We have been trolling the interwebs, asking for questions to ask FireSlash, creator of TF2stats.net as he’s agreed to do an interview with us in the coming weeks. We need something really juicy to get the conversation flowing.

UK PC magazine, PCFormat has offered up some official TF2 merch ( I think it’s a T-Shirt) and we’ll add to that with a T-Shirt of our own from our Merch store. The whole lot we’ll offer up as a prise to the question that leads to the “best” responce from FireSlash. We understand that “best” is a subjective term so we’ll judge it to be the longest, or most indepth, or simply the one that leads to the juiciest morsol of info. We’ll announce the winner on the show along with the replay of the interview.

So far we’ve had a bunch of responces as you can see below. If you’d like to add your own, just post a comment together with the Clan or Community you are linked to.

Apex [GamingMasters]

• If Valve released trading, would you make somthing capable of not just finding someone to trade (what you have now) but also automatically trade for you?

Reag [GamingMasters]

• 1. Was the idea behind tf2stats inspired by tf2items?
• 2. If so was it because you wanted to provide a service with more features than tf2items or wanted to narrow down onto statistics only?
• 3. Have you ever considered setting up a tf2 network with drunken_fool/pcmadness to make it easier for people to get the data they want?
• 4. Will you ever be updating the weapon stats page with the new community weapons?
• 5. Are you ever planning to improve on the WAR! or is it going to be forgotten in time?
• 6. Will you be ever adding an achievement progress section to the players statistics like on tf2profiles?
• 7. Will you be adding a global achievements stats list, allowing a quick link off each players profile to the most popular achievement they have acquired.
• 8. Will your item drop notifications ever be expanded to not be just a email service, bit like drunkens sms premium service?
• 9. Will your forums ever use a theme which is not the default and if its just used for posting update announcments which it looks like at the moment, why not use a simple comment page which you can post them on?

Hawk.ps [Playstuff.net]

• Would he look at more options to support and promote mappers and their maps? There are some great maps that could use a bit of testing and promoting, this looks a perfect place to get numbers and more for your map, and the more numbers, the better it can be balanced.

Calump.ps [Playstuff.net]

• As far as I can see, the type of stats listed on the site would only be useful/interesting if they covered a wider range of players/servers. Are there plans to make the site more comprehensive?

MacNetron.ps [Playstuff.net]

• 1. How does it work? (basically!)
• 2. What can we do to provide you with more stats?

As these look like very general questions, let me give some background to those two questions.

My main interest in the site TF2stats.net are as a server admin. Personal stuff is fun too, but I know my stats and weapons quite well and am not really interested by those of others.

What I do find interesting, is what maps are on our servers, in combination with when and how much people where on it at that time.

With the current server stats I can see which map was on when. Leads me to thinking that the server itself is queried for some information to produce the stats? If true, how is the server known to TF2Stats?

What we as server admin would like to see added in the server view would be something like the average people on that specific map.

This is because not all our servers have a nice web-server console which gives us information like that (even more specific, our main teamplay server does show how much people are on when, but not what map was on). If information like average players per map could be added, this is valuable information on which servers and maps are popular, and which not.

But as the information is probably gathered by TF2Stats by querying the servers, to get more frequent and more detailed data, TF2Stats need to query more often. That is not recommandable.

I’m guessing that most requests like “can you add this or that”, cannot be added because that data is just not availabe.

So a solution might be having the servers collecting data themselfs and uploading that to TF2Stats, for instance on map change. I think a SourceMod plugin is perfectly able to gather some data and upload it. Is there currently or in the future a possibility to do that?

Now, those two questions again:

1. How does it work? (basically!)

Is the data gathered by querying the servers?

2. What can we do to provide you with more stats?

Is there a possibility to have the server upload data itself and so be able to generate more detailed and extensive server info?

almightybob.ps [Playstuff.net]

• I see there’s a stat for newest maps. Is that generated by trawling TF2maps.net and FPSbanana.com, or by looking at maps loaded onto servers, or what?
• Also, how does he feel as a gamer about the information that’s emerged from the work? Any hugely surprising results? (EG I find it quite depressing that achievement_idle is the most played map.)

Maffu [Playstuff.net]

• Is it possible for them to implement heatmaps to show where people die most on each map?

artificialmonki [FragMasters]

• I’d be interested in knowing the best way to increase your chances of getting a hat. Do you honestly only have one chance to get one every hour?

mikbhoy [FragMasters]

• do you think the whole stats thing has been good for online FPS games or (like me)do you think it has just created a whole generation of hacking, statwhore, game spoiling bawbags that arent interested in actually having fun and enjoying the game?

Special Agent Patsy [Stompfest]

• What does FireSlash think of Valve’s actions against those players who used the idling program the was created by Drunken_F00l. Would he agree or disagree that the actions of Valve against the “illegal” idlers has led to increased prevalence of the map achievement_idle, contributing to the map’s current position as the number 1 most common map?
• Edit: One more question: What does FireSlash think is so liked about payload game style that two of the top three maps (not including the non-game play achievement_idle) and three of the top 10 are payload?