Psychostats 3 is quite good ranking system but it might not tell everything about the goodness of some player. Here’s what I tried to look for from PS3 database:

Consider a player who has K : D ratio 1.0. That kind of player on average kills only one player per round. If that player has very good skill in PS3 it means that the victims of this player are ranked high on PS3. That is the ELO rating system PS3 is based on.

Now think about player who manages to kill 3 noobs in each round before dying himself. Such player might be as valuable for the team as the player who always kills just the toughest opposite team player.

Player whose K : D ratio is close to 1 with high skill could be actually more valuable for the team than the 1st ranked player on PS3. Here’s what was calculated:

Player skill / (K : D)^1/3 ::: That is “player’s skill divided by cube root of K : D ratio”

Division by cube root is done so that players with high K : D ratio would not suffer so much about the comparison to just K : D. For example player with K : D ratio of 2.5 would have his skill divided by 2.5^1/3 = 1.357. Player with only 2.0 ratio would have division value of 2.0^1/3 = 1.26. Difference between 1.357 and 1.26 is only 0.0973. If we used plain K : D ratio then the player with 2.5 ratio would have his skill divided by comparable larger value than the others. By taking cube root from the ratio the values pack closer to 1.0 and thus are closer to the real skill of the player and even players with high K : D ratio get sane value for alternative rank.

Name		Rank	K : D	Skill	Skill / (K : D)^1/3

koti	  	18  	1.33  	13992  	12724
M@rt!n 		25 	1.35 	13718 	12412
Maksiu 		13 	1.59 	14283 	12237
TupaC	 	4 	1.96 	15293 	12220
dred	 	11 	1.67 	14400 	12137
EchO* 		24 	1.46 	13752 	12122
MITAC 		16 	1.57 	14058 	12095
k1ller 		8 	1.73 	14510 	12087
ANAL .pl	10 	1.73 	14416 	12009
Perplexer	15 	1.65 	14140 	11966
Michaellsland 	12 	1.72 	14327 	11958
lWoDl windman 	29 	1.46 	13520 	11918
?oakak 		20 	1.62 	13959 	11885
emmanuel 	2 	2.24 	15539 	11876
Chinaman 	21 	1.63 	13913 	11822
[odabasz]Pazo 	14 	1.80 	14279 	11738
essim0n 	1 	2.47 	15862 	11734
AJEJ 		28 	1.57 	13614 	11714
FakFeijs 	6 	1.93 	14559 	11693
Dr.House 	23 	1.69 	13839 	11618
k!llErM@ch!nE 	22 	1.72 	13901 	11602
BaLaN 		3 	2.31 	15302 	11576
Sonic 		17 	1.78 	14019 	11567
hg.toble 	19 	1.78 	13990 	11544
voov		9 	2.00 	14469 	11484
The[Rip]Ice_Fin	27 	1.71 	13631 	11399
hg.antizero 	5 	2.30 	15011 	11372
S.G#antizero 	7 	2.28 	14552 	11056

On that list you should see players who do not necessarily get lots of kills but know how to kill the other skilled players. Notice that the values in the last column don’t actually mean anything else but the order of the list. What was expected that the players who have rushing style of playing drop somewhat lower on this ranking list. They manage to kill the first couple noobs who come across their way at the beginning of each round and thus get high K : D ratio. Players who are more careful in their play either kill these first rushers or wait for the other skilled players to come to their line of fire.

Gameplay level

Currently the plugin “nonoobs time” (reserve slots for regular players) is inactive due to some technical issues (PS2 stats are not computed anymore) and the fact that there is maybe not enough online time for all regular players to be considered as regular visitors. Plugin is custom written so it’s possible to convert it to use PS3 data instead of PS2. Sometime in the near future (during this week?) it will be active again, hopefully.

What I’ve observed is that the gameplay really suffers because there are lots of more noobs than regular players. Now, because there are lots of noobs many good players get insane scores by killing lots of noobs. Because noobs cannot coordinate their attacks the few regular players cannot do much to get their team winning.

Pay attention to level of gameplay now and after the nonoobs plugin is enabled again.

Balancing teams

Team balancing is always a bit tricky question. Most players seem to think this as trivial but then again most players are stupid. Here are some thoughts about how team balancing can be done (either in wrong fashion or correctly).

