Is EOL the holy grail?

Milagros has announced he will finish EOL this weekend, after which we'll have a two week testing period with more testers and it will be released. So that means EOL out in mid March if things goes well.

It's been, what? three years? in the making with continuously pushed release dates by mila. I believe he at one point said spring '08? Anyway during this period it has been hyped, forgotten, rehyped and sometimes talked of like the holy grail. But is it all it's cracked up to be?

Being beta tester and designer of the webpage I have been close to the development for the past 1½ years. There has been really A LOT of smaller and bigger updates and features added, more than mila or any tester can remember I'm sure. Big ones are things like cooperative multiplayer, but some of the smaller ones are important aswell, things that will make the daily use more pleasant. This is things like being able to download any level ever played ingame and TCP mode for port forwarding noobs.

However the most important thing maybe is the site, that hopefully will bring people together about more than just the current battle and the last five chat lines. This is what I believe will be what makes or breaks the great succes of EOL, the people. If people doesn't play online all the time and get their stats recorded, if people doesn't use the site to see stats for the levels they play and if people doesn't use the potential of the extensive stats it will just be belma with a couple of new battle modes. On the other hand if people do do all these things and really come together around it, this is not just a new version of belma but more than we ever could have hoped for in Elasto Mania 2.

So it really is up to the people and, well me, and what I make of the site. The holy grail is there, we just have to grab it ;-)

EOL site: Teams

As you may know I'm making the website for the upcoming elma online. I'll write some posts about some of the features that I make, or maybe just this one post, we'll see.

Recently I've been working on how teams should work. At first you could just join any team, but because of the team rankings this was not such a good idea. It's not totally decided yet which ranking system we're going to use and how the team ranking is going to work. However team ranking might work a bit like this. Right now it's an average of the players in team, but someone suggested that instead it works like the individual ranking, so that in a battle the best player of each team in that battle counts for the team ranking that battle and the ranking points achieved is calculated based on the teams and other teams ranking.

This is why it is important that no one plays a battle while in a wrong team, hence fucking up the team ranking. The solution I decided on after discussing it a bit with kd is as follows. By default you can join any team you like. Anyone in a team can then lock and unlock the team. So when the team is locked obviously no one can join it. It also saves a history of which teams you've been in when. So that in case someone joins an unlocked team he is not part of, plays a battle, and fucks up the teams ranking, we can edit his team history and recalculate the team rankings using the team history.

I have coded it all except the part that recalculates the team ranking according to the team history. So I hope I'll be able to so all this works ;-)

And sorry it all this doesn't make any sense, but it does in my head atleast.