psychostats over hlstatsx if it had in game plugins for sourcemod/amx (sorry had to throw that out there)

I kinda like a fairly lite layout too much flash and javascript animation is a big turnoff. As for the boring table of users theres not much you can do, trolling around a player statistics site can never really be that much fun... You find your rank maybe look at your stats page and thats it.

Lastly i would like to see a simplified stats page that can load quickly in the motd, released with v4. Something containing some detailed stats but without alot of images/javascript. I have something that i whipped up real quick but im not all that great so it looks kinda bad lol. If you not sure what im talking about its like the webshortcutlist that mani mod has lets you take a persons steamid and generate a url that is viewed in the motd.

[DirtyDave]

I find nothing wrong as they were in the last two builds. It was completely perfect! Tons of information in a very easy to read design and layout. It's all and everything you could have asked for!

[OptimuS]

i don`t really care about live stats. I prefer the update through cron job. More accurate. you should keep the current look of psychostats and focus more on the accuracy, like i said on other post, in CS 1.6 you can read the information about kills deaths and many other in the csstats.dat.

The file can be easily decoded with a perl script or C# script. You can find them here http://wiki.amxmodx.org/index.php/Stats_Fi...%28AMX_Mod_X%29 . Should be much easier and more accurate to read the info from this file, instead of processing the whole logs, and lose accuracy. You can still run a cron job to read the logs to post on the website some other info`s like banned/kicked people and so forth. Thank you and keep up the good work.

[Stormtrooper]

The csstats.dat file would not provide the same level of accuracy that PS can produce from the raw log files (or log stream). The fact is, the dat file only contains summary stats for each player. It doesn't keep track of sessions, victims, and possibly other tidbits that I'm missing off the top of my head.

And I've said it before, relying on that file limits the support that PS can provide for any halflife game. I would have to rely on the addon authors to properly update their plugins anything a game engine change is made, or a new game comes out.

@forbisc

-Miniature google map on player profile page, allows you to see everyones geoip location.

This is partially done in PS3.2. If you edit a player's profile and manually enter a long,lat location a mini google map will appear on that player's page. It's not done for all players because the lookup involved to determine a player's geoip is an extra http request to my server.

[Lt. Maverick]

My 2 cents on your wonderful Psychostats and how to improve it in your next version...

Q. What can be done to spice that up a bit?
A. I absolutely love the look and feel of PS 3.2. As far as esthetics, I wouldn't change a thing except for centering the top menu which would better allow for a full top banner that can be customized by the operator. Because the menu is to the far left, the top log must also be pushed tot he left to look ok. This is extremely minor, but what the heck, this is why we're responding right?

Q. What important should be immediately visible when you first view the player stats for your server?
A. Very similar to what they see now.

Q. Do you want to see an overall view of the server?
A. YES an active view of what's going on in a log stream would be friken sweet!

Q. Do you want to see a list of the top 10 players?
A. NO, because the Top-10 could be any Top-10, i.e. top rank, top kills, top headshots, blah blah blah. I say let each person sort the lists as they want.

Q. Do you want to see how players are fragging each other?
A. Again, live log stream would be sweet!

Q. Do you want lots of pretty graphics and a complex website design, or something minimalistic?
A. The more graphics, the better! That's the beauty of web design and lets face it, people are drawn to detailed web pages if they are set up properly

Q. Do you prefer flash over dynamically generated images? Or maybe you fancy something like the google chart api?
A. Flash looks cool but is over-rated. Too save time and headaches, I'd stick with some nice graphics instead of complex flash work.

Q. Do you like to compare players or do you really only care if you're in the top10 and screw the rest?
A. I do like to compare players, and the existing system works fine for that in my opinion.

A. Do you want a forum signature that shows your ranking as an image that can be used in external forum sites?
Q. If it's not too much work, then what the heck... Not a priority though...