1. Admin swaps player from other team to another

This might be the most popular method of manual balancing. This method further divides to atleast two categories.

1.1 Swap “random” player from winning team to another

Swapping “random” player is not a good solution. Consider situation where team A is winning clearly and admin then “balances” teams by swapping someone to another team. Then team B starts winning and in the end scores are even - everybody happy? No. Even though the scores are even doesn’t mean that the teams are balanced. Swapping one good player (ie. anyone in PS3 top-50) can and usually does change the balance upside down. Usually players seem happy with this option even though it is clear by the next round that team B is going to start their winning streak evening the scores till the map ends.

Swapping one (good) player to another team has kind of double-effect. First it takes one good player away from the team A and gives that extra skills to team B. Not surprisingly the player who was swapped has lots of money, good weapons and kevlars and can continue his killing streak in the team B. Then team B starts winning because team A has actually lost the skill of the swapped player and team B benefits alot of this extra skill. This is the wrong way to balance teams!

1.2 Swap worst player in the winning team

This is quite much the best balancing option. Swapping some complete noob (who are omnipresent) does not change drastically team A’s tactics but gives a bit of extra firepower to team B. In 95% of cases it is just this insignificant noob who does not realize his position in the team which can make all the difference in balancing. However swapping noob in a balanced situation is not likely to have any change in the gameplay. That is, the noob does not have enough skills to play as a member of the team and as such does not affect the whole gameplay drastically. By complete noobs I mean players who get scores like 1 - 7 after 8 rounds.

2. “Fair” player swaps himself to another team

Sometimes this works but usually not in the intended way. Any player in the top-25 makes so much difference that if such player swaps himself to another team it completely changes balance. The player himself might see that he is balancing the teamplay by going to another team and make the other team win. That is not balancing! That is going to teamwhore in the other team with all the good weapons, kevlars and lots of money. The other team doesn’t expect anyone to be against them with AWP and are used to kill people with couple shots (enemies don’t have kevlars because they don’t have money). The “fair” player who swapped himself to another team now gets lots of easy kills and can quite easily make his team winning again because the other team lost his skills and the other team gained his skills. Anyone in top-25 shouldn’t change his team during one map (unless autobalanced).

3. Autobalancing

Mani admin plugin does autobalancing quite nicely even though it is completely random. There are some balancing plugins which look at the player skills, kills or other information to do balancing. However it is very common that these plugins overbalance the teams. It really kills the concept of teamplay if every round one or couple players change sides to make teams as even as possible. It’s not teamplay anymore.

4. Conclusion

Teams are balanced when it is X vs. X (X is some number). Usually atleast. Sometimes it just happens that the other team plays better than the other. That is not reason to swap some player to another team to make game “balanced” -  by “balanced” I mean that the other team starts winning so that the scores are even at the end of map. Just like in any other sport sometimes the other team is just better. Just look any national sports league and you can observe that sometimes some good teams just play badly. That is their fault! They should be improving their play rather than getting extra players! Next month the same teams meet again and the scores can be upside down.

Don’t cry for balance - just play better.

Stupidities in the modern world

There are some weird things in the so called modern world (that is, western countries).

Here are some samples from countries which pretty much think that they belong to these “modern countries”. Some of them actually are “modern” in almost every sense but still it’s amazing how much views can differ about how things should or should not be.

Abortion is almost illegal in some European countries.

Some weeks ago majority of Portuguese didn’t want to vote for the abortion law which is very restrictive compared to rest of the Europe. In the same news article it is mentioned that abortion is banned in most situations in Malta, Ireland and Poland. Just what is wrong with these countries?

Here’s a clue.

The picture shows that there are lots of religious people in the above countries (except Portugal). It’s quite hard to believe that people still in the 21st century let religion dictate their beliefs in the world.

Genocide of Armenians decided by Swiss and Turkish courts

Swiss court convicts Turkish politician because he denies Armenian genocide. In the same article it is mentioned that “In Turkey it is a crime to use the word genocide to describe the World War I-era killings”. Why does some court has to decide what happened in the world and what not? Is it like Turkey’s court is trying to protect its country’s image by saying that “nothing happened”. Swiss then again want to write their history so that there was a genocide - claim something else even with a proof and you go to jail. Unbelievable that in the “free world” (I mean Europe here, not Turkey) the freedom of speech is limited this way. Another issue is with the Germans and their swastikas, which is equally stupid thing to be settled in the courts.

