Clarity & Other suggestions
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Robocode is a game for teaching people how to program as well as a great way for experienced programmers to test their knowledge and skills. The wiki is pretty nice and user friendly. But both the old and the new rumble pages are entirely unfriendly. It would be good to:
- On the landing page, describe what the bot classes are, or at least link to the wiki explaining the bot classes & types of rumble.
- On the rankings explain what the columns are at the top of the page:
- WTF is : APS, PWIN, ANPP, Vote, Survival etc? Its not exactly what I would call noob friendly.
Any other suggestions for improving friendliness of the rumble pages? In the same manner as bot authors can set up their flag, how about allowing them to also set up a link to their bots robowiki page? Then when you click on bot details in the rankings, the bot's page has a "Bot Details on WIki" link. Might be neat.
I know its more work for you chaps to implement, this is a friendly suggestion list. I think you are doing a great job of it at the moment! :)
Explaining the different scoring systems is something I've been meaning to do for a while, so absolutely. I was actually thinking of doing it as mouse-over text on the rankings page, although maybe a separate page would be better? As for explaining bot classes, I'd rather keep the server entirely free of any sort of class-specific data, and leave everything up to the client configuration.
As for the back-to-wiki links in the bot details, how about a link that searches for the bot name on the wiki? That would minimise the amount of admin, and would just involve adding a bit of HTML to the BotDetails page.