Note: This is an internal communication meant for ABL community members, as such it should be considered propaganda. It is reposted here in purely for the possible interest of those on the outside looking in.
The first week of the new Chaos-Is-a-Ladder project was a great success! A special thanks to all who played and especially to all those sacrificed their time and energy to admin or do other behind the scenes work. Now the first week is over, we have learned much and I would like to share with you, the ABL community, what has been happening.
Our new Chaos Admins achieved nearly perfect coverage, with only a few lobbies missed. They said it couldn’t be done, they said it was impossible, but we proved the haters wrong. An international team of dedicated volunteers can indeed host an hourly 24/5 schedule. How did it happen? It was the love of the game. Nothing else can explain the dedication and devotion. Hats off to these heroes. Even I sometimes wonder how such amazing people exist and found their way to Artifact Bitcoin League.
From lobbies of 16 or less to regularly getting 60+, player count has risen incredibly fast. Feedback from players has also been great. Many people have stated ABL is the only reason they still play Artifact. We are all looking for something else to do than grind increasingly worthless tickets and packs. Personally, I was only interested in tournaments when I purchased Artifact. It is my objective and hope that this project will be jump start the tournament scene needs for some players to come back to the game.
I know the rest of the ABL team is as anxious as I am to see this coming week’s players count. Nothing is greater validation that we are on the right track than higher player counts. In the end, it is all about the players. Come play a lobby or two, even if you don’t expect to get into the top 128.
One failure has been the continued fragmentation of the artifact tournament community. Only a small minority of our admins are seasoned admins from other tournament groups. This is in contrast to what I see as a more united player base. Players from China, CIS, SEA, EU, and SA have led the way in joining the Chaos Ladder and making ABL a success in general. We are still surprisingly lacking players and admins from the NA region. Perhaps it is the American sense of individualism that is causing a disconnect. I still hope over the coming weeks more NA players will not only play, but also step up to host lobbies.
Now the part everyone wants to actually read: the leaderboard. Another ABL hero, cat0ftheyear, has been sacrificing his nights and sleep to automate the leaderboard. A key problem here is the lack of an official or even beta API for Artifact lobbies. We are dependent on convoluted data collection and manual correction of faulty data. As of now, we have figured out a system for keeping track of the top eight placement from each tournament. We have cut this down from top sixteen for the following reasons:
• An error in the data collection forces an admin to manually enter each winner individually. Across 480 lobbies for this month, that is an intimidating amount of data entry.
• This last week, about 20% of the lobby ATCs did not parse correctly. Admins are manually entering in all this data right now.
• In an effort to reduce the number of data collection errors, we are limiting the number of finishers the bot is required to look at for each lobby. Changing from top sixteen to top eight will reduce the potential number of errors by more than half.
• Thanks to the amount of data we were able to collect the first week, we were able to narrow down the cause of most of the erroneous data collection issues. However there are still one or two bugs that we cannot work around.
• This week, we are testing the stability of the bot and lobby admin methodology. To obtain more insightful and actionable results, we are temporarily reducing the points to top eight only.
• After we figure out the the right workflows, we will go back to top sixteen. This can and will be done retroactively once we can stomp out the bugs.
• Apologizes to anyone really counting on their 9th-16th place finishes to get them into the top 128 for the main event. If this is unacceptable, please wait until next month to play. I am sure we will have it figured out by then.
• Please don’t message cat0oftheyear asking about your personal points. He is already holding a dagger to his own belly, ready to commit seppuku if he fails to write a bot up to his standards.
• I assure you he/we are aware of your issue, it is the same issue everyone else has. You were in a lobby where the bot could not properly verify the data given to it, and so the points were not added to the leaderboard. The more time he spends addressing individual concerns, the less time he has to actually code a functioning bot.
• I encourage flooding cat0oftheyear’s inbox with any and all messages of praise and thanks if you got a spare minute. He might not respond but I assure you he will read them.
That’s all for now. Again, a sincere thanks to all the volunteers who are making this happen. As you may or may not know, I got incredibly busy IRL and as a result had to reduce the number of hours I can contribute to ABL. These volunteers are the ones making ABL happen right now, not me. Please thank them whenever you get the chance.
See you on the river,
-Opsy
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