One of the people on the team at CONE, Zhang Yan, has been kind enough to work with me recently on setting up an interface that allows realtime querying of game data. My plan is to use this to build a “dashboard” page of sorts that ranks players according to a different system than the one the game currently uses.
I hoped to get the initial version of that up and running today, but unfortunately I’ve had other commitments that have kept me from working on it. As a result, I think it’s probably going to be another week or so before I’ll have the initial version of that ready.
In the meantime, though, I wanted to give an idea of how it would work.
Basically, I’m thinking of displaying a table that ranks the players that have been active in a given day according to three different criteria:
- number of species that player has correctly identified in photos taken that day
- number of favorites points (the stars, I mean) that have been assigned by other players to that player’s photos taken that day
- number of identified species in photos taken by that player that day
In each of these categories, each player would be ranked relative to all the other players who had received a ranking that day, and would get an ordinal score (first, second, third, etc.) based on that. The three different ordinal rankings would be combined to give an overall ranking for each player.
My hope is that this will allow players to pursue different strategies in a way that will be fun. A player could use his or her 10 shots to try to photograph as many species as possible. Or to take the most interesting or artistic images possible, in an effort to win the favorites points ranking.
Yan has set up the interface to return the necessary data. I just need to build the pieces on my side that query that data and display the results on a web page.