Hi guys,

I just found out about better battlelog and got really exited, this thing is so cool along with bf3stats.com!

Anyways, I'm a noob, and I often end up in servers that are way over my head and I wanted a way to see if a server would be too difficult for me - or just perfect.

I took a glimpse of your plugins thingy and got off with something like this:

EDIT: Swtiched the dropbox link to imgur link.

It simply gets the average and mean rank of that server's players and assigns a color to that level on certain ranges.

Its really pre-alpha with just moments of developing so far, so I'm not releasing it yet. I want to have a talk how one should do what I have done. So here's what it currently does step by step:
1. On domchange if we have a playerlist on the right open and it's different than the last one
2. Fetch all the players playing on said server using Battlelog's own REST api
3. Loop through each and every player - do a request for each of them and their rank and store it
4. Sum them up and get the average and mean levels for that server, and assign a color to them based on your level.

What troubles me, is the huge amount of requests per server - 65 normal requests on 65 people maps - it's insane. At first I wanted to use BF3stats.com API and fetch all the users at once, but it didnt seem to return any information on player's ranks what so ever.

So - how should I go about making this thing better, properly and good enough so I can release it - if there's any interest on that? And what is a good way to assess the difficulty of the server? The rank based average seems to be kinda... lacking perhaps? Oh - and is there a better plugin that does something similiar to this already?

EDIT: So its been ages, I've totally forgotten about this and Johntron did some fixes to get this working on BF4 and I just merged them in. The github repo is here and if you want to use this plugin you can use the following url in BBLog:

Just click on some server on server browser and it should try to load the the difficulty. It's a little buggy with the loading icons and what nots, so click away and see what happens.

Hey all!

Thanks for the tips - I thought I looked into the BF3stats api and saw no ranking there, but like you said, there it was. So I changed the plugin to now fetch the data from BF3stats which comes with two downsides

1st. It's actually a bit slower than the Battlelog REST api itself, even when you can reduce 60 requests to just one request.
2nd. BF3stats are not the most accurate one, they are missing quite a lot of players from their databases and updating said users on a realtime app like this would just simply take too long. So now the listing isn't giving completely accurate stats, but hey, it works.

So currently if a realm's Average rank is over 20 levels lower than you, it shows it as gray, and if it's less than that lower than you, it's green, and from there on every 10 levels it gets closer to red, until its over 40 levels higher and its completely red.

Here's a screenshot from current version:


You can find the plugin here - feel free to fork it, give tips, add suggestions and what not - i'm still a beginner programmer so I might be way off with things :) Oh - and it's pretty much straight from the over - no testing, so you USE IT WITH YOUR OWN CAUTION!

Oh, and as for the future - I'll develop it if there's any interest in it, and possibly a button to make it "topdog" mode so it wont compare your level to others, just categorize servers according to levels, so you wont see just gray servers if you are rank 145 :P

ORFK wrote:

what i doesn't understand, why do you not caluclate with the SKILL Level?
The Skill said more about the games quality than the rank.

I'm not familiar with the BF3stats skill level. How does it determine your skill, and is it accurate - or is it more accurate than rank?

ORFK wrote:

optionally for the feature you could build in a choose function, so the user could have the possibility what should be compared. rank, skill, K/D, time played... all data are available form bf3stats, so this could all be compared.

This is a good suggestion and I'll take into consideration. One problem though - If I put up config flags, they show up as checkboxes and not as radio boxes (or dropdown). This means that you can select more than one, and for this plugin it doesn't work.

it isn't shown

In your picture all of your servers are empty - There needs to be people in there playing for it to scan them, and then calculate the average rank. If you still have trouble, let me know - possibly with a chrome developer tools screenshot :)

I would go with this link:

https://raw.github.com/NikkiLoveGod/Nooblook/master/nooblook.js

Yup. This -unless github isn't hot on hotlinking, in which case I should host it somewhere else, or you can host it your self.

ORFK wrote:

me it would be enough if it would compare the skill level, because that sais more/less something about the fight level of your enemies. as i said. Rank is only rank. can be bushed. not the best way ^^

I agree with you on the skill level - never noticed that it's a battlelog thing. I'll change it around tonight at some point :) I'll also see if I can make a selector thing there!

