WCSI have been contemplating writing this blog for some time by now. With this thread sparking some debate (and a lot of mindless comments) I guess now might be as good a time as ever.
First things first, if you want to discuss stuff from that thread, go to that thread. If anyone tries that shit I will ban you (from my blog, because apparently I can do that, and I am power hungry as fuck, so don't even try) :D
This blog is to speak about my experience working on the project that is aligulac.com and what is has been like for me.
I will use first names if those are the ones I usually use so a quick translation:
TheBB = Eivind
kiekaboe = Tom
Otolia = Otolia (Because I don't know how to pronounce his name)
Conti = Conti (Don't know his name either)
I joined the project back in mid december. I wrote a long and fancy e-mail for Eivind (I thought he had plenty of volunteers). Turned out, people doesn't want to contribute if they don't have to. I had spotted plenty of his posts in numerous LR-threads, having taken 3 statistics classes and studying a B.Sc in Business Administration and Information Technology I thought it would be interesting and maybe I could get him to add some cool stuff that people would like. I tried contributing a few simple edits to LP, but mostly just stuff like adding 9-16th of an MLG while it was being played etc.
So I joined aligulac, got a fancy log-in and began getting e-mails from Eivind once in a while.
At the point of me joining, the project had Eivind, PhoenixVoid and Conti I think working on it and adding matches. Most of the work where done on a basis of whoever was watching this weeks GSL would add the matches. Needless to say that this meant a lot of work figuring out whether or not matches were already in the DB.
Fast forward to after new years eve and Tom enters the scene. To those unfamiliar with Tom, he is our work horse. Tom is responsible for around 38 % of all the matches that we have entered manually. If our DB has some random cup, chances are Tom added it. Meanwhile I am pushing for Eivind to add some front end stuff to make it easier to both gain an overview of what we have and what we still need, as well as making the "add matches" process easier. This does eventually happen, and only few minor changes have been made. Also note that Eivind used to crash the site/DB once or twice a day whenever I asked him to add something new.
To better be able to communicate, I suggested we made a skype chat, to both facillitate discussion and get to know each other. We got that around 10th january this year. The skype chat is still going BTW and is really great, even though Conti swears against skype meaning that I know nothing about him other than him being able to program, he adds a lot of matches and is responsible for making the whole "earnings" system work. He's also German and fast to spot when players switch teams.
Around the 14th Jan. one of the biggest changes occured, the addition of the NSM (Nested Set Model). This hierarchy model is responsible for our ability to navigate the entire DB of matches, making event specific statistics and in general just gives an overview of the entire thing. Only one minus, when it was implemented, we had 30-40k unassigned matches. How does one fix that? Well by hand, brute force and pure Tom'ness. So we did, starting with the big tournaments first, filling all the holes and adding as we went. This included searching through game results ranging back to the first IEM where Morrow 5-rax reapered the shit out of IdrA in the finals and up till, well january 2013. Currently we still have 9305 "unassigned" matches, albeit most have some form of identifier and will be assigned, at some point, I think, maybe.
During this period I learned a lesson most of my professors in IT-related subjects had kept repeating: "Get the attributes right the first time, it's gonna be a pain in the ass to do them after you begin adding lines to your DB"- Because to be honest, it sucks dick to do it afterwards. Period.
I think around this time Otolia joined the club. A french who knew how to program and who seemed like a great guy. Whenever Eivind and Otolia would discuss technical stuff I always thought of something Nazgul said about R1CH's first day at TL.
Nazgul: rich first day at work
Nazgul: im in a convo with him + meat
Nazgul: its like reading a detective book where half of the words are gibberish
Nazgul: im in a convo with him + meat
Nazgul: its like reading a detective book where half of the words are gibberish
And as Hot_Bid would do, I also sometimes just said random stuff putting together words I knew, which could be something like: "Can't you just optimize the query load time by by-passing the RAID and going directly to the source using Inner-joins?"
I think I fooled Eivind once, although Otolia knew I was just being a dick :D.
Tournaments are played, matches added, lots of hole filled by Tom (no pun intended) and we gain at least a bit of recognition, spearheaded by the bi-weekly updates Eivind makes here on TL. At one point Eivind suggests we make a Twitter account, me having recently picked up Twitter to follow all the juicy stuff and balance whine that goes on there volunteers for the task. I soon realized that actually tweeting interesting stuff and getting followers isn't as easy as I thought, however with Wax being our very first follower (except for Eivind) I got my spirit up and thought it would be fine.
During the entirety of this, Eivind have experimented a lot with the graphs on the site. With confidence interval, without, match-up specific or not? It wasn't until dsjoerg suggested Highcharts that we got the pretty awesome graphs with zoom and cool features which we have now. And we have something in the pipeline, which I suggested (shameless plug), that is going to be pretty cool I think.
Around the time the graphs update went live, the twitter account had around 100 followers, sporting a few celebs such as Rotterdam, MrBitter and Frodan. TLO has said nice things about us, and Day[9] even made a post in one of Eivind's bi-weekly threads. So I guess we were becoming at least a little bit e-famous. However no single person has raised our follower count as much as Boromir/Jaime Lannister/Kaelaris. A few good RT's from him gained us 20-40 followers, which is a lot unless your name is Liquid Ret (Please follow @liquidret on twitter). Currently our "stable" of e-sports personalities following us include: Rotterdam, MrBitter, Frodan, Kaelaris, Adebisi, Welmu, Feast and Grubby. Which I personally take as a huge succes. I try to use our twitter to tweet predictions from the site, relevant updates regarding match-up win rates and stuff like that.
And that brings an end to my story so far. It has been, and still is a lot of fun working on the site. Taking requests, learning a lot about statistics and the entire premise for the site as well as designing and suggesting various improvements to the site.
I want to end my long-ass post with a request, to all those out there who use the site and want to get in on the fun, please go ahead and volunteer, currently a huge part of the workload is done by only a few, meaning the adding of matches/events, maintaining the NSM, keeping player profiles up to date etc. is done by 4-5 people. Al though we are on paper a few more, most of the day-to-day non-coding stuff is done by Tom, Conti, Eivind and myself and we could use a few more once in a while. It is not that hard, it's pretty fun and you do actually feel great for contributing to an, in my opinion, great site. The learning curve isn't that steep, and there is plenty of help/guidance to get from myself and the others. If this has caught your interest, feel free to send an e-mail to evfonn@gmail.com, PM'ing me or TheBB here on TL or tweeting at us @Sc2Aligulac (or just follow us for lots of stats goodies and shenanigans).
If you are a programmer who knows mysql, django and python I am pretty sure we also have plenty of stuff you can dig into.
If you want to fool around with the data, if you think you can develop a better model for calculating the ratings or you just want something to play around with, the entire database is free to download here with an explanation of the fields here
Thanks and shoutouts to: SC2charts.net, TLPD, Wax, Kaelaris, all the great people who use the site and suggest improvements, Eivind, Tom, Otolia, Conti and especially all the people behind Liquipedia because that shit has been GOLD when tracking and arranging old matches.
-Grovbolle
