Extra leaderboard stuff

A couple of handy additions,

• Added a list of the top 5 damage kills into the stats screen for custom leaderboards.
• You can now restrict valid kills to competitors in the same leaderboard. Useful for closed competition leaderboards.

Custom leaderboard goodies!

More good stuff for custom leaderboards; some improved navigation and now each custom leaderboard has it's own page of overall stats.

Easier Navigation

Finding particular leaderboards should be much easier now. A new Class/Ships leaderboard page gives a rough and ready index to all the class and ship specific leaderboards. A search page for custom leaderboards should be up soon too.

You can only fly what I say

Continuing the work on custom leaderboards, it's now possible to restrict the kind of ships that can be flown by the winning pilot on any kill.

If this goes ok, restricting the loosing pilot shiptypes will follow soon(tm)

Friends can shoot friends did you say?

Leaderboards now let you exclude (or not..) kills from the rankings based on wether the kill was against a pilot from the same alliance or corp (allow friendly kills), or another leaderboard competitor (allow competitor kills).

If your names not down, your not coming in

Want to stop the unwashed masses from tramping all over your leaderboard? Run a competition .. or make it a friends only club perhaps? Now you can prevent the unwanted from walking mud all through the house and restrict entrance to leaderboards based on alliance / corp membership or by pilot name.

Next up, restricting eligible kills by shiptypes or systems..

Accounts Purge!

We have recently purged a lot of inactive user accounts from the database.  Any registered users that had no players or pilots associated with their name will need to re-register.

Custom Leaderboards are Go!

Ok, a feature I wanted for a long time has been rolled out to Evesolo - Custom Leaderboards!

You can now setup your own leaderboard and get the same ranking page and pilot summary pages per leaderboard that Evesolo currently generates globally for all posted kills! Just login, goto 'Your Boards' and add a board.. the rest is faily simple to work out :)

There are a couple of 'restrictions' in place at the moment - they will be lifted, but we have decided to release with these restrictions so we can spot and iron out any teething troubles or buggettes that crop up. So, for now:-

• All created boards are public - anyone can enter / view them.
• You cannot restrict eligible kills by winning/loosing shiptype, date or system.

We recognise that this means you are missing a chunk of what could make the custom leaderboards super-awesome, but releasing with these restrictions allows us to test out the core functionality before getting fancy.

Assuming things go fine for the next 7 days, we will then roll out:-

• Invite-Only boards based on Alliance / Corp / Player lists.
• Publicly / Privatley viewable boards.
• Restrict valid kills by Ship-Type (Winner or Looser), System name/s, date.
• Leaderboard focused stats page.

Down for some maintenance

The site will be intermittently available for the next 12 hours as we change some infrastructure, update some of the code and do some testing..

Bugfix Bugfix

So I might have broken a thing when I tweaked a thing. Pilots with no wins will have been experiencing problems when trying to view their summaries, this has now been fixed temporarilly - a better fix will be pushed in a few hours, but at least you can view your pilot summaries now.

A Bugfix and a Tweak

So, to ease myself back into the code for the site I started with a bugfix and a tweak:

The bugfix; Links for favourite ships were incorrectly generating the leaderboard id for that ship, resulting in 'leaderboard not found' errors.

The tweak; Made the ship class name in the 'most wins in class' summary a clickable link leading to that classes leaderboards, and did the same with 'most wins with ship' for the ship.

Site updates coming

Ok, RL now permitting, I have the time and inclination to push forward again with the site. Partly inspired by Kil2's efforts in bringing solo back with his stream at http://www.own3d.tv/Kil2eve/  - If you haven't already and you are even vaguely interested in flying solo in Eve you should check this out, it's a great way to pick up some tips and get some insight into how to approach solo flying in Eve. I've even setup my own streaming account and plan to chart my progress from really-quite-terrible solo player to the dizzy heights of maybe-not-so-bad-as-I-was solo player ;P

So, whats going on?

Not a lot has been for a few weeks. RL commitments and all that, but evesolo is not forgotten.

Looking over the state of things, it's evident that perhaps stealth bombers could do with a nerf to the point scores they achieve against certain classes - the type of engagement they can find themselves in can skew the points system heavily in their favour.

Exactly how and how much to change the system is yet to be decided, but I think it will be, and soon.

Pilot stats update

More pilot stats have been included on the pilot summary screen. The pilot summary screen will now summarise your current ranking across the weekly/monthly/quarterly etc.. periods, and compare this with the ranking calculated for the previous period of equivalent length.

