But starting on: I have decided to do some work on websites instead. From 1998-2003 I ran http://www.theclq.com. A 200.000.000 pageview website with 160.000 registered gamers dedicated to monitoring game servers. Nowadays there are sites like game-monitor.com, serverspy.net and gametracker.com. None of them come even close to the scope TheCLQ used to have. I had good reasons to stop with TheCLQ 5 years ago, but several of those reasons are no longer valid. Especially hardware has come a long way, so I think it should be possible to do more. Also I learned a lot about gaming and Internet technology the last 5 years so I think I can do a better job this time.
This is all hobby (I also have a real life), and I will also keep spending time on keeping BBS alive and kicking so I am not sure how far I will get with this.
What are my plans (what actually happens might be completely different):
- #1 do some research on other websites that do server scanning
- #2 rent a few powerful servers
- #3 resurrect my old game scanning technology and get it to work with new games
- #4 start a small site (AllGameServers.com) with a few games/gametypes and a few stats to test everything out
- #5 resurrect my old database technology (used to do 100.000 transaction/second 10 years ago, should be able to do better now) and try to integrate that with the scanner and the database (used to be MS Jet and MS SQL-Server, will probably be MySQL this time)
- #6 add neat functions until people start noticing the site, and then keep adding neat functions
What kinds of stats and functions do I have in mind (again what actually happens might be completely different):
- Popular servers per game
- Details stats per game server
- Who is playing on what server, with some kind of alert system (e.g. a Firefox extension) helping you to decide when and where to play
- Some form of ranking, TheCLQ used to be global I think this time I will probably do separate ranking for each server
- Multiple different ranking methods; TheCLQ's ranking was not liked by everyone, which will apply to any ranking system, so perhaps I simply should have multiple methods and let the visitors decide for themselves
- Some form of awards and achievements (perhaps both global and per server)
- Tools helping gamers to organize fun matches, or perhaps even complete tournaments where the site could automagically keep the scores etc.
- Map statistics (e.g. which maps scare people away, which maps bring in new players to assist server owners in optimizing there map collection)
.
), I certainly wish you all the best with your project to bring CLQ to version 2.0. It sounds like an exciting endeavor and I look forwarding to reading your programming posts to see the progress you are making.