Additional thoughts/requests

1. I would love to see a "VAC Status" field in the each player's profile. So many people that have played and been ranked in my servers are VAC banned, it's not even funny. It would be sweet to be able to see that info right in their profile, especially when you see someone with unbelievable stats and you just know they were cheating. It would also be nice to be able to mass delete the VAC banned accounts to get them out of the rank list. THIS IS HUGE! PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE DO THIS! My whole community would love it...

2. Someone else already mentioned this, but combining the stats from multiple servers would be sweet, as long as you could select the servers you want to display the stats for. For instance, lets say I have 5 servers IO want to track stats for. Currently I need to have 5 seperate databases and psychostats systems to track them. In order to get combined stats, I need to import the log source of each server into one combined database which is cool, but the stats can not be sorted by which server they were collected on. The ability to be able to combine and seperately query stats from multiple servers usign a single data source that can be queried would be sweet!

3. DYNAMIC LIVE STATS! OH YES! That would be absolutely awesome!

4. Would be nice to have a decent MOTD Stats Psychostats display and a better in-game rank/stats viewer. The existing ones are very basic and many of them do not work properly.

5. Add the ability for admins to create custom achievements like most kills per minute and others... This would be tough I know, but has great potential.

That's about it as far as I can tell. I just want to thank you for an awesome system. We use it and love it! Have a good one!

Mike Vail
BOOM! Lt. Maverick
www.boomgaming.net

[Munra]

When I say I want a sourcemod plugin I don't want it to host web side of it.

Some of the things what should be cool for the sourcemod plugin.

1) Ingame stats (duh)
2) pull upstats in the MOTD (duh again pretty much already there)
3) Control the steaming instead of have add a log address to the game server.

The reason for number 3 is to run a perl script in the background you would most likely need a VPs level webhosting. Most shared webhosting will at allow a the perl script to be running 100% of the time logging real time data. Some might but most wont. If the source mod plugin could control the data and directly put that information into the database and eliminate the whole perl process. However another problem would be shared hosting blocking outside connections to the sql server. I do understand that this could be resource intensive but i don't know enough to say that.

[Stormtrooper]

It would never be possible to have a sourcemod plugin produce stats as complex as PsychoStats. It would take far too much memory and CPU to do it plus I'm sure sourcemod simply wouldn't be able to handle it as a programming language. Not to mention that sourcemod is EXTREMELY slow at inserting rows into a mysql database (At least when using threads; and if a plugin doesn't use threads then it lags the entire server too). Maybe newer sourcemod versions don't have this issue, but I know it was a problem when I implemented the Pslive plugin. I couldn't do more than 1 insert a second.

@Lt. Maverick,
thanks for the feedback, its appreciated. you have some good comments there that may sway me to do certain things.

[pc349bds]

I would like to see a nice simple way to customize the lay out. like a GUI to change color, use a img as a background for a title, size , text, homepage and so on.

The player id to be the SteamID not a new id by PS. this will let us use SM WebShortcuts to link in a ingame command to go right to a players page.

Better awards like they are in 1.4.4 of FraggerStats but still with the calender (ps that's a radon site i found not my site)
Then use the the icons given in that to be put on a sig

A opp to integrate with forums would be really nice. Like PHPBB and others. so users don't have to reg twice.


You could have a script run on one pc that reads the info in rcon and updates the SQL with the info it picks up and have it set to keep the time of the last thing it received. if the stream is lost then it can go to the logs and find what it lost and pick it back up. and it can make a temp file to mirror the server Log file so at the end of the map it would open a new peal to look at the 2 and see if it lost any info and correct its self if it did then delete the temp file.

[neggard]

I think it is ok now but I wish to se more of CMS and forum intigration.

Easy for CMS system like e107, joomla and phpnuke etc. to show top 10 and maybe some stats in
forum like rank.

[fusionhead]

Hi, first off, I love this tool and thanks for all the hard work on it.

Regarding what I look for on player stats? Most of the time I'm either looking for cheaters or who to congratulate on their performance.

