Suggestions on improving WebAPI for CS:GO community web devs

[Yoba Deluxe]

This post is directed to Valve developers who might notice my site, or this group. Csgo-stats.com uses Leaderboards (through deprecated Steam Community data endpoints) for getting "Competitive Classic" mode stats. According to my tests, CS:GO stopped updating the Leaderboards for a significant part of players after a patch in September 2014. This is a problem because the Competitive stats are the most useful kind to evaluate other players' skills. So I've decided to do a public post that would point out the ways to improve the WebAPI for CS:GO.

This is my list of suggestions on improving the WebAPI methods for CS:GO.

Most important issues:

• Total stats can be easily boosted on modded Community servers, or even in offline bot matches. The solution here could be providing separate stats (with some kind of a prefix) for only Competitive Matchmaked games, OR only for all games played on Official Valve servers. These stats would be more trustworthy.
  
  
• There are no "total_*_map_*" stats for newer maps (everything released after cs_militia, except for de_cbble.) There are also no stats for Operations maps.
  
  
• Weapon stats do not distinct weapons that can be equipped in the same slot. For example, the "total_kills_m4a1" stat includes kills made both with M4A4 and M4A1-S. Same issue is present with Five-Seven/Tec-9/CZ75 and P2000/USP-S stats.

Other, less crucial suggestions:

• Consider providing the player's competitive skillgroup in the WebAPI. Twitch streamers already can show it online, and there is already a privacy setting for that in the options.
  
  
• Provide WebAPI methods with in-depth stats like DOTA 2 has. The most useful here would be a history of player's Competitive matches with stats for each participant.
  
  
• The IEconItems_730/GetPlayerItems method I use for getting the player's Operation Coins and stats that go with them is very unstable, and often returns just { } .

If the community would have better APIs for CS:GO, we would be able to make sites like Dotabuff, or even Battlelog to enhance the competitive experience for all CS:GO players.

* - For joining lobbies, there is a "lobbysteamid" line in ISteamUser/GetPlayerSummaries

[Matt]

I hope the devs will see that and will make the things move !!

[HolyNoob]

Valve won't going to respond no matter what.

[Mishon]

Bump, also they won't see it probably :P make some online petition form or else

[ShoT_UP]

Even us CSGOLounge admins don't get responses from Valve... Good luck.

[Yoba Deluxe]

I don't expect a response. I just hope they will take notice of these issues.

[Yoba Deluxe]

Updated to include newly found issues with join function and several stats stored in operation coins.

[www.twitch.tv/farowai]

You can translate this on russian language?

[Killstreet]

I dont know how much time you have and how good you are with coding but I know an old plugin for cs:source called FBG (Final battle ground). This plugin kept stats aswell, but besides that you would get points (called plinks) on the site to do stuff. At first there wasnt much, later on they built a game on the site to use plinks on, people would also be able to do competitive against eachother with a special extra plugin for competitive servers. I was hoping you could have a look at it and tell me your thoughts about the possibility for re-creating this.

[Yoba Deluxe]

So I mailed this post to Vitaliy, and he responded to me saying that Valve will incorporate this feedback into their future considerations.

[ShoT_UP]

This means that your email is gonna get deleted. Probably.

[dot]

I'm no developer, but I do understand what this stuff means for the CS:GO stats website and for the GO community in general. This would be amazing if these features were added into the API - it would expand how people develop sites for GO tenfold.

[Reason]

We need the Steam CS:GO Devs to come here. @csgo_dev ( https://twitter.com/csgo_dev )

[px]

we need a global rank like, the highest hs% , or the highest K.D, or the highest pistol player etc

[Flashbang Mike]

If only Valve cared.... and/or had a decent management structure. -sigh-

Ok, a less flippant response:

Is it not obvious to CSGO devs that comprehensive stats are CRUCIAL to e-sports? Thats rhetorical by the way, the answer is yes it is obvious.

Why? Its like Baseball, or Cricket... this is the kind of game where (unlike say Football where flair and hard to measure "skill" is important) what people want to do is COMPARE things. What map do I do best on? What weapon? Where do I need to improve? People also want to compare different PRO players in all kinds of respects. In football its all about "wow look how he did that cool spin shot" but in cricket its all about batting average. CSGO is like Cricket. How many rounds do you win? What is your K/D? Whats you hs%?

They are only harming their own business model while they do not address this deficiency, and I struggle to see how they don't recognise this. Or, back to my flippant response, perhaps they do recognise this but they lack any kind of competent management system to galvanise them to respond to it.

[Degetz]

Last game stats unfortunately are faulty with regards to favourite weapon, don't know whether it was reported or not. Example from a game:

Win 16/18 rounds won.

Favorite weapon Glock-18
Fav. weapon kills 3
Fav. weapon accuracy 22.2%
K/D ratio 2
Kills 24
Deaths 12
Damage 3290 HP
Money spent $65150
MVP 5

From this, it looks like only the second half statistics are gathered/reported by the API, which in this game was a rather short T side.

Also would be nice to have all weapon stats for the last game.