Your Halo 2 Stats Via RSS

An interesting feature of Halo 2 was mentioned in a post on personal site davextreme.com - Multiplayer Stat RSS Feeds. His post (quoted with permission): "Really cool thing I discovered today about Bungie.net's stat tracking: RSS feeds. Not only do they track every single kill in every single multiplayer game (along with who did it, how it was done, and where it was done), but they put all this data into a feed you can subscribe to and never miss out on post-game scrutiny. Of course, to get to all of it you have to go through a really obnoxious sign-up process (which involves -- shudder -- getting a Microsoft Passport account), but once you've finally gotten signed in, associated your gamertag with your Passport, and found the stats page, there should be an orange XML button. Pop that into your favorite newsreader, and you're ready to obsessively review every single frag."

Is it!?

[over_exposed]

Is this getting gaming one step closer to competing w/ the popularity of football, soccer, or any other competitive, publisized sport? Could this evolve into (way down the road) the possibility of televising tournaments? Maybe G4Tech TV could redeem themselves by televising QuakeCon, or whatever the H2 equivalent will be. I'm all for it! It would make LAN parties that much cooler, yet so much geekier...

Re:Is it!?

[Ayaress]

From what they were saying about "XBox TV" a few weeks back, combined with these RSS feeds and integrated into the Xbox Live system, it could very well amount to the equivalent of the amateur leagues in sports at the very least. If it were segregated in some level by region, it would be even moreso. For example, in the amateur sports leagues, there are often a lot more players than the big leagues, but tend to have a few stand-outs overall, and many local areas will have a few outstanding players or teams.

Re:Just remember...

[GoodbyeBlueSky1]

Because Microsoft loses money on every Xbox sold, I will deprive them of income.

No, they don't. They only lose money at the very beginning of the production cycle. Once all manufacturing processes are in place for a while (e.g. setting up plants, working on more cost efficient development) they make money on systems as well, though still not nearly as much as on software.

Re:Just remember...

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently, the concept of loss-leading is lost on the majority of the /. community. Almost every M$ basher that posts on here latches onto the catch phrase: "Microsoft is losing money by selling Xboxes." Taken in the way that so many anti-M$ zealots lurking in the shadows here mean it, it simply isn't true. Not content being anonymous morons, obviously, these cretins are trying to convince everyone of their glaring economic and financial ignorance.

Look at it this way: A company evaluates a project based o

Re:Just remember...

[kiddygrinder]

Just a point about Nokia: they aren't in the same business. They may have been absolutely slaughtered by nintendo in the 'handheld gaming' business, but they made a tidy profit on their product as new model of phone. I'd say they'll just continue to release evolutionary hardware that capitalises on the niche of people wanting a phone that they can play good games on.

Re:Just remember...

[unclethursday]

A company, even one with M$'s deep pockets, will not green-light a project (Xbox-related or otherwise) if it is not expected to generate a profit and achieve measures that meet or exceed company standards for risk and return.

Which is why MS green lights all the projects that haven't turned a profit, ever, right?

And, if you took the 5 minutes to look, you'd see that Microsoft has NEVER made a profit from the Xbox, or its games. Since its launch, the Xbox has accounted for most of the Home and Entertai

Re:Worthless Feature

[Anonymous Coward]

You're stupid. There's no real argument against passport other than it's from MS. You don't have to give passport any more info than you want to.

Exposing data to users is something more services should do.

Re:Worthless Feature

[DAldredge]

And what is so wrong with MS passport?

Re:Worthless Feature

[Osty]

And you need a Passport Account to boot

Of course, you already had to have a passport if you have a Live! account. If you don't have a Live! account, this is obviously useless to you.

who needs to know every kill in every game of every player in every universe. It's stupid

Do you keep track of the miles per gallon you get in your car? Do you follow your bank account, tracking where you spend your money? Do you follow any sports team? Even high school teams track stats. Maybe this is stupid for yo

Borken for me

[octover]

I had heard that Bungie.net had a way for you to check your stats online. I also had heard about the RSS feed. I thought I would check it out. It worked great at first, but then I started getting other people's games. It happened when I wasn't even home, and there wasn't really a consistent gamer tag where it seemed a wire had been crossed, but I was just getting a bunch of garbage. Anyways after over 200+ games I did not play in I deleted the subscription out of my news reader and relegated it back to "huh, thats nice, but I don't really care."

Re:Borken for me

[Achronos]

Yeah, sorry about that. There's a caching bug with the RSS feeds which is why we haven't publized the feature much. A fix should be going out late this week or early next week, depending on a few other things.

Re:Borken for me

[Kingfox]

This week or next? The response in email I got from you guys earlier today was this:

Known problem we should have this fixed up in the next day or so.

Either way, great feature, and thanks for the quick response about the problem!

I think its more for Guild Websites than "news"

[L7_]

Dark Age of Camelot had something similiar to this RSS feed two years ago. They kept track of guild and member pvp statistics (in the form of things called "Realm Points" and kill/death ratio and stuff) for each server and published the results to an XML file [camelotherald.com]. Every DAoC "Pvp Guild" (I use the term loosely), had a php extension that showed real-time statistics of thier members and thier top-status on thier web page. So you could tell how good or bad a DAoC guild was by just browsing thier webpage!

I assume things will be done similar to this. Real time published statistics to guild web pages, showing those viewing them how active they are, how "good" they are, and which members are the better players in the guild. And since they will be updated in real-time, it should be obvious if the information they are publishing is valid (cause a witty programmer could just change all thier published statistics to "win", but then that wouldnt match up with the central server).

Publishing

[ifreakshow]

Is it possible to publish your stats to the community as a whole or only subscribe to your own stats?

Crap

[JFitzsimmons]

This just makes it really easy for those hugeass php script forum sig images with everybodies l33t stats in them. *Sigh*

http://vivalar4d.com/halo/

[c0nrad]

check out my game stats.
although it shows the latest game at the bottom, it worked out pretty good.

http://vivalaR4D.com/HALO/ [vivalar4d.com]

Not really news

[Osty]

The game itself tells you about this (in tips while waiting in the multiplayer hopper, and in the manual). The RSS feed is neat, but it's pretty useless since you can only get to your own feed unless a feed link is given to you by someone else. I don't need to watch my own feeds via RSS, but it would be nice to watch friends and rivals without having to always go to bungie.net.

However, the most impressive feature in my opinion is not the RSS feed, but the Game Viewer. A full list [bungie.net] of features available on bungie.net is available (Game Viewer is section 6.5), as is a list of medals [bungie.net] you can earn during multiplayer and a description [bungie.net] of how rankings are determined.

This data is stored on XBox Live!'s stat servers, so sometimes bungie.net can be out of sync (I've seen it think I hadn't played any games on the overview page, though the games themselves showed up in the game list).

At last!

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

At last we'll have Hard data on Halo 2.
Hopefully this will help clear the smog of positive Hype and negative FUD surrounding the game and potential buyers will actually be able to buy a game based on cold facts for once in the history of gaming.
There should be more of this kind of thing.

This of course doesn't take into account the fact that most potential buyers have already gotten/ordered Halo 2 anyway.

What's next?...

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

A fantasy Halo 2 league?

As a result...

[hollismb]

I created a page to parse the XML for my stats on my site with a little help from my friend Kick the Donkey [sytes.net]. The stats, for some reason, come oldest first, so we had to switch it to be reversed, showing the most recent game at the top. It's a lot cooler than having to check Bungie.net all the time, and has links that will take me straight to each specific game. Also, and more importantly, I can't check Bungie.net from work, where most of the guys I play with are, so this helps a lot with bragging-in-your-fa