We have stats! (sorta) (Patreon)

So the leaderboards aren't up yet, but with Beta 9.4 behind us I finally had a chance to get into the stat side of things. Again much of this isn't something I can really do on my own given how it's been handled (far outside my realm of expertise), but anyway, I asked Will for some direction and got some tools that have enabled me to make some meager progress in analyzing player data.

Now I'm not sure how things will work in the future, but for now what I have is a program that can read all of the player protobuf data, strip it of some irrelevant wrapper content, and export it all to an archived JSON file, with one line per submission.

I know many of you are both skilled at webdev and interested in data/stats, so if you like you can download all submissions made to the new system between its introduction in October until about a day ago right here, in that format (gzipped JSON with one submission per line).

Over here, I have a "program" Will gave me which I can apparently run with node.js (installed yesterday...), and it outputs whatever data I want to query the JSON file for depending on what I write into this map() function:

I don't really know JavaScript, but at least it's not hard to do basic things given the examples Will gave me :P

What this does is put the desired data into a CSV file for spreadsheet analysis, basically what I had before except that before I was using my own C++ program to output every single value from every single run into a single rather large spreadsheet.

So this new process requires more steps, and has other drawbacks as well. Not too happy about that, but it's just the current temporary state anyway--alternatives can always be added later, and the main priority is to get leaderboards active. I just wanted to start to be able to get a glimpse of at least basic stats considering we have no leaderboards at the moment.

And of course the main thing I wanted to know first was how many people are playing RPGLIKE even after the event is over???

So I output those numbers using variations of map() and did some spreadsheet analysis on the results. Here we have it:

(The last day is actually incomplete, given when I downloaded the data.)

Clearly a non-insignificant portion of the reporting player base is still playing the mode. It's a minority, but around 20-25% so fairly high. I imagine this percentage would be lower if we included anonymous data as well (which is not currently submitted but might be one day), and I also imagine it'll gradually go down over time as newer players aren't even aware that alternative modes like this one are even a thing. I do, however, plan to at least add a new tutorial message about this for new players (comes up after they've been playing for a while), and also future events will be ways to remind people that other older modes are still available, and once we have leaderboards up those will also have separate sets of data for special modes. So there are quite a few ways to be reminded.

It's also interesting to see the percentage of people who weren't playing RPGLIKE during the event, although in this graph it technically includes both those who'd deactivated it and new players who hadn't met the 10-run threshold for autoactivation anyway. It'd be interesting to separate the two, but require yet more steps xD

It'd be really nice to have a simpler query system for all the data. Maybe we'll have something like that one day. In any case it'll be easier once the stat system is actually online.

Seen above in the map.js source screenshot, today I also installed VS Code as a replacement for Atom. I use a number of different text editors for different purposes--TED Notepad for todo lists and design docs, Notepad++ for my own data file formats, and Atom for web dev stuff--but I never really liked Atom (mainly because it's surprisingly slow for a text editor...). I used to use Sublime Text for this purpose, but that was a long time ago and then they went commercial, so I thought I'd try something else and ended up experimenting with Atom, which was recommended at the time.

VS Code seems nice, and has gotten a lot of praise across the board.