Urg. I f***ing hate your BBS, or whatever the hell this is. Pardon my language, and if there are little kiddies, then please ignore them. Then again, from what I've seen, I think it'll be censored.
[obligatory "censorship is anti-democratic" comment]
Anyhow, I tried appending this to the "points" thread, but it wouldn't let me, so I copy/pasted it here:
Hrm. I had another question. Well, not exactly a question, more a suggestion/requst. On the familiar's info page, could you possibly put the folling extra pieces of information?
- How many points there are between the player ranked 1 above you and 1 below you;
- How many points you will gain from the next win (assuming no level change) and how many you will lose from the next loss;
- A combonation of the above two, how many successful challenges you would need to go up one place in the rankings;
And on the screen where you place your familiar (these may already be choices):
- Your overall rank;
- Mod points;
- Any of the above three suggestions (about points gained/lossed + rankings);
From the formulae that you showed, it wouldn't really seem to be that much work, but this is also from a nice observer's POV, so meeh...-_-; (c) Ethereal Enterprises, 2002
MintMan
Posts: 4061
Member #1
Feb 9, 2003 16:56
Okay, how about I answer this all with one simple answer:
- Points mean nothing.
Simple, no? You shouldn't care what rank you will become or what your points are in any given location because they are entirely meaningless. I only added that ranking page to give people an idea of how good they are; it doesn't do a bloody thing besides own self-interest. If I implement the changes you propose, those worthless ranks would have to do a bloody lot more than just look pretty.
See, points don't exist. You can't look inside of an account and say "Oh, look, I have 500 points!" They are calculated on-the-fly when the ranking page is loaded. What you are suggesting would require either points and ranks to be stored and recalculated by some sort of Cron-managed script (which would cause to numerous problems to name; trust me, people complain about every little detail about everything, especially points that would be slightly off in the thirty minutes or whatever in between script runs) or to be sorted-through every time any one of the aforementioned pages is loaded. There are somewhere in the neighborhood of one thousand BD accounts; running through that every time someone wants a visitor to their site to see their rank is a bloody lot of loading for something that means so very little.
You shouldn't strive to attain a new rank; a rank is just a current situation, not something coveted in giant tournaments and whatnot. If you look into it, you'd see that most highrollers on the list are just inactive accounts from ancient days whose creatures have grown to incredible levels and stopped. Yeah, can't wait to show those guys who's boss and pass them up on the list.
And this ain't no freakin' BBS; this is a hard-core RE Forum programmed by, thus the suckiness. I prevent double-posting as spam-prevention and post-bumping. If you want to say something, just edit your previous post. The philosophy is that (keeping that the post isn't ancient) someone who hasn't read it will and push the post up if the edit was so meaningful.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot -- censorship isn't something I push, but rather the internet pushes on me. A lot of "parental safety controls" just close any pages containing offensive language, so I have to ensure that others don't inhibit my visitors. I really don't care what people want to say, but I do mind if they are keeping others from coming to my site.
