HI-SKILL ladder

The HI-SKILL ladder was a ranking list of players with the goal to encourage competitive gameplay. It was introduced as a replacement for third AC ladder, which demised in July 2009. The HI-SKILL ladder has been hosted and developed by Drakas till its shutdown on December 1, 2010.

History
After the demise of the third AC ladder there were many calls from members of the community for a replacement. The HI-SKILL ladder was announced on September 4, 2009 by Drakas, a member of the clan w00p.

During its service time the HI-SKILL ladder was undergoing several updates and improvements. It provided daily, weekly, monthly and all time ranks for players, and separate pages for these. Clicking on a user showed all the information about his games. There have been also some unique features (see below). The list of supporting servers changed alot: Most of them have been fired up by Drakas himself, but also servers of RandumKiwi and the clans Armed & Dangerous and Beyond Compare supported the ladder, too. Also the the map rotation of Drakas ' own servers have been changed a few time to fit better into the ladder concept.

In the course of the releasing of AssaultCube 1.1.x on August 2010, Drakas had become one of the most prominent supporters of the previous release (1.0.4). In his opinion the new release "...is a new game, it's not the same old AC with that feeling, that some of us been playing since 2006". In the same post he announced that the HI-SKILL would support both releases. Later he published alternative 1.0.x server lists. To that point of time only minor critics exist about the mixing of the scores of two releases with a different gameplay in a single ladder.

On October 3, 2010, the support of HI-SKILL by RandumKiwi ended. He decided to provide his statistics to the AC ladder back again. On November 11, 2010, Drakas introduced a replacement of the official 1.0.4 masterserver which was shutdown before. As reason Drakas had been stated, that the supporters of the 1.0.x side "mostly believe either that 1.1 is a new game and has lost its competitiveness and only caters to lowering the skill level, or that the way that AC and its forums are being run as of recently has taken a negative deviation. In my case, it's both". With that, the majority of the HI-SKILL servers supported the 1.0.4 release of AssaultCube.

On December 1, 2010, the ladder were shutdown. The website is now serving as a static, read-only archived version for historic purposes.

Features
Beside several server or website features/addons which have been also provided by other hosts and clans in the past before (like a forum, a teamspeak and/or IRC support) HI-SKILL had provided a few unique features.

Signature feature


The ladder also provided user signatures which allowed ranked members of the ladder to create image links to use in their forums to display their levels. The user could modify his image by selecting a different background or a weapons symbol.

Points transfer
Points transfers was also available to those who have played a while and changed their nickname and/or joined or left or moved the clan. Transfers were going to be performed in the following cases, in terms of the source of the transfer :


 * Either the player had been listed with a global all-time rank,
 * or he had played over 50 hours (on average, for 2.5hrs/day, that's 20 days in a row),
 * or the source nickname was located in the 'United Nations' (which means the IP wasn't recognised).
 * If the destination nickname had been in a clan, then that player had to be in the actual clan.

Scoring
On the designated servers all relevant game data of the participating players had been collected and put into data packages which were sent to the ladder service. How scores were calculated is not being revealed.

Servers
Only well maintained and reliable servers are allowed to report to the ladder. These servers can change as often or as little as they want.

Rules and hints

 * The ladders statistics wasn't real time. Scores from the servers were updated every hour.
 * Only games with at least 6 players (this rule need not apply for the whole game, but an action will only score if there are at least 6 players in the game at that time) were counted.
 * Games have to be play on an official or a chosen non-official map.
 * Cheating, intentional team fire/damage (especially with flag carriers), repeated verbal abuse and team fixing (could be defined as putting all the good players on one team and all worst players on the second team) weren't allowed. Not following any of these may resulted in removal of the individual scores, or of team's scores if more than one individual has been involved in that. Extreme cases reported to the blacklist.