Quarter Zone is preparing to wind down over the coming weeks. Our key dates on this timeline are expected to be:
- 2023-07-31: Cross-platform multiplayer leaderboards will stop being scraped and the Discord bot will be discontinued.
- 2023-08-31: All site data will be effectively frozen at this time. A final audit and update of records will be performed, including the Hall of Fame.
- 2023-11-11: quarter.zone will stop resolving after this domain's registration expires. The GitHub Pages domain will be the only entry point to the site.
Why are you shutting down?
The answer to this is threefold:
- My own personal interest in Tetris Effect has waned to a point that I no longer have a serious drive to continue maintaining the site. Each daily scrape of leaderboard data, while not outrageous, still demands a non-negligible amount of money to retrieve and store that would probably be better redirected to another passion project.
- Player activity appears to have reached a peak that is now waning. While I look forward to seeing what strides the community might make with future competitive events, my feeling is that this site failed to become an authority for competitive data that I hoped to develop it as with efforts like an ELO ranking system. Difficulties collecting single player leaderboard data also challenged this initial vision for the site.
- The competitive integrity of the game's online multiplayer is compromised in ways that are unlikely to be resolved at this point in the game's development, including rampant disconnects and players artificially boosting their mode SRs. As I've become more aware of situations involving specific players, I've developed a distaste for the reactive rather than proactive attempts at moderating this behavior that has relied on the good-will of players investigating and coming forward in the community.
Will you be sharing Quarter Zone's data or tools?
Raw data like our multiplayer and single player leaderboard data, player name history, player countries, and event match data I expect to have available for download some time before the site's domain ultimately expires. None of the tools used for scraping or ingesting data from leaderboards will be made available, nor any of the tools used to generate pages for the site.
Can someone else take up this effort?
Maybe, if I think you'd be a good steward for it! But probably not. The general flow of turning data into pages we use is a little bespoke, plus the aggregated database and ingestion tools I developed represent a serious body of effort that I probably wouldn't part with without some amount of compensation. I'm chosing to release the raw data that I've collected as a compromise to that position.
I have questions still!
You can email me at webmaster AT quarter DOT zone or find me on whatever Discord server you happen to be a mutual with me on.
Parting words
Thank you to everyone that has sent kind words my way over the last year and a half as I kept this site humming. While I wasn't able to live up to all the possibilities I imagined for Quarter Zone, I hope you still found some enjoyment tracking your own improvement and seeing how you measured up to the rest of the Tetris Effect community. Even now, I'll continue to run.
~ bitto