Cloud-based score tracking

[weiluntong]

I just thought of this, but why not have a cloud based score tracker?

The concept:
Users can associate an account with their game. By doing so, their progress and score is accessible from all devices, PC, iOS, or Android.

In practice:
The account creation can be handled in anyway, but a few ideas could be to tie it to the forum's login, use Google's authenication, or Facebook's authentication.

I'm not sure how metadata such as progress and score are currently stored, but we can generate a hash value with the file as a key, and associate the metadata with the hash value. This information then can be stored on the cloud account. By doing it this way, there is no need to upload large MIDI files onto the server, and avoids duplicate songs being uploaded by multiple people.

[Nicholas]

There used to be a "lite" version of this with the online scoreboard. Once that came crashing down under the weight of tens of millions of submitted scores, I've been a little hesitant to add that sort of online infrastructure again.

In the full incarnation that you described, it would be an even bigger, heavier data storage task. That comes with ongoing maintenance, ongoing server charges, security/privacy concerns, authentication friction (even including all three methods you described still wouldn't cover all Synthesia users). It's a direction we could go in, but you might start hearing words like "subscription" instead of "buy once, get free updates forever".

The real value I see in centralized progress tracking is in school environments. It would be convenient to have your data travel between devices automatically, but it is absolutely vital for teachers to have access to student data. In that case, we might include some tiny server component they can run on whichever computer they have around. That at least solves the server charges and privacy concerns. Assuming some sensible authentication options using whatever they've got in-house and most of that friction goes away, too.

[weiluntong]

Oh I see Nicholas. That's a too bad, I truly thought my idea was not extraordinarily large. I'm glad to see that you've thought of the idea before and played with and tested it though. I love your program and I thank you for looking at my idea and giving me the cons of it! Especially since I didn't know the full details of what my idea would cost, in both monetary and space/time complexity.