There are many, many use cases for automated data collection that improve the player experience on the Hypixel Network, and the developer ecosystem built around it.
On this page, the use cases are limited to only those that will affect the individual players on the server, and, by extension, are missing a variety of other benefits of this system on Hypixel, which may be covered by other pages in this proposal.
Please note that this is not an extensive overview of what is possible, but instead just a breakdown of what developers and players have shown the most interest in, and what has already been built.
As players invest time into games, they like to be able to see progression - it provides motivation for improvement and allows players to compare themselves against their friends.
This exact reason is why most video games have âskill divisionsâ - it provides innate competition against other players and a need to keep improving, drastically increasing player retention.
As a whole, Hypixel can introduce most of these systems - but the implementation is obviously not free. Developers who make player statistics trackers can provide identical benefits for players who use their system, at no cost to Hypixel themselves. In addition, this also provides flexibility - if a player dislikes the way one system implements statistic tracking, they can simply use another system, in a way that wouldnât be possible in a Hypixel-implemented solution.
As mentioned elsewhere, leaderboards provide a sense of progression and competition, encouraging players to invest more time into the game.
At the moment, developer-created leaderboards are in direct violation of the Hypixel API terms, as they must update automatically to provide a player with an up-to-date overview of the other players on the leaderboard.
Hypixel is slowly implementing their own server-side leaderboards, but this is simply more load on the Hypixel team when implementations of custom leaderboards that players need is something that developers clearly are interested in building.
Players are wiped, systems change over time, and data is lost.
As was recently seen in the latest profile migration on Skyblock, player data from before migration is now unavailable to all API projects until the player logs in.
It is unfeasible to expect Hypixel to provide all data from now until eternity - it is not economically viable. However, that doesnât mean that all data should be lost forever - ideally, 3rd parties should be able to save data to preserve player progress and statistics even if Hypixel themselves are unable to.
This type of mission is nothing new to the internet. Preserving data on the internet is a common task - https://archive.org make it their mission to preserve every site across the entire web.