HI-SKILL ladder

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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

HI-SKILL ladder

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 [1], 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[2][3][4].

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"[5]. In the same post he announced that the HI-SKILL would support both releases. Later he published alternative 1.0.x server lists[6][7]. 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[8].

On October 3, 2010, the support of HI-SKILL by RandumKiwi ended[9]. 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[10]. 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"[11]. 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[12].

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

HI-SKILL's 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[13]:

  • 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.

1.0.4 Servers
Name IP/Domain Max Players Owner Location Logging
A&D: BigCheese 81.89.107.97:40000 10 stef Germany yes
A&D: Flopsy 81.89.107.97:30000 16 stef Germany yes
GROM 94.124.10.20:28763 16 grenadier Poland yes
THE HUB @ HI-SKILL sol.woop.us:5000 14 Drakas United States yes
EUROZONE @ HI-SKILL idis.woop.us:4000 14 Drakas France yes
Wotan Fragland idis.woop.us:5000 14 Drakas United Kingdom yes
ultra.gib@hi-skill sol.woop.us:6010 14 Drakas United States yes
liberty@hi-skill idis.woop.us:1337 14 Drakas France yes
1.1 Servers
Name IP/Domain Max Players Owner Location Logging
liberty@hi-skill idis.woop.us:11020 14 Drakas France yes
1.1 @ HI-SKILL sol.woop.us:1100 14 Drakas United States yes
1.1.0.2 @ HI-SKILL idis.woop.us:1102 14 Drakas France yes
BC|Riot In War bcus.selfip.com:28763 14 BluePr!nt United States yes

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.

See also

References

  1. "New AC ladder" w00p forum. 2009-09-04
  2. "New maprot map" HI-SKILL board. 2009-12-09
  3. "Small changes" HI-SKILL board. 2010-07-05
  4. "Current maprots" HI-SKILL board. 2010-07-22
  5. "AC 1.1 OR AC 1.0.4" AC forum. 2010-08-13
  6. "1.0 alternative server list" AC forum. 2010-08-21
  7. "1.0 alternative server list, v2" AC forum. 2010-08-24
  8. "Ladder Version Problem" HI-SKILL board. 2010-08-22
  9. "|NZ| server update" AC forum. 2010-10-03
  10. "Woop Clan's 1.0 Masterserver" HI-SKILL board. 2010-11-11
  11. "Recent happenings" HI-SKILL board. 2010-11-12
  12. Announcement on the index page HI-SKILL website. Retrieved on 2010-12-02
  13. "Points transfers" HI-SKILL board. 2009-10-31