Is that really the state of the freedom of speech in Europe? Unfortunately yes.

Turkey bans YouTube

Just what is wrong with you Turks? Don’t you care a bit about what your government dictates and what not? Do you support such ban? There are quite many Turkish CS:S players at Setti. I really hope you don’t support such bans - but are you against that kind of stupidity? Somewhere I read that Turks don’t like to protest at anything because they are too afraid to show what they really think about issues. They rather wait for the problems to fade away. Just how stupid is that? Even though the ban is quite separate example it still shows that it is possible to cencor internet in Turkey the same way that is done in China and other oppressive countries. It is done possible by your courts and people who accept such bans. And for what reason - because you Turks are idiots (and Ataturk is idiot too). Plz ban?

‘28% of Israel’s Arabs deny Holocaust’

Maybe not so reliable statistic as it was not reported in most of the popular news services but maybe there’s a hint of truth. “More than a quarter of Israel’s Arab citizens believe the Holocaust never happened, and nearly two thirds of Israeli Jews avoid entering Arab towns, a poll by an Israeli university showed Sunday.” Maybe Israel should now look example from Switzerland and Turkey and make a law that dictates what happened. Just pick couple people and ask their opinion about what happened and what not.

Messageboard at Setti mainpage had to be changed to moderated when there started to be too much stupid one-liners. The difference between from page 388 backwards to onwards is like day and night. Stupid messages completely disappeared. There are still stupid people who post stupid messages but it is relieving to know that they don’t get published.

Not all members are moderated though. Currently there are handulf of players who have proved to be able to write something sensible every now and then. Currently not moderated users (who are still active) on mboard are:

• muck
• EchO
• diak
• Hattori Hanzo

Also admins and some others who have not posted anything for ages are not moderated. Those who are not moderated can see the informative message:

Your messages are not moderated. Your post will show immediately.

Users who are moderated see the message:

Your message must be approved before others can see it. Your message will be in waiting state before it is either approved or disapproved.

If you look for messages that not-moderated members have posted you might get the idea why admins can trust that they don’t post anything stupid. That is, there is no need for moderation. Unfortunately there are just a few such members.

It doesn’t mean that all the other members or their posts are stupid but it’s just that these are just not needed, not even once. Unfortunate reality is that if moderation is removed from some members then that kind of posts will increase.

Also commenting on these blog entries is moderated. However mboard moderation system beats this moderation hands down. Whenever new comment is posted for example on this post the comment disappears. It’s as if there was some error. Not a single bit of information that the comment has been succesfully sent and must be approved before displaying. I added the moderation info in the layout some time ago.

Regisration and user management

There are lots of stuff that had to be done so that the “START BLOG” button actually creates the blog and is ready to run. Here are some things which had to be dealt with.

Old user registrations

Some players (for example: “. . : :EchO: : . .”, “Hattori Hanzo”) have registered themselves such names that cannot be easily written to urls. Obvious cases are those special characters which don’t appear in ASCII chart. Another thing is spaces which could have been dealt with by replacing them with _ or with nothing. However it’s not like those who had exotic name lose something if they change their username. Both EchO and HattoriHanzo have re-registered. Registering with odd names is not possible. Old usernames are still preserved though, so names with special characters are now a rarity. Hold on to your passwords

People who have “weird” characters in their names do not have “START BLOG” button on their useraccount page. There is notification that their username is not valid and they have to re-register IF they want to blog - it’s not mandatory.

New user registrations

As said in the previous chapter, newly registered users cannot register names which include special characters or spaces. In fact, someone actually registered with such a name and I had to update the registration form again (oops, old version was active).

Because comments are only allowed for registered users all new users have to have also usernames for these blogs. Because Setti mboard and these blogs are from different worlds there must be some integration between them. So, whenever user registers for mboard they also get username (not blog) for the blogs. If username wasn’t created then they wouldn’t be able to comment at all. Allowing anonymous comments is stupid because quite quickly spam bots and stupid random browsers find these blogs.

