Feldon 
As posted by Praetorian, owner of the Raid strategy discussion site EQ-Raiders, on the EQ2 Forums:
It is now official that EQ-Raiders will be hosting a brand new Raid Guild Progression website.
This new website will have both manual kill submissions (For guilds that fall out of the realm of accurate auto-updaters) as well as automated kill verification updates through a unique RaidHub interface being created by Mecrab, the author of RaidHub. The website is being designed and coded by Mecrab and should be launching this weekend. RaidHub will not be required by any means but with the added capabilities and the already large amount of guilds that utilize RaidHub, it only seemed natural to make that the platform of choice. The website will also take full advantage of kill verifications with the upcoming new SOE Data Feeds that feature guild kill updates as well.
Some features of note:
- Utilizing Raidhub will allow “Kill Time” to play a factor in how a guild is ranked. If Guild A kills one Mob in 5 minutes while Guild B kills it in 6 minutes on the exact same day, well Guild A gets a higher ranking. There will also be leaderboards in the future that will rank guilds based on how long it took them to kill a certain encounter. Yes, even more bragging rights for your endgame raiding guild. Of course, these trophies will only be handed out during the period in which the content is relevant.
- Gone are the days of constant disputes. By utilizing a system that can only have a kill disputed once, ever, a guild can be rest assured that their kills will not be voted down once an administrator verifies the kill. If a kill is also confirmed by either Raidhub or the upcoming SOE Data feeds the kill automatically can not be disputed.
- The new progression website utilizes a standard scoring system used by many progression based websites which allows for a greater level of accuracy based on when content was cleared. This will put guilds closer together that kill content in bunches and seperates the guilds that kill content weeks after the first guilds cleared the content.
- In the future Guild Trophies will be generated to place on your guilds’ website. Things like banners of content cleared, records on kill time..ect.ect.
There will be more announcements to follow when the final details are put in place but be ready this coming weekend to start comparing yourselves once again to the whole of the EQ2 raiding community!!
Visit www.eq-raiders.com and register your account early to prepare!!!
Praetorian
EQ-Raiders
Using fight duration as a tiebreaker is pretty silly…
If 90% of new encounters will be easy as heck duration wont be bad idea
I couldn’t agree more Quabi. That’s about as dumb as it gets, especially since even using something like Raid Hub or ACT it’s something that can be easily falsified.
The RaidHub app automatically submitting kills directly to the new website can be easily falsified? How?
You know I’ve seen the data, right? 😉
Go Crabby
<3
Agree, time taken to kill a mob is a stupid tie break mechanic, especially the way they descibe it there “on the same day” hopefully SOE will ensure that the guild achievements are accurate down to the second, its highly unlikely that guilds will manage to kill a mob at the exact same second and as such it makes it more accurate.
EQ2 Achievements are reported with unix timestamp down to the second when completed.
Open raid hub at some point after the encounter is started, thereby giving you a later start time.
Mecrab has put in a number of checks and balances
The mechanics for kill submissions via RH will be clearly defined on the site. A single submission won’t do it, there has to be multiple submissions within a defined time range, with the timestamp recorded. The timestamp used is the server-side time, not the client, so there’s no way to monkey with the time.
Even if you start RH later in the encounter, you’ll still submit an actual kill time, but a shorter duration. The other submissions will negate that short duration. There’s a fair amount of information that can be used to detect falsified submissions.
A tie breaker by duration would only come into effect if two guilds killed the same mob at the same time, and the auto-submission entries showed the the exact same timestamp. A very rare case, and one that probably won’t be triggered ever. The odds of killing a new mob at the exact second are pretty low. This scoring mechanic may get dropped, but still it’ll be interesting to see how fast (and often) a mob is taken down.
A leaderboard that includes duration reflects what a guild is capable of today versus 3 months ago.
I’m excited to see how this pans out. As always comments and recommendations for improving the system are welcome!
Cheers,
Mecrab
Does this mean that guilds that want it to be done automatically have to use Raid Hub?
Currently the only way to automate it is if you use Raid Hub. The RH client is in constant contact with the server farm and can submit kill information reliably.
For those not using RH there is a manual submission page on the site. You have to be a registered user on eq-raiders.com to be able to submit kills.
I’m considering an ACT plugin that would do submissions, but that will require a bit more work and quite a lot of testing.
Automatic submissions will be verified by raidhub and in the not too distant future the soe feeds. However feeds and raidhub can’t account for all guild makeups which is why manual submissions are still allowed.
Mecrab, our raiders get a lot of use out of RaidHub and we appreciate all the work that’s gone into it. This looks like a great way to leverage the data (and probably get some new customers!)
Extraneous factors like encounter duration (or number of deaths, dps, etc.) would be an interesting sidebar, but using them as competitive ranking metrics would be a mistake. A faster kill is not a better kill, and would most likely have raid leaders pulling their hair out from overzealous raiders trying to squeeze another few seconds out of an encounter and failing on mechanics. Surely an accurate kill time is all you really need to keep it authentic and sustainable.
I’m more interested in finding out how you’re going to match characters to guilds: Will a raider from Guild A give his entire guild credit for a kill while he is a guest on Guild B’s raid? What if it’s a raid made up of two guilds, half and half? Who gets the credit?
Sounds like a great idea, a couple of points from myself though.
Overzealous raid members trying to squeeze out that extra dps to get the fastest time is the problem of the raid leader its still a nice idea to see what some of the bigger guilds can achieve compared to others.
In regards to those that believe the data can be falsified, now i’m sure that under some circumstances somebody may eventually figure some way of manipulating data but that takes time and alot of work can those who think they are genius programmers refrain from commenting on how easy it is to falsify the data until they have some evidence of such.
I find it annoying when people come along slate a new idea after the think they are the next Dennis Ritchie because they;ve downloaded a compiler and written the Hello World program.
Please give it a chance and offer evidence to help fix cheaters rather than insult the project.
Just curious when this will actually be listed on any of the sites. Been a registered member for some time on both sites and not seeing anythign on either.
Finishing touches are being done now, plus a lot of data entry.
In regards to scoring a same-time kill, it’s only fair to count them as an even kill. That’s how the system is set up now. If there are 2 kills at the same time, they both receive the same value.
The duration stuff (and lots of other goodies) are there for additional bragging rights 🙂
As far as raid composition to kill credits, that’s an excellent question.
I can see this working several ways:
1) Manual submission have no data about who was in the raid, it’s an honesty issue. A clear dispute process is in place to mitigate these problems.
2) Automated submissions have all of the data one participants, and it’s rather easy to verify the player submitting the kill is part of the guild. If they’re not, the confirmation is discarded.
3) Raid Alliances have players from multiple guilds and don’t fit the mold, they fall into #1 or #2, without the ability to get a percentage.
Good question on a half/half raid force, I’m going to rely on our community to make the call here. That could be a same-time kill for two guilds.
For a “majority” it would be credited to the guild with the most presence in the raid force.
Suggestions are more than welcome, hopefully this new site will be an asset.
Thanks!
Mecrab