- Q: Why Make this page???
- A:This "achivement" thing is a relatively new spin on the idea of
single player games. It provides a sort community-visible platform
for the normal "hey, did you beat Portal yet?" "Yeah, did you find
the secret blah blah in the blah blah?" conversations that gamers
exchange all the time. I mean, honestly, how many people do you think
would actually carry the garden gnome through the whole HL2:EP2 game
if it weren't for the little achievement that lights up when they do?
The related question ("How many people did carry the garden
gnome through the whole game??") is also interesting, and that's what
this website tries to answer.
- Q: "Spiffiness?"
- A: Spiffiness is a measure of "Just how unique are you for
actually doing all these crazy achievements that valve came up with?"
Specifically it's the inverse log of the frequency of that
achievement. A player's spiffiness is the sum of the spiffiness of
their individual achievements.
- Q: How is this data collected?
- A: I leave a computer spidering the steam community website to
collect it. It spiders along friend networks (ie: from a user to their
friends, to their friends friends). Unfortunately the response time
for each page is not fast, so it limits the rate at which I can spider
(I don't want to do concurrent requests because I don't want valve to
get upset at me for wasting all their bandwidth on this pet project).
- Q: Spider friends? Why not just use the groups browser?
- A: I tried that at first, but counter-strike is waaaaay too
popular. Very few counterstrike players also play Portal and games
with stats, so polling those groups is a waste of time (and some of
those groups are huge!). So I'm hoping spidering friends (who
play the games with stats that we care about) yields fewer false positives.
- Q: My data's old! I want to see my new data!
- A: Currently I only refresh old data once per 24 hours (why? it
takes a very long time to grab statistics for 20k users). I might add
something in the future to let you force an immediate update, but I
don't want to add too much pressure on my system either.
- Q: Why's spidering so slow?
- A: I don't know. I'd be curious to compare spidering speeds with
people who aren't in Japan.
- Q: Your webpage is ugly.
- A: "Hey
look buddy. I'm an engineer, and that means I solve problems. Not
problems like 'what makes a pretty webpage?' because that would fall within the
purview of your conundriums of art. I solve practical
problems." No seriously. This is just a weekend project. Maybe
someday I'll actually make it all AJAX'y and shiny.
- Q: As long as we're gauging spiffiness, wouldn't it be cool to
compare the user's "spiff" to the time they've played the game?
- A: Yes. Yes it would. Unfortunately to do that we need to have a
measure of how much they've played the game overall (not just
in the last 2 weeks). Since I'm checking each page every day, in
theory I suppose this might be possible (figuring out when the steam
counters roll over might be an issue). It's something I'll look into
when I have some time...
- Q: I've gotten every achievement, why am I not on the Top Players
page?
- A: Basically because I didn't know you when the "Top Players" page
got updated. The "Top Players" pages only update between
spidering/refresh iterations. If you've looked yourself up via the player lookup tool, then you will be included in
the next iteration (and maybe your friends too!), so just be patient.