Okay guys, I'm now looking into switching the levels into skill based comparison - the problem being I have no idea how to compare skill levels. Ranks are easy - If you're 50 levels over me, you've played a ton more than I have and therefore its highly likely that you are way over my head - so red etc.

How would I figure out what skill level is easy and what is hard? Whats the range or ratio and so on?

juress wrote:

Under 200 = noob
200-400 = low level player
400-600 = medium level player
600-800 = skilled player
800-1000 = highly skilled player
1000+ = über pwner super mega skilled player to the max

How do you come to this conclusion? And how do I compare say a skill level of 450 to 500 - how big is the difference? Or would you say that a 500 skill level player will have hard time against 600 skill level player, or what do you think the "treshold" is?

What my aim is - I am a 450 skill lvl player, I need to know what skill level is easy for me - or green, and what is very hard - or red.

juress wrote:

For player with 450 skill it would be like so:

0 - super easy
100 - very easy
200 - easy
300 - calm "no-stress" game
400 - normal game (400-500)
and the same you can apply for the higher numbers

Thank you, this was really helpful! Would you consider this to work on higher levels as well - say if I were a 800 skill lvl player - would 600 skill still be easy? For now, I'm going to run with this and go with somewhere between 100 and 200 levels per "jump".

juress wrote:

I guess you can start by adding skill level of players on each side and divide it by the number of players on that side. That would give you 2 numbers you could compare to each other. If there is a big difference between the two numbers (teams) you have a big chance there is a base rape going on on the server or just badly stacked up teams.

This was actually incredibly good suggestion and worth doing! There could be an icon that indicates "possibly uneven teams", but I'm gonna leave that to the backburner since if I add anymore info, I'm going to run out of space and I need to start doing some UI design to make it work :) Also taking this plugin this route might change its meaning more to a server inspector type of thing (which might not be a bad idea at all!) but lets try this out first. Simple needs and simple solutions!

juress wrote:

Then you can also compare those two numbers to your skill and find out what the gap is. If it's smaller than 100 skill, it's the same level of difficulty.

While it could give you some extra info on what team you should join to what advantage, I think it would be more of an information clutter to display both of the teams levels there

juress wrote:

All of this is ofcourse very simple and probably not gonna show the difficulty of the game at all, since there are other factors to consider like:

- team play: more ppl from one clan or simply friends on TS cooperating which gives them considerable advantage
- the difference between 2 highly skilled players + 14 low to med level players and 16 med to high level players

While I dont agree on the "difficulty of the game at all", since I believe this type of indicator is atleast a DECENT indicator when you're a beginner, but I agree that there is way more to this than just skill, rank or measly stats. I dont mean to make this "the definitive server inspector" - just a tad bit more insight on the server you're about to join :)

Dendari wrote:

TBH, I'm not sure how skill is a better indication than the player level.

TBH - I'm starting to think that aswell - I finished making the transition from Rank to Skill and when I go through the serverlist, there are one or two skill lvl 600 servers, couple 500, loads 400 and some 300 and one 200 (generalising). There are simply too many 400's players around for the average (or even the median) to move from that, and yet I feel that there is a noticable difference in servers.

Solution 1. If the average skill is actually a good indicator of server difficulty (which empirical testing will tell), reduce the 100 lvl range to more minute, like 30 and tweak how it compares it to your skill to get a feel of "difficulty".

This is not to say that Rank would be any better - just that It had more diversity, and with lack of testing I can't say if it was a good indicator either

Solution 2. Think of another way to compare peoples skill - Time played? In my case there's about 400 hours /played difference between skill of 450 and 720 and that is a huge difference. Maybe a combination of sorts that takes something else into consideration, like the team balance or something? (And yes, I recognize that Skill lvl is a combination of things - in a much higher detail that I can comfortably calculate).

Or.. maybe Juress was right and the general feeling of "how difficult this server is" is not based on the server's players individual skill - even if averaged, but rather a factor of something(s) else completely.

Ideas and discussion!

I pushed the switch from rank to skill to github -

Skill version and latest:


Rank version (old and with a bug in getting the correct indicator color on higher levels):

ORFK wrote:

did't found in your topic but what does the numbers mean?

The numbers are average skill level of that server, (all players skill levels summed up, and divided by the number of players) and the one in parenthesis is the "average median" skill level of that server (all players skill levels are ordered from the lowest to highest, and then taken the one in the middle - or in case of even number, the average of the two in the middle).

