I have no idea how hard this would be to implement, so feel free to disregard it...

Would it be possible to put up a little Empire icon next to a players name in the rankings? I have noticed myself clicking through to see who is in what empire and how they are doing. I think it would add touch more flavor to the inter-empire competition to see at a glance how your team is doing compared to everyone else.

I've added a new sig banner option that shows your best class rank/score/games posted. The background setting is ignored as it uses one appropriate to your best class automatically.

Sample:

Can you add Empire of None to the Alt-Meta?

Added.

Cool new banners. I encourage folks to use them. I also want to encourage folks to focus on the type of games that they prefer. I think these class specific banners are a good way to do this.

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On a separate note I'm wondering about the new process of adding new characters/empires to the AltMeta. I think I know what's going on but let me summarize just to make sure.

Initially, the AltMeta automatically scanned through the top 100 official metaverse empires and updated the stats for any active players that were members of that empire.

However, since the hosting for the AltMeta was changed, the AltMeta now runs off of a list of empires to update. Any new empire that wishes to be included in the AltMeta can simply request to be added to this "AltMeta update list". This request can be made in this thread or any other thread where Kryo will notice it (i.e. any thread).

I also assume that individual characters wishing to be included in the AltMeta could simply form their own empire and ask to have their empire included, or, if they have some strange religious beliefs that preclude them from forming their own empire it could be possible to add them to some placeholder empire or otherwise simply have their character stats updated directly. (Really not so sure about this part).

My understanding for the need for this is one of bandwidth required to do the updates. Apparently the official metaverse has a large set of defunct characters that haven't posted a game in a dog's age or may have never posted a game for all I know, but that these characters would otherwise still need to be scanned, causing AltMeta update times to get to ridiculous levels. (Again not totally sure here).

My question is, is there any way to have a mechanism in play that doesn't require folks to explicitly request that they be added but still has some kind of limitation on the length of time required to do an update?

I have no idea of the mechanics of how something like this would work, but something that automatically added any character once they posted their second game and conversely automatically stopped updating them once they have been inactive for 6 months would be perfect. I really don't know what I'm asking for here, I'm basically grasping at straws. However I think it would be a very good feature to not have to require folks to explicitly ask to be included. Any and all ideas that anyone may have in this regard would be appreciated.

Pretty much. Any empire will do, but you do need to be in one for the altmeta to find you. This is because it uses the empire RSS feeds to determine if it needs to update the characters--scanning every character to check for new games every update would be very impractical, so it just looks at the empire RSS and compares your overall score with what it was at the last update. If it's different, it looks for any new games you've posted.



More or less. Scanning unaligned characters via the "no empire" empire RSS is not really practical at all for the number of active characters it actually contains. And if these players don't post on the forum to request being added, then they probably are not aware of the altmeta anyway.

Kryo, when you get a chance, would you mind adding my newly-formed empire "The Gerontocracy" to the AltMeta? Thanks in advance.

Hi Kryo.

Requesting permission to have my empire "The Great Galactic Shoehorn" added to the AltMeta.

Many Thanks.

Hi Kryo,

Please add "Inisfree" to the list of newly formed empires to add to the AltMeta.

Thanks!!!

Added.

Another new empire to add if you please Kryo, Tyranny of Evil.

Thankyou kindly.

Added.

Help! I'm trying to create a character, but it keeps saying that the name is invalid. Help me out here!!!

Well, for one thing special characters are not allowed and that includes periods. Also the name can't match a name already in use. Finally IIRC you have to put in your serial number to create a character.

Yeah, but I followed those things (only A-Z, a-z, 0-9, _, ., -) and it still won't work.