Overall Member Rankings Are Now Available

Just a note to point out that there is now an 'Overall' category in the member rankings so we can see who has beat up on the most newbies across all classes

Rank 86, woohoo!  

/flex

So I take it your "overall" rankings simply sum up the "best round" rankings for each class?

I feel that the "rankings" used by valve for TF2 aren't really that indicative of someone's skill.  Your ranking for each class is simply the stats earned during your BEST round for that class.

Let's say there's a guy who consistently gets 10-12 kills per life as a demoman.  Another guy gets really lucky with sticky placement and happens to take out 15 guys in a round, but normally only gets a few points per life.  As far as valve is concerned, the second guy is the higher ranked demo.  One lucky round negates hours of consistent play.

I think it'd be nice to see a "___ per hour" stat, that show how many kills or points you get per hour, per class.  Or, barring that, simply some overall stats.  If you get 15 points per round every round for 4 hours, your stat for that class is no better than if you had only pulled it off once.

Alternatively, we can avoid looking at these stats as "rankings" altogether.  They're good on a personal level, since they really are "personal best" stats, but to use those as a rankings system doesn't seem to make too much sense.

260th, not bad....

One question: How are you parsing the info?

Good job     

Quote:

High level answer: Querying the stats page and reading the HTML.

Low level answer: Regular expression

But dude... you're querying 500+ pages in the 3 seconds it takes the page to load to gather the stats, then organizing them live?  Or are you just storing that info in the DB and updating nightly?

I've been working on a parser, but I don't want to get blocked by the Steam server administrators (which happened to several other sites I know of that were querying the community profiles.)

That would shut us down.

(I'm developing the art/theme site FragimusMaximus.com and the stats/sig site SteamStats.com - and both will be using stats derived from the community pages.)

I wish they would just provide us with an XML feed.

There's no way they'd be grabbing the data live.  They have to be doing scheduled data grabs from the steam pages and then storing the data in their database.

The data for an individual user only refreshes when you click the Check button.  There is no automated refresh at the moment.  Yard O' Jack is right, the data is then saved in the DB and rankings are calculated from there.

There used to be a site that offered an XML feed of the Steam stats (can't remember the URL right now) and we were originally planning to use that, but the guy had no way to monetize the site so eventually he couldn't afford the bandwidth it was using.  I don't know how he was doing it, probably just crawling the Steam community pages.