We are considering building a distribution system that would let players download zipped archives with every replay in them, since we noticed some people have been using scripts to do this and using a proper CDN would be more convenient for us and our users. We are looking to gauge interest in this possibility.
Feel free to select the poll option that most closely aligns with your thoughts, and share any additional comments or ideas in the comments.
I am currently using scripts to download large numbers of replays
I am not doing this, but having a zipped archive of replays would be useful to me
I don’t fall into an above category but think this feature would be ‘good’
I am not sure if resources are spent best implementing this.
I would like a front end system just enabling everyone to watch selected replays better than bulk downloading.
These serve different purposes, watching replays is useful to learn and iterate and downloading large numbers of replays may be helpful to users interested in machine learning.
The cost for implementing this is fairly low according to our Lead Engineer.
If it is a low cost then some sort of archive for games would be useful since I have not gone about doing this yet, but I agree with 8 in that this isn’t a huge priority, since getting the data isn’t very hard.
I just store the copy of the link of interesting matches the same way replays are shared on the forum. That works well for me. I don’t see a separate need for offline match databases. Unless these links stop working after a (very) short time period. I’m not sure what the policy is on removing matches from the server, but maybe the algorithm that removes the matches only does so when they are not played or watched for at least a month or something similar?