Developer Update Part 1 (of 1) - New Navigation, Killer Stats, & Match History

Hello! New year, new update. Let’s start this off by talking about the thing everyone is going to notice instantly, the new navigation. I was never quite happy with what we had previously and although it "worked”, it’s become increasingly difficult to include links to all the things I want to and it really wasn’t nice to use. In this update I’ve added a new page (spoilers) and it was the final straw which sent me down the path of creating a replacement. I’m really happy with how it’s turned out, but I understand it’s a significant change and I’d very much appreciate hearing any thoughts you have or bugs you run into.

Killer stats

Okay, the next thing is the new Killer Stats page, it’s always been my intention (and a large motivation in creating the site) to create a variety of “public stat” pages with data from many thousands of games. Unfortunately, when you start drilling down and breaking up stats you realise you need a lot of data for it to still be remotely representative and reasonably unbiased. This is why I haven’t added any more pages sooner. I think we’re at the point now where there’s a large enough variety/quantity of matches that I can share some killer stats (including for the lesser seen killers) and not end up being the source that says Michael is the strongest killer due to a lack of or overly biased data.

While I was planning and building this page I had and experimented with so many ideas and I’ve ended up trying to keep it relatively simple. (There are a couple of design choices that may - I’m not sure - seem a little strange that were necessary for features I’m still considering adding.) What I’ve realised is a page like this - more so than any other - requires being used and the feedback of many to reach its final form. If there’s anything you find unintuitive or clunky to use, or something else you’d like to be able to do with it, please let me know.

Match Retention History

I want to take a moment to clarify this more officially, when I first released the site, I had no idea how many users there might be or how well things would scale and I hadn’t even considered the possibility of other people financially supporting the site. As a result of that, I decided to add what I still believe to be a reasonable limit which I had referred to as “match retention”. This ultimately exists for the purpose of keeping the site affordable and is primarily intended to avoiding needing to store data indefinitely for any number users (particularly inactive ones). Obviously, this limit is a bit of a balance between multiple factors and will likely always be necessary to some degree. What I want to clarify is that I don’t currently intend to ever delete any matches, I have been and will continue to invest a good amount of time into creating systems to store and archive matches in more economic forms. I’m not going to say that I won’t need to delete matches at some point but based on how things are looking currently, I don’t expect to need to anytime soon.

In an effort to make things clearer I’m going to be referring to match retention as match history from now on. The effect is the same, regular users will be continue to be able to query matches from the last 60 days, and supporters will be able to do so for 360 days - I just feel it’s time to use a term that doesn’t (at least so strongly) imply deletion.

Changes

Features

  • Added a new navigation
  • Added a killer stats page

Changes

  • Added the ability to increase the upload size limit on a per user basis for those in situations where larger file sizes can’t reasonably be avoided.
  • Renamed match retention to match history

Misc

  • Added Spirit renders (a commission done by Ev3ntic)
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