The City Badge Tracker leaderboard might be more fun if only one character per account could be on the list.

[mechahamham]

I was a mod in Victory Badges for a long time during the live era. I never got frustrated on the 'Gotta catch 'em all!' front, but I did like to help others get badges. For me, EVERY run is a badge run, even if my character has those badges. I will likely never be in the top 5 or even top 50. I don't think people should be ashamed of showing off their characters' badge counts. It's a big part of the fun of that game.

 

When one individual takes all the top 10 spots, it's maybe not so fun for others. They have achieved a lot and should rightly have kudos and recognition, but so have those other players.

 

My suggestion is that if you have one character on the badge leaderboard, the clicked leaderboard entry will display other characters from the same account that would also be on the leaderboard.

 

Currently, it looks like so, when it's not broken:

 

Quote

 

Rank Count Character

1 1500 Character Name

2 1250 Character Name

3 1150 Character Name

4 650 Character Name

5 550 Character Name

...

100 88 Character Name

 

 

When you click on the name, you're taken to the list view of that character's badges. On the character page, list other characters from the same account that have more badges than the  #100 spot.

 

So if you're #1 and have 80 characters with more badges than the number 100 on the list, your displayed badge list is topped by a list of those characters.

 

Difficulty: Medium, but not moreso than the existing functionality. This is likely 2 somewhat hairy, but still completely feasible SQL joins, one for the top 100 list page and one for the character badge list page. However, the badge tracker script already breaks on RAM usage and joins can VERY hungry.

 

My suggestion is to schedule the joins to happen once per day and then cache the result. If the Badge Tracker select runs once per player click, simplify it to use a 'select top 1 *' style query rather than a join. 

 

Edited Wednesday at 11:34 PM by mechahamham

[Lazarillo]

The focus should probably be a matter of making it work at all (or honorably admitting defeat and rolling it back), especially since Dimensional Warder progress is effectively missing from the game right now, before they start looking into how to add more bells and whistles to something doesn't even serve its base functionality.

Edited Thursday at 07:19 PM by Lazarillo

[mechahamham]

4 hours ago, Lazarillo said:

The focus should probably be a matter of making it work at all (or honorably admitting defeat and rolling it back), especially since Dimensional Warder progress is effectively missing from the game right now, before they start looking into how to add more bells and whistles to something doesn't even serve its base functionality.

 

In this case, that might mean the HC team needs to do the caching step ANYWAY. We know that the script runs on lower population servers like Victory, but dies on Everlast and Excel. While I'm certainly not privy to its working, that just screams 'SQL join is exhausting all its resources'. Doing a 'select top 1' style query might also help with that.