sf overview

Overview of Slackerfinder (updated 17Jul14 - best viewed landscape):

FYI, hourly readings of all the stats shown under the "highscore" menu are publicly available.  If you want the details, read about it here: http://board.en.ogame.gameforge.com/board684-ogame-org/board82-tools-scripts-and-sims/730759-ogame-api/.  You might note that player information updates daily and planet/moon data weekly.

Since I'm a lousy hunter and mostly just feast on carcasses, I make an inconsistent and half-hearted effort to collect the hourly observations of military points.  Watching the change in military points usually shows who is not spending their res, and who is being farmed.  Taking a peek at the guys whose score stays same or goes down for 2-3 days, without any little upward blips, often yields real easy loot from those too busy or bored to stay on top of their accounts.

A period of constant military points does not necessarily mean the player is offline.  There are days where we throw nothing in the build queue and the military points hold constant, or even decline due to losses from our attacks.  Some players are simply savers, even though they are very active.

Conversely, an increase from one hour to next in somebody's military points does NOT necessarily equate to activity.  Mil points might increase because a lanx upgrade finishes or when expeditons find ships.  Sometimes my moons burp out GC or PT after a few hours at night.  We all sometimes jam some build queues full for long periods.  Nobody has to be online to cause these increases in military points.  

But most of the time, when the military points hold steady and then increase, it's because someone was online and threw some res into a queue.  Many of us do that to burn res when expecting to be AFK for an extended time, and you can see the point production tail off as the queues empty out.   Over time, tracking the hourly chnages in mil points can allow inferences about someone's typical online times.  

I realized a long time ago that I'm seldom the smartest kid in the room, and a good rule of thumb is that many hotshots have already explored any thought that might cross my mind.  So the fact that I'm looking at players this way probably means others are looking at us too.  So whether you wish to analyze a target player's resource spending habits, or want to see how you appear in other's eyes, feel free to give the SlackerFinder a try.  

btw, slackerfinder not actually hard to use, just have to make your peace with two hassles:
 1) It's a standalone thing, except for the API server queries, so you're on your own for collecting the hourly data.  You can click the "update" button whenever you feel like it, but i've taken toward using a little side .cmd file that just polls the GF server automatically and writes the hourly data to individual files.  Then another little bat file appends them to the main database whenever you getting ready to run slackerfinder.   Sadly, sometimes my computer is off, so still get gaps in the hourly data.   (I always wondered why infuza, ogniter, war-riders, etc. do not store and publish the hourly data).
 2) The crappy interface has no documentation, and a non-intuitive arrangement; but is not complex and you should get used to it quickly.  I did put in some tool tips to help a bit.

Here is the so-called documentation:

https://mega.nz/#!ZYx3DTRB!dBuT1JXsk2hJODcx9d4dVNbW0jUte3iKOpk7OJQwmlI