Official forums for BZFlag.org

I believe allejo is having League Overseer collect a bunch of data, and I was considering an idea. While a countdown is running, we could track many different statistics and try to come up with an algorithm to have an objective individual ELO system. Some examples are flag captures, distance moved with flag (straight line between where picked up to where dropped), individual score (ignoring sk's and tk's), and kills vs. each opponent (who would have their own ELO). We could even have a subjective ranking of people submitting what they think ranks are, average them all out, and factor that into the whole thing. The ELO tracking could be done only during official matches or with funmatches as well, since offis are hard to come by these days.

The reason for this wouldn't just be an individual ranking system, but it could be the beginning of some other ideas entirely. I know in the consolidation forum, we talked a little about having a Team A vs. B in addition to the current official teams we have now. If we were to implement the rank, we could come up with a way to make objectively even and random secondary teams (perhaps 4 total) based on individual ELO.

It could also be used for some events where we have teams based off ELO play each other in a round-robin or elimination-style competition (kind of like Silly Cup, but not random teams).

These are of course all preliminary ideas - what do y'all think?

I'm for it, but I think we should have some more important ideas on how to jump start this league, not trying to high jack this post though. I am also in favor of some official fun match teams.

mana's had this running for long time and it's updated daily.
http://bzf.bzflag.net/playerstats.html
Would be nice to expand on this concept as hj stated.

My next release of League Overseer will be collecting all of this data and submitting it to the league website. For the moment, it's not collecting individual player stats

Let's not get carried away with statistics. The more stats you're wanting, the more bloated and complicated the plugin is going to get, and the more sources of bugs and issues you're going to introduce. Also keep in mind that the plugins run in the same thread as the server game loop, so the more events you tap into and the more processing you do in the plugin, the more that will impact server performance.

Alright, my 2 cents:

# flag captures
# distance moved with flag
# individual score
# kills vs. each opponent
# ...

Nice statistics but they have not much value in a team-based ctf match.
Examples:
# Some players just focus on a single task - like defending and covering - while the teammate is capturing the flag.
# The attacker will most likely have a very bad kill vs be killed ratio against a skilled defender.
# Some players play well together, others do not.

It also heavily increases the server load, like Blast mentioned.

--

What you want is to know what "value" a specific player has in a particular setting (map style, size of teams, teammates).
For this, we only need some basic info like the players involved in a match, playstyle, score (captures) and a few others; this data can be used to derive the "worth" a player has, depending on his teammates, opponents mapstyle and teamsize.
This works quite well and is used in some other games as means to set up even teams.

If this is a thing players really wanted, we could either collect those data from now on, which would take some time to have enough matches played to create a solid database, or we would have to analyse the last maybe 500 or 1000 matches.
(funmatches and officials, because the latter don't bear enough info - the who played with/vs whom in official matches is too limited)