Of all the things developed for UT2003, the stats page was by far the largest disappointment for many people. Introduced as an answer to the realtime ngStats feature (which was bought to Microsoft and then discontinued), the Epic UT2003 stats debuted with a new site and a new look and hopes were high right out of the gate. However, the stats started falling behind almost immediately, ranging from a couple of days to a couple of months late, were reset at one point, and then taken down altogether when it was clear that they weren't working.

The story I've heard is that an outside contractor dropped the ball in a big way and then vanished, leaving Epic holding the bag. The stats site was taken down, forcing desperate gamers to turn elsewhere to fill the gap and others to simply write it off as an unsupported feature. A recent question on a UT2003 admin list received replies that are (finally) encouraging:



Mark Rein said this on the atari forums on the 4th June:


"Folks, We're in closed testing of the new stats system right now and everything is looking good. The stats server code has been completely rewritten and looks to be a big improvement over the previous system. Please accept our apologies for the delays but getting it right is really important.

I hope to have more news for you soon. Thank you for your patience."

So there ya go - it appears that Epic is working hard to close the loop on the last great outstanding issue from UT2003.