Hello, everyone. It's been a good week in the Septagon. If you're new, thank you for stopping by. Welcome to another SWU. This is a short little thing that happens each week detailing some of the ongoings of the community. With that, let's begin. [u][b]What's Going On in the Community?[/b][/u] [url=https://www.bungie.net/en/Clan/Post/39813/169836594/0/0]Today is the last day to enter in Art and Stuff's off-topic art contest![/url] However, [url=https://www.bungie.net/en/Clan/Post/39813/151150650/0/0]that's not the only thing brewing in Art and Stuff. Employees, stay out![/url] [url=https://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/174485486/0/0]The Collective Anomaly is hosting a writing contest![/url] Check it out for details. [quote]Mechetti here with your weekly Game Night information! Three gamenights this week, and two are today! [url=https://www.bungie.net/en/Clan/Forum/15287]Community Carnage[/url][url=https://www.bungie.net/en/Clan/Post/15287/174460005/0/0] - Iron Banner - (2015/11/20)[/url] The Community Carnage is having one of their biweekly Crucible Carnages later today! 9PM ET. This week's is also a special Iron Banner edition! [url=https://www.bungie.net/en/Clan/Forum/1535]FCAW - Master Chief Collection - (2015/11/20)[/url] For Carnage Apply Within is venturing into the land of consoles this week with a MCC game night later today at 9PM ET. Show up and play! [url=https://www.bungie.net/en/Clan/Detail/1225539]The North Point[/url][url=https://www.bungie.net/en/Clan/Post/1225539/174668995/0/0] - Halo 5 - (2015/11/21)[/url] The North Point is hosting a Halo 5 game night this weekend! Saturday at 9PM ET. BTB only. Sign up fast! Invites will be first come, first serve![/quote] Interested in fighting the forces of Darkness but you're working 9 to 5 or busy with school? Don't worry, [url=https://www.bungie.net/en/Clan/Forum/1338193]the Weekend Fighting Force[/url] has got you covered. There are alternative groups for the out-of-[url=https://www.bungie.net/en/Clan/Forum/12839]WorkPlace[/url] desires for those who'd rather game with other adults, so be sure to get involved where you can. [u][b]Septagon Spotlight[/b][/u] This week I had the pleasure of talking to the developers of [url=http://www.destinytrialsreport.com]DestinyTrialsReport[/url]. They were very gracious in answering a few of my questions, so check out the interview below. [quote][b]Q: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining me for this. I know that I and any of the readers interested in this sort of thing are very thankful for you three being here. Would you care to introduce yourselves and tell us a bit about what you've created?[/b] Vlad: Sure thing, love the idea. The three of us built and maintain the site DestinyTrialsReport.com. If you're not familiar, it's a great resource for useful information about your opposing team inside of a Trials of Osiris match Steffan: I'm Steffan and I joined Vlad shortly after he had launched DTR. I do my best to help progress the project where I can. Mark: I'm Mark and I joined DTR after using it for every match for a few weeks. Vlad and Steffan had already figured out the way to show the most important stuff you would want to know for a Trials match, making it an awesome tool. I just thought it could look better so on a free weekend I forked the repository, redesigned it, and sent it to them. I think a few days of some hard work for the three of us later, the redesign was ready to be pushed live. Since then, we try to improve DTR for every iteration. Vlad and Steffan do most of the work, coding everything in the back-end, for example, while I join in design and front-end when I can. I think our goal for DTR is the make it the perfect companion for a Trial match, showing exactly what you want to see on any device. The ideal tool for me would be that it already knows and shows what kind of game it's going to be based on just the gamertags of the six players involved. V: We really lucked out with Mark, neither Steff or myself are any good with front-end design. Our design before him was…not great [b]Q: So, Vlad, it sounds like you're the "leader" of your troop. What got you into creating this site? What was the philosophy behind it when you started?