Skyrim Characters will be Supported

[Tom]

Hello, community.

We at The Elder Stats would like to take this opportunity to announce to the public that The Elder Stats will be providing support for Skyrim characters approximately one to two months after Skyrim's release on November 11, 2011. This is an important goal for us, and we feel that adding support for Skyrim characters to be posted on The Elder Stats will allow our community to grow and the website to gain more activity.

Our plan for integrating the support of Skyrim characters with the current system is geared toward affecting as little of the current site as possible. This means that all of your Oblivion characters will not be affected in any way, and your profiles will remain the same for the most part. We are hoping to keep Skyrim and Oblivion characters all on the main Elder Stats site, without requiring users to switch between two different portions of the site to view characters for each game. We plan to allow members to choose their preferred game, which will then display characters for that game around the site by default. The changes we are planning will be as minimal as possible, but the addition of new graphics relating to Skyrim and new stats for Skyrim characters will obviously be among the new features coming with this revamp of The Elder Stats.

Of course, we will not be able to start extensive work on the Skyrim portion of the website until Skyrim is actually released to the public in November of 2011. Until that time, we will devise a detailed plan of how we wish to proceed with this integration of support for Skyrim characters, and we will keep you informed as we make more decisions on this subject. As you could imagine, we are also planning to design new profiles especially for Skyrim characters that fit the look and feel of the game once it comes out.

In closing, we hope that the addition of support for adding Skyrim characters to the site will attract more Elder Scrolls fans to join The Elder Stats and post their characters for the world to see and share. If you'd like to pass this announcement on to others, we would appreciate that very much so. More extensive information will be coming on the specifics of this integration in the coming months. If you have any comments or suggestions, please post them in the Discussion forum.

[whoman69]

I'm hoping by the time this comes out we'll have a way to weed out the patently false stats and info. The number of people logging on here just to be #1 lately is ridiculous as are some of their claims.

[Tom]

We're planning to redesign most (if not, all) of the website to accompany the launch of support for Skyrim characters either this winter or in the spring of 2012 ‒ and when I say redesign, I don't just mean a remodeling of the graphical user interface of The Elder Stats. We're looking to go even further by making some changes to the functionality of some areas of the website, and we also would like to provide a better manner by which members can help us in the process of keeping cheaters out of the leaderboards. Of course, as you know, the Report System has been in place for quite some time, but it's not the most visible link on character profiles for members who are not intently looking for it, and this system still requires us to review each report, investigate it, and make a final decision about removing the character(s) in question from the leaderboards before any progress is made. Simply put, as the website grows after the release of Skyrim character support, it's going to be us few versus the many cheaters; the battle will not be easily won.

I'm convinced that there must be a more efficient way to allow the community to easily "flag" profiles that they believe to be presenting false or inflated information, and thus I have been contemplating the concept of a "reputation system" for characters on the website. If a member browsing a character's profile finds the information listed there to be fraudulent, he or she could simply click some sort of icon that would subtract from the characters "reputation", and then characters with poor reputations (below a certain calculated level) would not be displayed on the leaderboards, and their authors would have to contact us personally if they wish to have the situation rectified. If not, then the profiles remain hidden and out of the leaderboards. This is still a concept, but I think it's a more effective means of addressing the problem of falsified statistics than simply having members file a report on every character they find to be "cheating", then have us go through each report one by one and investigate/hide each profile from the leaderboards, etc. Allowing the member community, however small it may currently be, to control the reputation of character profiles may be the best system to enable the website to operate more self-sufficiently while simultaneously addressing the matter of false stats in a more timely fashion.

After the launch of Skyrim support on The Elder Stats, we are hoping that the website's member community will grow quite a bit, and that will in turn provide a larger community of members who will be able to "vote down" the reputations of characters with false stats in order to provide a more enjoyable experience for everyone. If you have any suggestions to add to this concept, we welcome them. I haven't even written a single line of code for such a feature yet, as it's still in the imaginative stage, so it's still very flexible.

[ShadowSentinel]

This is all good news. I admit I haven't used the site much in the past year, but we just got Skyrim and of course I've already made a starter character and will be interested in loading her up and tracking progress.