Time to start your own consulting business, where you can sell this matching logic to game companies with online services.

Dealing with crazed, self-involved rectal-probers with absolutely no ability to form coherent sentences and who do little to make me want to continue allowing the human race to continue wasting oxygen is why I got out of software engineering and consulting.

Plugging a recomendation system into the online facet of a game is something that’s been a long time coming and I’m of no delusion that it’s a trivial matter. One of the huge challenges when it starts is boot-strapping from almost no data. Do you try and seed it, or do you let it develop from the in ovo and take the first few weeks of lumps where it doesn’t recommend very well very quickly because of insufficient information? Do you allow players to “tag” other players with notes that they can search on later, ie. “dropper” for someone who drops out, but keep that information private or do you just not allow it at all and keep the scope of interaction literally to “yes, I’d play with them again” or “no, I’d not play with them again?” There are a lot of interesting questions to answer in the development.

I’m actually curious as to whether I could back-door turn Jaanix into a “playability” service for Sins or, theoretically, anything else. Since it allows you to create text entries in the accounts with whatever description you wanted, you could create one with just your login ID / nick, a little about yourself, and a special tag that identifies the entry as a player-ranking account.

Hmmm, one moment …

[Time passes.]

Here we go, my own play-rank entry on Jaanix for my own play-rank. To create your own, sign up for a free account and create an entry with no link, just a title with your nick in it, maybe “Sins Play-Rank,” and a little descriptive blurb in the description. Make certain in the tags you have at least “Sins of a Solar Empire, playrank” (without the quotes), because that’s how the playranks can be found later. If your Jaanix nick isn’t your ICO nick, be sure to put that in the tags as well.

Usage: Looking at a new game on the server but not sure if they’re dicks or just cool froods? Hit Jaanix, search for the Sins, playrank, and nick tags and see if they come up. Just finished a game with some guys and a couple were cool enough to nudge up? Same thing, only hit the up arrow next to their names to give them jaa. Were they utter pricks? Give them a nudge down toward nix.

There you go. Not pretty and a long way from perfect (in that I’m wondering if your playrank link shouldn’t be your forum Profile URL), but certainly usable on an experimental basis.

Why, yes, yes I am used to hacking together good-enough solutions …

One possible way to solve this problem is to take a lesson from, of all places, eBay. EBay's feedback system requires that you have a transaction with someone before either of you can provid feedback to the other. You could implement something similar to this in a game system, so long as it's implemented from the start, where you could not provide a rank to another player unless you have actually been in a game with that other player. This would help prevent the "circle of friends" all downing your rank because you downed one of theirs or something. It's not a perfect solution, but I think it would work better than a straight ranking system. Problem is it would be near impossible to implement after a game is developed, as in Sins or any other game out there. It would need to be incorporated either into the game itself, or into the online community/lobby where multiplayer games are set up.

It would be possible for a forum to set something like that up, where forum users have the ability to rank other forum members. That rank is then based on games that are planned through the forum. Problem is this does not help in the open online community.

Don't be so upset that you got "owned".

Hmmm.... in all honesty its best to expect the worst out of all people you play in the online gaming world.

That way your even more pleasantly surprised by the cool folks that are out there & will easily adapt to the abuse that you WILL suffer (you are guaranteed abuse)

TALK ABOUT OWNED!

Seeing some of the one-sentence replies in this thread one can safely assume that at least part of the idiots this thread is devoted to browse this forum too...

As on topic - one thing we can all try to do is establish a forum list where those that exhibit a particularly high degree (for the Internet that is) of perceivable intelligence as seen in the context of what they post can build friend lists according to time zones (the Americas, Europe, Asia/Australia, etc.) I personally hate droppers and infantile sh!theads that know no better than spam profanity/incoherent crap for no better reason than their own mental deficiencies.

Spamming "owned" after winning a 4vs2 game, well...

Ya know, all of this is addresed by the way the space ponies is set up.. It eliminates the morons altogether as they would not be a part of the team.. so the people who are there as casual players can be assured they are also hooking up with people who will not bail in the middle of a game..

feel free to come and join us at

WWW Link

I started out trying to say it without it sounding like an advertisment.. and everytime it sounded worse.. So I said the heck with it and just put it in as one..

So thx about it sounding smooth... Guess less thought on it was better..

This is why god lets us create LAN games, find friends on forums and other things.

Besides if you start a big game, you need to be able to get ahold of those people again, cause chances are good you won't finish in one sitting.

(and if your offended I have implied Stardock is god well too bad, its close enough as far as I'm concerned, thanks for SINS you guys! It may not be perfect but it made my year!)

Just think about it. Once this game becomes more and more popular-- the more diversity of people and the more trash talking. There is no way to avoid it so I suppose we all have to deal with it. I just think nothing of it anyway. By the way, I was in bestbuy looking for a new game to play and i came across this. It looked very interesting-- Like a NEW starcraft (being starcraft was the only other RTS I have actually played). I bought the game and I am enjoying it a lot other than the fact that its hard for me to learn.

Xylum, grow a backbone and get over yourself. If everyone got along we wouldn't be where we are today. Ever heard of the altruists' dilemma? Games are a competition, a contest, and there's no point playing them if you can't bask in your victories. Take your hippie political correctness bs elsewhere because all wishing me a "good game" makes me want to do is slit your throat with barbed wire.



Just one? Where have you been living, and do they have any space for rent?

morons wil always be around and annoying

they'll try anything to make you feel bad... saying

"i wont surrender noob cuase you didnt beat me (mostly some lame laughing behind it...)"

i just ignore it.... tough an ignore function would be great to stop the beeping of the chat while still being able 2 hear game warnings.

heard some people talking about a rating system..

BAAD idea, seen alot of free online games (......dont think me a kiddie now ) having such systems...... i "worked" my way up in the rankings and disagreed with some people..... aperantly they had a big friend group and ofcourse they all voted me down ruining the game for me since nobodys gonan play with a low ranked dude

my sugestion here is keep it out, even tough some lower people are dicks, there wil always be other dicks that keep goood friends then pis on the smaller.....
now most of you wil think.. "who cares" (yes i know MOST do think this way outa lotsa experience with online playing... even in the Sins lobby) but what if you are this "normal"player disagreeing with someone then getting voted down to the SHIT rank?



someone sugestion 2 chitchat here then meet to play a game... good idea... though not for me
yet again out of experience i have a different name here then SINS online, people who feel pissed on by my opinions wont play if they see the same name there....

now it IS a good idea but you wont see me doing it


if something has 2 be improved first turn the attention to.. why cant 80% of the players host? hear alot of people talking in the lobby "i did this and it worked!!!" while someone else says it didnt work for him..... first figure out how to make your own games so at least you can make a friends only game.... then start thinking about what to to with the dick players

when you play the type of maps i do getting wiped out early means being defeated on the 3rd or 4th 4 hour session of game playing... the save feature makes this a strategy game to live for man