Attack Rank Monthly Video


  • Dev Team

    We're announcing our new little project: Attack Rank Monthly Video. We automatically recorded all spawn kills during March 2020 and displayed a few of ticks around every event, with total number of kills by players. We hope it will be feasible for us to make such a video every month.

    🔥


  • I'm absolutely in favour of some sort of "combat ranking", but I'm not sure the video is very interesting. I very much doubt that many people are going to sit through a 12min video every month. I watched it because I wanted the following information:

    1. Who had the top rankings
    2. What the rank was of anyone I knew or anyone near me
    3. What my own rank was
    4. Whether I appeared as the victim of any of the top players

    The first 3 points would be addressed just by having a "combat ranking" page like we do for "expansion rank" and "power rank". This is something that many players have requested many times during the lifetime of screeps. Are you planning to add this?

    As for the 4th point, a full video still isn't really the best format for that.

    Of course, making videos may be a good way of raising the profile of screeps and getting new players. Maybe that's the main goal here.

    Also, is spawn kill count really the best way to determine attack rank? It seems to encourage attacking low-level players, which is already a big problem. I think one of the main reasons many players have requested a combat ranking is to encourage combat between high level players, because at the moment it's too hard with no reward. I'm sure others can weigh in here with better suggestions as to what this could be based on.

    ☝


  • This is great!

    Maybe add a multiplier for RCL, so a spawn from a RCL 8 is worth more than one from a RCL 1.

    Also maybe add tick time on the top left so you can find the attack.



  • Well. On one hand, I would like to see a filter to only save level 8 RCL spawns as they're destroyed, to prevent people from just seal clubbing to get on the top list...

    But on the other hand, I wouldn't want to infringe on the influx of people joining the seal clubber clubbing club.

    So... I like it the way it is.



  • I'm super glad to see attention to the monthly recap.

    Watching libexec plow through 71 spawns got a bit long. Maybe showing the kills by time across all players. OTOH, watching a single player's kills one after the other you get a strong sense of how their code works.

    As for the problems of using spawn kills as the metric, we all know how hard we've all tried to come up with an ideal attack rank metric. It's just too easy to abuse. However, this is not the Spawn Kills Monthly Video. The Devs can (and should IMO) change the criteria from month to month. We don't need a leader board. They can continue to experiment and find the metric the produces the most interesting ranking/video.



  • I'd +1 the seal clubbing aspect to the list, I'm sure there are plenty of current players that could easily wrack up a high score if they killed off all the low level players in their region but had no reason to before, which might not be the best game result.

    Also, just seeing the actual spawn kill is a lot less interesting. Maybe a ranking with a showcase vid of the top 5 players with a longer vid of their highest level kill.

    To be sure, harder to automate than capturing room history within x ticks of a spawn kill.



  • Wouldn't it be more interesting to see a "overall damage dealt / received" metric?
    This viewed over a month could be interesting. This way only "real" battles get attention.
    "Seal Clubbing" isn't that fun to watch, and it is more a turn off for potential new players.

    ☝


  • Did April happen?



  • No, they don't want to encourage social distancing violations through room attacks.

    😂

  • Dev Team

    @tigga the video is being currently crafted. It will be uploaded as soon as it's ready 🙂