Players and maps

Players

Every player seen on a server gets a row: their in-game name, the platform id where the protocol gives us one, and their accumulated statistics on that server.

Sessions are separate from players

A player who joins, leaves and re-joins has spent two intervals on the server. A single joined/left pair on the player row would either lose the first interval or report the gap between them as time played — so each visit is its own session row, and that is the only place play time is measured.

Seconds are written when a session closes rather than derived on read, so “total time played” is a sum over an index rather than a date subtraction across every visit anybody has ever made.

The player browser

Players are browsable in their own right at /servers/players, and each has a page showing where they have played and for how long.

A member who has connected their game account can be linked to their player rows, which is what turns “somebody called Ashley” into “this member”. That linkage is also what makes a member’s game history a thing they can hide — see showGameHistory.

Grace on a missing player

A scan tolerates a player briefly disappearing from the query response, because the protocol drops them on a busy server. A plugin reporting through the integration API gets no such grace, since it enumerates the real player list and has no equivalent failure mode.

Maps

A map is a first-class item: it has a page, a browser, categories, tags, reviews, ratings, comments, media and favourites, exactly like other content.

Maps arrive three ways:

1. From a scan — the current map a server reports is resolved to a map row for that app, creating it if we have not seen it before.
2. From an integration — a self-reported map is resolved the same way, so it appears in the browser like any other.
3. From a mod — mods are the one content type that can contribute maps directly.

Maps are per-app: de_dust2 on one game is not the same row as de_dust2 on another.

A map’s page shows which servers are running it, which is the useful direction — “where can I play this right now”.