Now I had a pretty good suggestion from a friend - the average skill and average rank are all a bit hazy, but what one MIGHT be interested is "According to skill level, I am better than 37% of the people on this server". Maybe we can get a good indicator with using that knowledge and the average level. It might get hazy if we start combining all of these to a make our own "how well you'll fare -score" but maybe we can work something out!

ORFK wrote:

thx, i know how to calculate the average of something ;-) and i think this system is ok, but the secound in these "parenthesis" are absolutely useless. i would take them out, they just confusing and not really understandable.

I was watching khanacademy.org on averages a while ago, and there I heard that in some places they call different things "the average". In this case I'm calling the arithmetic mean (yup, I wikipedia'd that ;D) "the average" and wanted to clear it up!

But if I understood correctly, that if the average and the median skill levels differs by a largish gap, there's a bigger variety of skill levels there - a wider range, meaning that the indicator might be as accurate in this case :P

juress wrote:

See, but you can already work with these numbers.

The challange for you here, is to find the perfect formula, that creates your final result. That is - the "gap" between skill level of you and players on the server.

I kinda agree. Then it means that a 400 lvl server represents a "low" server, 500 is a "medium" server and 600 is a high server. Meaning that a skill lvl 800 player will not find 600 lvl server as relaxing as one might think and thus meaning this is kinda inaccurate way to describe it. Although - it's a decent start never the less! Maybe the right way is to provide this data along other data so show a general feel for the server at a glimpse.

juress wrote:

- The base rape thing i suggested - you don't need to show that information directly on every server you get in server browser. There is still a lot of room in the server detail collumb once you click on one in the browser.

That is true aswell, but I find my self largely ignoring the whole right column as it is and I'm hoping to make the plugin "detail at a glimpse" type of thing.

juress wrote:

You can see it creates average ranks and score on both sides which gives you some kind of idea what server are you joining.

I like the way they have displayed the info, I just might follow up on this



What I mean by this, instead of the premium and close quarter small icons, you would get fe. babyface icon on a noob server, skull on a pro server, some icon if there's a high skill gap between teams and so on for different things. Not making it too cluttered ofcourse, and then possibly displaying additional detail in the right column?

juress wrote:

Just for your information: skill value is being used by DICE for matchmaking, so there is already some level of reliability. Skill level rises if you kill a player with higher skill and lowers if you are killed by player with lower skill. + there is probably some spm and kd included there.

From what I gather, there's no spm included - its just the killing and dying to stronger or lesser player. What troubles me, is that your skill level fluctuates INSANELY - meaning that its really volatile and fluctuates on different things. In my game, it gave me -80 points when i was dying in the 600 level server with kd ~0.8 and gave me ~150 points when I was playing in the 300 lvl server with kd ~1.5

juress wrote:

NLG wrote:

"According to skill level, I am better than 37% of the people on this server".

That is a very good idea.

I also like this, but it feels that this leaves out the info on "Okay I'm better, but by what margin?". Well, maybe it's fine with the avg level comparison.

Kelnoc wrote:

The plugin works fine for the server-browser but not in the history or favoritelist. Is it possible to make this happen?

I'm glad you like it! :)

The plugin works in both of those situations, but the way it's done, it requires the players list to be open. In history and favorites tab of server browser, the playerlist in the right is not automatically opened so you have to press "Show all players" and then it will automatically load the average skill for the server. I guess I should automate this aswell :)

But where it really doesn't work - in the detailed server view where you can see each players individual rank etc and I'll make this work somewhere in the future.

Kelnoc wrote:

As for the bug: when you click on two server shortly after each other and the first isn't done yet, the data of both servers is shown in the second.

I came across this one too, but didn't figure out what caused it, thanks!

Guys, any idea how I can get the team specific list of players through bf3 api, or battlelog dom? So far I haven't been able to pick any info :S Seems like I have to return to use battlelogs own API and do specific searches on servers and people. O

GameFreakBoy wrote:

I'm pretty sure this wasn't mentioned yet, at least I hope it wasn't, but don't forget about accuracy and head shot kill ratio. I find that this makes for a difficult opponent, and, if at all possible, have it only check the history of the last 30 days or so as they could have had REALLY bad aim when they first started out.