I think an admin cheat analysis view would be excellent. One thing I look for is high percentage headshots or high percentage anything. Lets say the shots were always going to the chest and nowhere else, that would be suspect too. It would be nice to have automatic tags for suspected players to be reviewed for x reasons. I hate cheaters to no end because it takes away from the honest players effort. Lets face it, we all spend a lot of time on these games so to have someone devalue it, it is unacceptable.

Thanks again for a great tool.

http://www.fusionhead.com (site of my ps3 page)

-Fusionhead

[Stormtrooper]

I would like to see a nice simple way to customize the lay out. like a GUI to change color, use a img as a background for a title, size , text, homepage and so on.

There are two options. either make it easy to change a couple of things like background color, fonts and head image and that's essentially it. Or allow the entire site be 'skinable'. I choose to make the output skinable for the greatest flexibility. I could compromise on a few points, like an easy way to 'brand' a site by changing the banner, etc.

The player id to be the SteamID not a new id by PS. this will let us use SM WebShortcuts to link in a ingame command to go right to a players page.

You can do that with PS3 using the search. Just use a URL similar to: http: //mystats.com/stats/search.php?q=STEAMID_0:1234567 -- When a search matches exactly 1 player it'll automatically redirect to that player page.

Better awards like they are in 1.4.4 of FraggerStats but still with the calender (ps that's a radon site i found not my site)
Then use the the icons given in that to be put on a sig

I want to build a better awards system. But having things like medals will require graphical work that I can not do.

A opp to integrate with forums would be really nice. Like PHPBB and others. so users don't have to reg twice.

With so many possible and requested integrations I can't do them myself. PS3 (and PS4) has a plugin architecture that allows someone to modify the way users are authenticated in the stats. So it's entirely possible to hook into that and change the behavior of the PS session management to use your existing site backend. This just requires someone with the knowledge of the backend to do it.

I think an admin cheat analysis view would be excellent.

Hehe. Not asking for much, eh? That sort of coding and logic can get very complex very fast

[fusionhead]

Hehe. Not asking for much, eh? That sort of coding and logic can get very complex very fast

Stormtrooper,

Yes and no. If you keep it simple at first... You already have the data. Example, you can trigger on data in the table ps_c_plr_victims... below.

dataid plrid victimid firstdate lastdate deaths headshotkills headshotkillspct Descending kills killsperdeath
2464 1579 1580 2009-03-29 2009-03-29 2 1 33.33 3 1.50
2458 1445 1499 2009-03-29 2009-03-29 14 3 33.33 9 0.64

It just needs another table something like cl_plr_anal that adds tags based on simple math. It's up to the admin to review the list of users flagged and dig into the stats for that user. This would be a huge help in narrowing down the list of potential cheaters. Of course, improvement over time it can get more complex.

With that said, most cheaters go for headshots so this should catch most of them.

If I get some time, I'll write a perl script to do it. Maybe I will make it email the list daily or after each map change so you can have the chance to go in there and catch them red handed.

-Fusionhead

[BuMHeD]

... something like cl_plr_anal that ...

This made me chuckle.

*~BuM~*

[INC Grandma]

Hi there,

I had been looking for a good stats system I could host myself initially and found this.
Whilst I love the interface and the way t install it, I do run 10-12+ servers and running the update script complete kills my server in terms of CPU.

I have a dedicated Server with remote desktop to it that I also run apache on as well as 12 CSS 100 Tick server and 1 L4D server, all servers are quite heavily modded.

I run this on a very beefy machine with a dual 3.2Ghz Quad-core and 4GB RAM. My GSP provider assures me that they are easily able to run about 30-35 100 tick standard servers off such a machine.

The stats.pl script completly destroys and lags out my server to the max

I would be interested in any sort of update that uses a better and mroe efficient method of parsing the logs, more realtime would also be preferable too as this is a very important issue to me in deciding what stats package we use.

cheers,
|INC| Grandma

http://www.inc-gaming-clan.com
http://stats.inc-gaming-clan.com

You can find all our info and servers from there