Organized Crime

[Capt. Glorypants]

The Spreadsheet

During my time with Monaco, I've experienced two small problems: I haven't been sure of what I should do next, and if I've gotten a very good ranking, I'd downplay it if telling it to friends. The solution that I came up with that would fix both problems... a spreadsheet.

Quite simply, rows contain the levels, columns contain the game modes, and each column has the sub-columns "amount of players completed", "own rank" and "ranking percentage". The first two are self-explanatory, while the third one is just "own rank" divided by "amount of players completed". There are a few general statistics about Monaco as well.

Here's an example of how mine looks as of writing this:
DropBox[www.dropbox.com]
Of course I've filled it with the lovely colours of the game

You might notice that if you have a first place, the placement percentage isn't 0%. That might at first seem like a flaw in the system (that's what I thought), but I later realized that it distuingishes between the value of different first-places (or other identical rankings).

Beating a level in Monaco isn't hard; it's about beating other people in that level. Therefore, getting a good ranking in a rarely played level is worth less than a worse ranking in a very played level. Take for example my ranking in "Prologue: The Hacker, Zombie, SP" in comparison to "The Sound of Violence, Enchanced, SP".

So if you want to get a better overview of your devices and know the true value of your ranks, grab a clean version of the spreadsheet here.[www.dropbox.com]

Automatization

I also made a script that fetches the data from the Monaco leaderboards. It comes in two formats: Python script[www.dropbox.com] or Windows executable[www.dropbox.com].

If you have Python, edit the file, and in the top of the script there'll be a few comments (# in Python) telling you how to use the script. The result will be printed in the Python shell.

If you're going for the .exe, you'll have to insert the last part of your user page's URL (in my case "captglorypants") in monaco.txt, close it, run the script, open monaco.txt, get result.

Both methods will return a long string. Copy that string and paste it into B4 in the Excel spreadsheet. It can take quite a while to finish, but due to the nature of the script (and the 5000 entries per request limitation on the leaderboards), the script actually goes faster, the better you are at the game.

[Capt. Glorypants]

Originally posted by CORL!:

I think you might want to talk to Free Market/Perfect Competition, she has done multiple projects involving Monaco Leaderboards.

(you may know her from this thread: http://steamcommunity.com/app/113020/discussions/0/620700960964754884/)

While I haven't talked to her, I did read the post again and notice the mention of a Steam API that can access the leaderboards. It shouldn't be too difficult to make a Python script that gives a text you can just copy-paste into the diagram, so thanks for the suggestion.

I did know about her work; I just thought she still used the screenshot system, which I didn't want to struggle with.

[Perfect Info]

If you want some help getting started, I can share some of my source with you (given you mentioned using Python) or just give you some help so you can figure out for yourself.

The entire, official map Monaco leaderboards are about 800 MB. The top-50 ranks (what I collect regularly) are about 1.4 MB, and you can download the top 5000 entries easily (5000 is the cutoff for a single query, also possibly feasible to do top-5000 by hand without programming anything), so that would be about 140 MB for all the official leaderboards.

[Capt. Glorypants]

Originally posted by Perfect Competition:

If you want some help getting started, I can share some of my source with you (given you mentioned using Python) or just give you some help so you can figure out for yourself.

The entire, official map Monaco leaderboards are about 800 MB. The top-50 ranks (what I collect regularly) are about 1.4 MB, and you can download the top 5000 entries easily (5000 is the cutoff for a single query, also possibly feasible to do top-5000 by hand without programming anything), so that would be about 140 MB for all the official leaderboards.

Thanks for the offer, but I got some help with only a few things from a friend. I think it was best to do it mostly on my own, so I'll become more familiar with the topic. The heads-up for the 5000 entry max probably saved me from a bunch of frustration, though :)

[Perfect Info]

Well, you can collect more than the top-5000. But it will take multiple queries, so you'd want to program something to automated. rather than just run down the list of links by hand.

Also, the way the data is encoded is slightly non-obvious, so if you do get stuck feel free to send me a message. I'm sympathetic to wanting to do it yourself, so I can make my advice cryptic but leaning in the right direction : P

EDIT: Oh, didn't see your edit. Nice going : )