The current rank for any given period is calculated from the current point in time backwards to the start of the period in question. The ranking for the previous period is calculated from the start of the period in question, backwards for the length of time of the period being calculated.

Raife.

More ship stats

The ship stats page has been updated and now lets you view stats by hullclass.

This throws up a couple of interesting results in terms of the best performing vs most popular ships. For example, the Rifter - of course - is the most popular T1 Frigate hull for solo PvP, being in enough fights and succesful enough that it tops the most-wins and most-losses category for T1 frigates; but it turns out the Tristan is twice as likely to actually win a fight, based on win:loss ratio - and it only costs 379,998isk as opposed to 449,795isk for the Rifter.... (prices from eve-central)

There are a couple more surprises in there too.


Have fun!


Raife.

Which ship should I fly?

The first-pass for the new section 'Ship Stats' has just been added to the site.

This section lists statistics for;

• Best win:loss ratio
• Worst win:loss ratio
• Most popular
• Most wins
• Most losses

Go take a look. Find out which ship in Eve wins most often in a 1v1 fight...

Note: As an addition to this, the next step being worked on is to produce the same sets of stats broken down by hull-class.

Fanfest

Wishing I was there! Have fun everyone :) And please someone hassle a Dev to spill the beans on any upcoming killmail and killlog API changes! There were rumours that improvements to the killmails were being made, and so hopefully also to the info in the API Killlog's...

Reward!

Oh yes, while I remember. We are offering rewards of 50 MILLION ISK! (that's Eve ISK, not the Icelandic stuff) for any bug reports sent to yellowalienbaby@gmail.com that lead to something broken being fixed. First come first served in terms of actually getting the reward, arrangements for transfer etc.. will be discussed via email.

So, tell us if it's broken, please!

A small update

Work continues on adding in the capability to auto-pull from killboards with the idfeed. It turns out that not all board idfeed's are equal, and we were testing against a remarkably well behaved example. We are still working on ironing out the issues with the badly behaved boards.

Not to get hung up on that though, some focus was shifted to improving the pilot and ship stats today, with the first update in for the pilot summary screen. It will now list the top 5 ships you fly, whether you won or lost.

And we have a good one coming up shortly.. ever wondered which ship is actually the best of the best for solo pvp in Eve? Assuming the best ship is the one that wins most often, we will all soon know...

A small rollback

Anyone who created a pilot or posted any kills over the past 5 days will unfortunatley have to re-register and re-post or pull their kills. There was a DB corruption on a backup we were relying on that stretched back to the start of the killboard-pulling testing. Based on the amount of risk and effort involved in fixing it we judged that rolling back to the start of the testing would be better. We now also have two DB's, for production and dev, as well as the dev / release versions of the site code. So combined with a different backup strategy as well, this shouldn't happen again.

edit: We've discovered it's slightly worse and better than that all at the same time... The worse bit: all the registered users have gone - not just from the past 5 days. The better bit? all the kills posted right up to yesterday should still be there. (In an hour or two, after we finish rolling the DB forward)

Downtime

It's more usual than you think.. Evesolo is going down for around 24 hours while some structural changes take place..


so whatever you do don't get more than 25 solokills in the next 24 hours :)

Sucking them in from where?

Killboards. Pulling in solo kills from other KB's can now be done via the EDK idfeed url. That means if you have your own personal KB, or corp or alliance KB you want evesolo to automagically  grab the solo kills from, you can set things up to do that.

Or you will be able to, soon. In the meantime a side-effect of testing this is that evesolo now knows about squillions of solo kills - or around 55,000, so you may already be up on the leaderboards somewhere..

Pilot who?

The search-for-pilot buttan has been added to the navbar. Now you can search for pilots by full or partial names, though to make a partial match you need to enter at least 3 characters of the name.

To complement this, more detailed pilot stats will be coming soon.


Raife.

Bugsquashin'

A few bugs were found and squashed. If you've been having trouble, please try again :)


Interesting fact(?) - the name 'bug' for computer code errors originates from the fact that the very first 'bug' was in fact a real bug in a machine! http://www.jamesshuggins.com/h/tek1/first_computer_bug.htm

(Though, wikipedia doesn't mention it.. if that means anything. I prefer the real bug story :P )

..I stand corrected! there is further discussion on this little 'fact' here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debugging

Usability tweaks

I've just updated the site with some friendlier error messages for when things go wrong. Nothing that you will notice too much of, hopefully!

A side effect is much nicer rendering of any messaging that occurrs from your actions (IE, posting a mail that is already posted etc..)