This is also a decent idea, but I dont think using it alone would be beneficial. Maybe in a separate "extra info" box or an alert icon "Your accuracy is low compared to the servers average" or something.

What comes to the 30 days, BBlog does an accuracy history graph on each player in their profilepage and I think it comes from BF3stats, but I have found no way to access data on a particular time frame. Please direct me to the right direction if someone knows :)

GameFreakBoy wrote:

Outliers could also be tossed out completely as long as there are only one or two of them. The average could be thrown off and wouldn't really make a difference in 64 player servers, but odds are that there will always be quite a few in each skill level.

I think that's what the Median value (the one in parenthesis) of skill brings in. It sort of tosses the outliers off the equation.

GameFreakBoy wrote:

Edit: also, it will not work for me. I'm using firefox; will that mess with anything?

It's working for me on Firefox. Make sure you have restarted your browser, are checking on a server that has players, and the playerlist in the right column is open - displaying the player names.

bullet-magnet45 wrote:

In order to decide what algorithm you need to accurately describe the aggregate skill level of players on a server, you really need to know how the skill level is calculated. Then you can decide if you want to use the average, the medium, the coefficient of variation or what. Is the skill level calculated as the difference beteween the skill level (or is it rank?) of the two players involved in a death or is it a ratio or what?

It's just as you guessed, here's what DICE had to say about skill level a while back in a forum pin. Sadly the post is not available anymore.

DICE wrote:

• You gain/loose SL based on every confrontation with another player
• Killing a highly skilled enemy gives you more points than killing someone less skilled
• Points are not transferred from a player to another, they are simply added/subtracted based on the encounter and the SL of both parts (thus, after an encounter, one part may go up 50 points while the other loses only 20)
• The SL is used for matchmaking

Basically, It's an arbitrary value that fluctuates immensely, but so far the best we've got.

So far what's on my mind:
- Skill level works as an indicator of general difficulty, but getting the right brackets (or gaps) between "easy" and "hard" is challenging.
- Just using skill average as a sole indicator is lacking in terms of "how enjoyable will my experience be". It does not factor in team imbalance, outliers in skill (those 50 - 3 dudes that just owns the place and sucks out the joy, especially in Air Supremacy),

BrainFooLong wrote:

The only way is actually the live update view on server detail page. Maybe you find some techniques there.

I downloaded the Battlelog Plus addon (which like juress said, isn't developed anymore) and it seems that it is using batleloggers.com API. It also seems that Battleloggers is down from public, but somehow that is able to fetch and separate players into different teams. It is also able to duplicate the server inspector's live update thing into its own window which baffles me - It would be nice to know how it's done.

I tried to poke around the plugin and see what it's doing, but its pretty advanced and I couldn't really reverse engineer it how it works just from the source. (Not to mention that I dont have any API keys to either battlelogplus api nor the battlelogger api).

So, if you have any tips - they're welcomed :P

Eb0 wrote:

This plugin looks really great !

But sometimes, it's not able to determine the server difficulty.
It seems that there is an error while fetching players from bf3stats.

Do you guys have the same issue?

It seems there's some big updates going on in battlelog. I haven't been playing in a while and for that reason haven't seen the updates. So, it seems that they have changed the way the BL has been built and it broke the compatibility on both of my plugins, The nooblook and the assignmentinfo thing.

I'll wait a while and see what comes of the new battlelog and then update the plugins. I don't really fancy the new look my self :(

EDIT:
Oh, and all these plugins are in github (links in here somewhere :D) so feel free to fork and fix bugs if you wish to spend some time fooling around and make pull requests :)

Good lord it has been ages. So someone approached me that my plugin was not working, and then I found out that I totally forgot not only about this plugin, but that Johntron had made a pull request that does some fixing for BF4.

So I merged his fixes to the project, and it should at least run in the BF4 battlelog, but it seems to be a bit buggy - the "loading" gif seems a bit random, so you kinda have to just select a server and wait out if it loads it :P

This could use a little love - hook it up for BF Hardline and so on, but I'm not playing BF3 anymore, didnt even get BF4 so I don't think I'll be able to - at least for now. I'm kinda interested in the Hardline, but we'll see about that...

But yea - you can use the following url to get this working:

(You could use the Johntron's link as well - I didn't do any additional fixes yet.)