[/b] V: I like to think as all of us being the Lead, everyone plays their own part and is equally as valuable :simple_smile: I did start the initial app though, and there's a little bit of a story there. During a trials match somebody told me about a trials lookup site: http://destinyreforgebuddy.com/trials The idea had a lot of potential so I got in contact with its creator (reddit u/kaphis) and discussed some features that would be good to know. We briefly discussed other ways to improve the site and I asked him if he wanted to team up and possibly add me or open source the application. While I waited for a response I started meddling with the API data that drives all of the third party apps out there and was slowly adding in stats that I wanted to see while playing trials and making a simple design to show it. Since I still never got word back from kaphis, I went forward on my own, made a post to r/crucibleplaybook, and it blew up. S: Shortly after DTR was created, Vlad showed me the project. I thought it was fantastic. I found a few bugs and saw a few things that could be improved and continually bugged Vlad about it. In time, he brought me in on the project, and I bug-fix and optimize as best I can. Vlad is in charge of new features. V: It's essentially our workflow, I make a new feature, Steff does one of these "-_-", cleans the syntax up, and makes the code look all pretty. [b]Q: Well, it sounds like the three of you make a great team, especially with Mark wrapping things up in a pretty bow. Where you stand now, do you think you'd be interested in any new developers? Should I look for an ad in the paper?[/b] V: [url=https://github.com/DestinyTrialsReport/DestinyTrialsReport]The source code is public; anyone can contribute if they want to.[/url] S: I think we have a pretty great core team already. We think of an idea and we implement it. That's not to say we don't want contributions, though. Our project is entirely open source. Anyone is free to fork it, make changes, and suggest we pull those changes. We also gladly accept bug reports and suggestions as issues on GitHub. Even if someone just wants to take a look at our code to see how we use Bungie's API, that's available too. [b]Q: Great to hear that you listen and engage with the community you're helping. Are there any future changes or tweaks you can tease? Perhaps another site or developer you'd like to partner up with?[/b] S: We're currently working on a few features that will allow you to compare the enemy fireteam to yours. We're still working out the finer details and design, but we will certainly be adding an opt-in feature to show your chance to win the match. V: Well we recently partnered up with Guardian.gg, coincidentally also just 3 developers. really awesome group and app. Since we don't store any data there are many limitations but now that GGG has been sharing data with us we have some great stuff lined up. Very soon you should see a section on the site that lets you set the members of your fireteam and yourself, this would let us compare any team you are looking up to your current team. The first use of that will be a optional opt-in feature that shows how likely you are to win or lose the match based on the combined Elo data we get from GGG. S: Elo is an account-wide rating system provided by Guardian.gg. When you finish a match in Trials, your Elo rating is changed based on a few factors, most notably: whether you won or lost, and the Elo ratings of the players in the match. For example, if you're matched up with a group of players with very high Elo rankings, your odds may not be very high to win. However, if you do manage to win, you will take a large portion of their Elo ranking for yourself. Similarly, if you lost the match, your Elo ranking won't be affected very much, because you were outmatched. If your fireteam is matched with a group around your Elo ranking, then you stand to gain less on a win and more on a loss. Over time, this ranking system can be used to accurately calculate your chance to win, and is often used as a sort of skill level. It was first designed for use in Chess, but has been used in other games such as League of Legends as well. [b]Q: That's very interesting stuff. You're using both the Destiny API as well as statistical analysis. That's very impressive. Thank you very much to all of you for answering my questions. I know we all greatly appreciate it. Is there anything you'd like to say to end this? Any parting remarks or decent jokes?[/b] V: Thanks for doing this. In my opinion, third party apps play a huge role in Destiny. If it wasn't for destinylfg, I wouldn't have met most of my friends list, including Steff, here, for example. All of these sites are created and managed by one or two people on their own free time and usually hosted out of their own pocket. It's nice to be heard and appreciated so I really like what you're trying to do here, Charlemagne, and I'm looking forward to reading more. [url=http://natethesnake.com/]And a joke.[/url] S: I'm glad to have had the opportunity to speak with you today. I'm very proud of the project we've created and encourage anyone that plays Destiny to check it out, you won't regret it![/quote] That's a wrap for this week's interview. Thank you so much for all who joined me and helped out. Have a great day to all and be sure to check out [url=http://www.destinytrialsreport.com]DestinyTrialsReport[/url]! [url=https://www.bungie.net/en/Clan/Post/520845/174828444/0/0][b]Continued Below[/b][/url]