Forgot your password?

No Problem!

On the login page you will now find a link to reset your password. It's fairly standard stuff - you will be sent a confirmation email with a link to follow, follow that link and reset your password!

oh, the email will also remind you of your username, so if you forgot that, then just follow the same procedure.

Raife.

Update, and upcoming short outages for testing.

You may notice a few spots of downtime today as I test some of the monitoring processes that keep an eye on the site. Nothing longer than about 10 minutes at a time, and only 3 or 4 times through the day. Sorry if any of it hits you!

Update on site features;
The initial pass for killmail verification is in, along with the ability to switch leaderboard views between verified-only & all-kills. Ahead of schedule, so all good!

Items due for some loving over the next few days should be something along the lines of;

• Forgotten Password buttan, seeing as we are picking up a fair number of registered users now.
• Improved leaderboard navigation
• Automagic killmail gathering - we pull, so you don't have to (unless you turn it off, ofc)
• Search functions

Have fun!
Raife.

Leaderboards with verified / unverified kills

I've just put in the change that enables switching between showing a leaderboard including all kills, or just the verified kills. It's only in for the overall leaderboards at the moment, the ship and hull-class leaderboards will follow tomorrow. Right now I'm off to the cinema to see 'The Artist' !

..and a quick edit, I've put in the verified kills only or all-kills option for the ship and hullclass leaderboards now too.

Kill verification update

Ok, the first part of killmail verification - verifying based on kills people pull from the API via registered pilots, was simpler than expected and so I've put that in right off the bat.

To support this, and to give a bit more info, the following new stats are given on the pull summary screen,

• Total mails pulled
• NPC Wins
• Already posted mails verified
• Disputed mails corrected

  In addition, any lists of kills that are now generated will show the verification status.

Small bugfix - pilots on their own killmails as attackers

Pilots that manage to get themselves on their own killmails as attackers will not be counted as an extra involved party anymore. Even if they do themselves damage (Thinking of not-so-clever bombers here ;p )

Update on whats to come

Ok. So I've put a bit of thought into the priorities and whats really needed next to help the site along, and the feature that's currently getting the most loving code wise is killmail verification, and the ability to filter killboards by verified / unverified mails.

Being a dev by trade, I've put a bit of efort into planning this, and the estimated time of arrival is wednesday based on the amount of time I should have available and how much work I think is in it. I feel like there's a good chance it will be sooner, but you know, these things always reveal a couple of hurdles half-way through..

The point system

Its becoming apparent quite quickly that the point-scoring system really does need some tweaking. I'm going to let it run as is for a while to get a better picture of how bad it really is, and make some adjustments in the near future.

Oh, Hi!

Test website please ignore.

Or not, anymore ..

Ok, welcome to the eve solo blog, a site I have hastily thrown up to provide a bit of feedback to people who are interested in the progress of the eve-solo website at http://evesolo.com/

I released it to the public with the intention of keeping it low-key and ironing out any major issues and bugs, while I implemented the last couple of features. Then, a kind soul posted a link to it on Reddit, and before it blows up I thought I'd start this blog to go with the website to let people know what its about, and where it's currently at.

What It's About.
It's about EvE-Online, and solo PvP combat in spaceships. It aims to track 1v1 kills and through a pointscoring system, keep track of how well players are doing and present sets of leaderboards in various categories - ships, ship-classes, pilots, over periods of a week / month / quarter / all-time etc.. It lets people create accounts and associate pilots with those accounts, to enable automagic pulling of killmails using the EvE API provided by CCP.

Where It's At.
It's going through its very first exposure to the general public - so be gentle. The aim really is to test the core components, iron out any major problems & monitor and tweak the scoring system. There are a couple of major flaws at the moment - not least that it will currently accept any killmails that look like solo killmails without attempting any kind of verification what-so-ever. There are plans to address this through the use of the EvE API provided by CCP, and to let people view the leaderboards filtered by verified / unverified mails, or just 'all-in'. That is, in fact the very next component I am coding up, and should be going live soon (tm) - oh, along with a 'forgotten-password' mechanism, which is missing at the moment.

What's Coming Up.
Features in the pipeline are;

• verification of killmails and filtering of leaderboards by verified / unverified kills
• more ways of gathering killmails automatically (via killboards etc..)
• account functions to manage those things
• better ways of navigating to the various leaderboards
• ...an 'I forgot my password' buttan.

In the meantime, go have a look, post some mails, play eve, blow up some shit!

have fun :)
Raife.