AC ladder

The AC ladder (also known as the TyD! ladder) is a ranking list of players with the goal to encourage competitive gameplay. It records scores from multiple servers and presents the data organised by individual or clan. It's currently the longest existing ladder service (with breaks) in the AssaultCube community. It's under hosting and development of the clan Tear you Down!.

The first ladder
Between July and September 2007 a small group of people started to discuss the need of an official ladder system for AssaultCube. Unfortunaly no one was able at that point in time to install a full working ladder system. In January 2008 acfan announced at the official forum that his servers Beacon and Champagne now provides a ladder system. Short after that the list of supporting servers was enlarged with Krusty and Clown, both hosted by KanslozeClown. At the end of January and after an administration error in March, which causes the deletion of one of the topscorers, the ladder table was reset.

The second ladder
After a serious hardware failure, the Beacon and Champagne servers were lost and with that also the ladder service. Short after that the clan Tear you Down! started to discuss the possibility to recreate the ladder on a server space hosted by KanslozeClown. On September 16, 2008, he confirmed on the AssaultCube forum the rumors about the existance of a new ladder. This new one was running for a couple of days as beta version, to test the stability and to fix errors.

With the new ladder service also some new aspects took place, cause the statistics are calculated by now also with the results of matches hosted on Pennywise. Since Pennywise uses a different blacklist than Clown and Krusty (which means that brazilian IPs are not banned on Pennywise), the amount of abuse on that server is (much) higher. However, the clan wanted to make the ladder available for Brazilians as well, and thus decided to make two versions of the ladder: one which includes scores of all three servers, and one using only the points scored on Clown and Krusty. Another new aspect is the map filtering: Many players are still playing trainings maps (mostly known as "gema") on the public ladder servers. These maps often includes multiple flag bases at the end of the training course. With that, these maps could be abused to push the scores. Therefore several maps are filtered out: they can still be played, but they won't count for the ladder.

The third ladder
With the release of the AssaultCube 1.0 it has become necessary to update the ladder to support new server, gamemodes (HTF, KTF, TKTF) aso. Since December 1, 2008, the beta version of the new ladder was set up online. With that also the number of providing servers increased: In addition to the three upgraded servers KanslozeClown fired three more servers (Bassy, Binky, Doink). Thus all servers are identical in their configuration, there was no need for a separate Pennywise statistics anymore. On January 4, Joker was added as well. Since that and with the support of the community, the list of contributing servers is still growing: Several servers of Beyond Compare, Armed and Dangerous, RandumKiwi and w00p have been added.

New features have been implemented also: Now the ladder supports per player statistics. These statistics are shown on a separate page (which can be found by clicking on a name in the ladder). Scores for every month as well as totals are shown on one page. Also, for each item in the ladder (frags, deaths, flags kept, etc) the overall ranking is shown. This way, players can keep track of their scores in an easy way. In May 31, 2009, a few minor changes have been made to the ladder: The minimum number of players has been lowered from 8 to 6. This has been done to allow people to score ladder point more easily, and also because several contributing servers have got a lower number of maximum players to improve gameplay in the meantime. Also the number of points awarded for hunting down a flag has been lowered. This has been done because of the fact that keeping a flag in KTF and scoring a flag in CTF is much harder than hunting a flag in HTF.

As a consequence of the incidents around the attack of Tear you Down!'s forum KanslozeClown closed down the ladder service in July 2009. On November 11, 2009, pwnage who is now responsible of the clan's servers announced the return of the ladder service. The third ladder stopped working when the 1.0.4 masterserver closed on November 09, 2010.

The fourth ladder
As consequence of several new features of AssaultCube 1.1, especially a different weapon scoring, and to support new servers, an overhauling of the ladder code has begun. During the alpha and beta test stage of the new AssaultCube also the ladder code updates has been tested. On August 12, 2010, pwnage announced the release of the new ladder.

Clanwar
On December 23, 2008, KanslozeClown introduced Clanwar, on which the ladder scores of the top 6 players of each known clan (identified by their clantag) make up a cumulative score per clan.

At the beginning of February 2009 there was a first indication that the clan Redemption Gam!ng tried to influence the ladder. They were suspected to change the teams so that all good players from one team (and clan) go into one team and the bad ones in the other. This was later confirmed roughly by one of their leaders. Cause several warnings to refrain this action were ignored, KanslozeClown decided to nullify all scores of rg!-members of March 2009. The action itself - so called team fixing - is now considered as cheating.

Moderanking
On December 11, 2009 there was a new addon to the ladder: Per mode statistics. These statistics shows the individual scores in the different modes. Players will now get a clearer picture of which mode they scored their total score in, and which mode they should practice in.

Signature feature


Cause many players requested this feature - especially those who are former players of the HI-SKILL ladder -,  the current ladder also provided user signatures which allowed ranked members to create image links to use in their forums to display their skills. The image is currently automatically created when accessing the player's ladder page. It also included already the possibility to show the player's country. The background image is currently selected at random; a selection dialog is planned for the near future.

The signature code originates from an example written by Luc@s. It has been fixed and overhauled by Apollo and pwnage. The feature has been introduced at October 4, 2011.

Scoring
On the designated servers all relevant game values (like number of captured flags, frags, gibs, deaths, team kills aso.) of the participated players are collected and put into data packages which are sent in intervalls of one hour to the ladder service. There, the values are caluculated as follows:

Every player in the table is ranked by the number of points he/she has accumulated during the existence of the table. If it is equal then they are ranked by their ratio, if that's equal too then they are ranked by scored flags.

The table also shows the number of frags, deaths and the ratio. Number of frags is increased on kill, increased by two on gib, decreased on team kill and suicide. Number of deaths are increased on death and suicide. Ratio is frags divided by deaths, with two exceptions. If number of frags is less than 0 then ratio is 0. If number of deaths is 0 then ratio equals number of frags.

Rules and hints

 * The ladders statistics are not real time. Scores from the servers of Tear you Down!, RandumKiwi (NZ|), and Bastard Cubers From Hell are updating every hour.
 * Cause there where several attempts in the past to manipulate the scores, only games with 6 or more players are counted.
 * Scores below 100 points will be deleted every hour. This means that a player has to score a minumum of one flag in CTF or to kill ten enemies in TDM.
 * Scores will be calculated per month. At the beginning of each month, all scores are reset.
 * Anyone who cheats the ladder by influencing his score, will be removed from the ladder. This includes (but is not limited to) using modified maps or playing unfair games (noobs vs pros).
 * Scores of people wearing tags without permissions can be removed on request.
 * Scores of former clan members will not be removed, they earned those scores.
 * Scores gathered using different names will not be merged.