Leaderboard/City Badge Tracker ideas

[Voltor]

Well, Excelsior is the one server that has the problem with the City Badge Tracker/Leaderboard system locking up and shutting down, usually on Mondays, which means it can last 6 days after the Tuesday server restart. Under NORMAL conditions. 

 

However Winter and soon the Spring Event are going to cause it to fill up and shut down a lot sooner. 

 

This is due to the Tracker/Leaderboard having only a FINITE amount of entries it can store before it shuts off.  Anytime a character first enters Pocket D during the week it is automatically loaded into the board, clicking the button just opens the board and maybe sets up your statue if you qualify. 

 

Solution: see if the City Badge Tracker limit can be doubled. That should resolve the overload/shutdown of the Leaderboard system

 

As to the statue, well everyone wants a statue and that's fine.  Perhaps it can be set where once every 60 minutes the system reviews the Top 100 players currently listed and randomly picks one and automatically sets the statue.   No more constantly running up to hit the button if it can be done. 

[Glacier Peak]

Or play on Indomitable, where we have less than 10 players with all the badges! We can all be winners!

[Voltor]

Well, called it.  Excel's leaderboard appears to have hit its limit and has shut down

[mechahamham]

After doing quite a bit of thinking about it since it's release, I'm of the opinion that the badge leaderboard functionality and the tracking and progress functionality need to be divorced.

 

One need not even make a new kiosk, although there certainly could be one created. Just keep the red-screen computer for the progress functionality and have the leaderboard functionality accessed by clicking on the base of the hologram display. A hint could even be included on the display given by the computer to click the hologram base to view or submit one's character for the leaderboard.

 

I think I remember reading that the kiosk was powered by a Lua script that ran SQL queries? Please correct me if I'm wrong.

 

If they're split off into separate entities, then the tracker/progress script has the potential to use Lua's collectgarbage functionality to reduce its memory usage after players leave Pocket D.

 

Likewise, I remember reading that the script polls every player who enters Pocket D. If the leaderboard ONLY polls players who actually click on the hologram or its base, then neither the tracker nor the leaderboard have to poll every last player who drops into Pocket D.

 

[Faultline]

4 hours ago, mechahamham said:

I think I remember reading that the kiosk was powered by a Lua script that ran SQL queries? Please correct me if I'm wrong.

 

No SQL queries; Lua scripts run on the mapserver and don't have direct access to the database.

 

In the next patch, it will no longer automatically track characters who enter Pocket D unless they have at least 500 badges.

[Bionic_Flea]

Love the new avatar, Faultline.  Very nicely done.

[Ukase]

So..the badge tracker...
I'm all for a way for people to determine which River Rat marker they may have missed. 
I'm all for people to figure out which AV they're missing for Dimensional Warder. 
Yes, let folks see what plaques they're missing for Bicentennial. 

Maybe it's time to just stop with the statue. Stop with the leaderboard. It doesn't really serve a purpose worth the resources. 
On Excelsior, those who have all the badges, or even most, kind of already know who else has all the badges or most. There just really isn't a point to it that I can see. Maybe there's a point to it on the other shards? No idea. 

By all means, give it utility. But the vanity leaderboard isn't really useful. What good is it doing me to get my avatar on the podium for an hour? Or even forever? Doesn't really help anyone. It did help me see that there are now close to 50 or so characters with all the badges. Most names I recognized. Some have certainly been busy since I last saw them, jumping up hundreds of badges. But that knowledge doesn't do anything for either of us or anyone else. 

 

[Rudra]

5 hours ago, Faultline said:

 

No SQL queries; Lua scripts run on the mapserver and don't have direct access to the database.

 

In the next patch, it will no longer automatically track characters who enter Pocket D unless they have at least 500 badges.

How about if it only tracks characters that interact with the kiosk instead? I thought I could only show up on the leaderboard if I used the kiosk, and if I can instead show up on it just for entering Pocket D, I have reason to avoid Pocket D. Not everyone cares about leaderboards, and some of us don't want to even be on them.