Default Wordpress installation requires e-mail addresses to be applied too but that seemed stupid. Luckily it is possible to create users with WPMU functions without specifying e-mail address.

This way both mboard useraccount and these blog accounts seem to be as one even though they are separate. Because all functionality still goes through mboard -> useraccount things can be controlled in more concentrated way. For example users don’t have to remember username / password for both mboard and these blogs.

Starting a blog

Figuring out how to start a blog for some user was somewhat easier than figuring out for example how to signup a user without e-mail. Default blog owners didn’t have some privileges which would be useful. For example creating pages wasn’t possible. Also comment moderation wasn’t enabled even though all comments are by default moderated.

Logging in

Logging in is maybe the most elegant solution. Both logging in to a blog and logging into a default user account are done with same login page. Login page can figure out

1. Is the user logged in
2. Who the user is
3. What is his blog if he has one
4. Login the user for his blog or to his user account

What is neat about this is that all required authentication is done by the same authentication thingies that identify all registered users for mboard. Wordpress doesn’t know anything about the user.

Layout

The layout ‘Boxy But Gold’ is taken from Wordpress themes gallery. There are millions of different themes. One requirement was that the main parcel is dynamic. There are lots of themes which don’t scale with the browser. No matter how big your browser is the text is still in that narrow parcel. That is not good.
Another “requirement” was that it is easy to include the default Setti header on top of the blogs. I tried couple themes and Boxy But Gold was the first one for which the header fitted perfectly. Not a single bit had to be changed either from BBG or Setti stylesheets.

The layout is not the best possible I have to admit. Positioning of pages (eg. see my blog, the upper left corner) is not good at all. All the pages are in lower case no matter how you write the page. Positioning of sub-pages is not any different from their parent pages (on my blog the “css stuff” page is parent of “high resolution cs:s video”). Originally the pages were at the right side but that is even worse.

Some links were also completely broken in the default theme installation. Those are now removed.

I’m still quite pleased with the blogs. The main blogs page which lists all new blogs is still somewhat cluttered because the blog entries don’t show up correctly. For example paragraphs are completely lost. This post surely won’t look pretty on the front page.

Here’s a video of a great video game! Just kidding, the music video by Ural 13 Diktators, a Finnish band who make retro kind of music. They take some of the samples from C64 sounds and they have covered quite a bit some well known hits from the ’80s. Still, great music with a flashback in time.

Name of the Game - Ural 13 Diktators

Absolutely great.

Why install blogs and not forums?

Here are mainly reasons against forums

People have asked for forums to be installed at Setti occasionally. However forum postings and the whole content of the forums eventually goes into “whay me banned?”, “cheeter plz admin ban him now pls!11″, “plsz restrict awp” and etc. postings. Other kind is “where can I find <insert something you cannot find>?”. This observation can be seen on many other forums. At that point nobody is interested in writing anything useful to the forums anymore.

Another thing is that usually forums have these stupid categories (General, CS:S, Off-topic, Chatting, Map requests, … ) which quickly die because nobody actively writes to them. Only good category is the General category where everything could be posted on such a small community as Setti. Using lots of different categories only makes it slower to browse through new posts.

The “General” category now seems to be the Setti mboard. One thread into which all questions and answers are posted. Whenever people ask something it doesn’t take long for someone to answer to it. Having separate thread for each question+answer is not needed. There are not so much posts that questions would quickly flow away from the mainpage.

Forums are also familiar to lots of noobs who just register to post some stupid questions. Blogs are little bit more exotic and people - hopefully - don’t register just to post some stupid question on someone’s blog.

Moderation is still a must have to ensure that there’s some quality level for each post. Before Setti’s main messageboard was moderated there started to be lots of “lol”, “wtf”, “pls ban blabhal” and such posts which aren’t of any use. Because the board is now moderated people don’t so easily post stupid stuff for the whole world to see. And even if someone does, which does still happen, the message can be easily disapproved so nobody else has to read it.

Some reasons for installing blogs

Users who want to create lots of content of their own (videos, images, tutorials, own scribblings, diary, … ) can now easily manage the content. All other users can still comment on the posts of that particular user. This encourages people to write something which they think other people would want to read too rather than posting “lol” on their blog.

That is sort of own forum for each registered user.

Happy blogging!