The response from the SC2 community has been fantastic. We've taken into account all of your comments, and made corrections based on your feedback. Thanks to those who let us know that the survey was quick and painless to do; that was what we were trying to accomplish.
It’s taboo to analyze your data before it’s all collected, but we thought we’d give you a sense of where we are now.
We have players representing every league. We would love to see more Bronze and Silver players. If you have friends who play casually, or if you are mentoring beginners, please encourage them to participate (and help them find their replay folder). Grand Masters, we know you love StarCraft and we also know you have replays. Please help out. Because an expertise study tracks changes across skill levels, it is critical that beginners and top-tier players are strongly represented.
It’s still early in our 2-3 week data collection period so there is still time for your friends to participate. PLEASE REMIND THEM TO UPLOAD THEIR REPLAY! Half the surveys sent to us have no replay attached. We are studying your screen movements, hotkey use, APM and other factors that we can ONLY get from your replay.
North American players are dominating currently, but there is a strong European contingent as well. We have translated the survey into Korean, and hope to get some responses from Asia soon.
Ways you can help: 1. Go to SkillCraft.ca, complete the survey and upload your replay. 2. Spread the link: by mouth and thread, by tweet and by vid. For the study to have the kind of impact that can spread back to the community (e.g., positive mainstream press) it needs to be mindbogglingly big. People need to think “Wow, that’s a lot of f*ing gamers”. 3. Let us know if you hear about us on any streams. We’d love to know about any press we’re getting and we want to thank anyone who mentions us on their show. 4. We plan to spread the survey around the Korean scene. The problem is that we don’t know anything about the Korean scene; we welcome suggestions.
ANNOUNCEMENT: We will be holding an AMA session on reddit (r/starcraft) this Thursday. Dr. Mark Blair, Director of the Cognitive Science Lab at Simon Fraser University, will answer any and all questions about the project. See the site for further information about the study: http://skillcraft.ca.
Finally, a big thanks to the players that responded to our original post to keep it alive.
Woah this looks really cool, I missed the thread the first time. I just did the survey, and as a psych major I'm definitely interested in checking out the results!
On August 17 2011 03:13 Sated wrote: Submitted. :3
The only problem with this is that most players who come to sites like Team Liquid are players who care enough to try and get better (I know this is a generalisation, but I think it's an accurate enough one to make). Because of this, your league graph is going to be skewed towards the "above average" leagues (as it is at the moment).
According to Blizzard, ~60% of active players should be in bronze, silver and gold but your graph doesn't reflect that... you might need to take this into account when handling the data?
Yeah we figured that this might be an issue, part of the problem is reaching out to the lower skill level players because they generally (and this is a big generalization) do not have as much representation within the StarCraft 2 online community. This is why it is so important to spread the word about the survey to all of your friends, it will help us to reach people who would otherwise never know about the survey, and likely help us boost the number of lower level replays that we receive. No player is to new in order to submit a replay, if you have only played your placement matches, and are the bottom of bronze, we still want to see your replays. Having the wide spread of skill levels helps us to make comparisons between the different levels of expertise and allows us to see where differences start to emerge.
I would but then I noticed it's SFU and as a UVic man myself I simply cannot stretch my morals to partake in anything to do with my school's bitter rival.
The sum of replays uploaded, according to the first graph, is 670. When you look at the countries, you say there have been 1125 replays uploaded from America.
On August 17 2011 07:00 mr_tolkien wrote: The sum of replays uploaded, according to the first graph, is 670. When you look at the countries, you say there have been 1125 replays uploaded from America.
Hey guys so there is some confusion about the numbers, our apologies for that. The first graph is a graph of games which we have already pulled league data for, the second graph is how many replays we had total. The discrepancy lies in our ability to poll league data, we were running into a bottleneck issue so the numbers don't match up because we didn't have the data on all the leagues but we did have the data for where all the replays were from. Sorry about the confusion and I hope that this answers some of your questions
UPDATE Regarding Participant Numbers! We now have an accurate sense about the current numbers of our participants. We previously made the assumption that everyone was doing all three steps. As it turned out many people are only submitting a replay and not their battle.net link, or vice versa. It's great to see that many players from Gold to Masters are contributing to the process of helping to legitimize StarCraft 2 to the academic community. But since an expertise study tracks changes across skill levels, it is critical that beginners and top-tier players are strongly represented.
edit: oops, I actually did the survey this time. I'm really excited about seeing the comments. Hopefully Blizzard will create brief surveys like these and release the data.
a good number of the europeans might have accidentally given you the us.battle.net/name link instead of the eu?? I am not sure i know only one silver league player but i'll send him your way. oh, and in case you forget to consider this; skill level between servers apparently differs a bit. Such as korean diamond being claimed as significantly harder than eu/na.
How on earth can I remember when did I start gaming or how many hours I have played SC1??. A survey can't be accurate if people answer some questions randomly.
But yeah, guessing how many hours I played SC1 was completely random. SC2 I had a decent estimate because sc2gears tells me my total replay time. But SC1 I mostly played between 1998 and 2000 and I really don't remember how many games I played.
I know a fair few bronze/silver level players. I'll spread the word in every game I'm in at silver level for the next two weeks. Was interesting to read through your Reddit comments and see you discuss biases and statistical effects.
On August 22 2011 05:58 Evangelist wrote: I know a fair few bronze/silver level players. I'll spread the word in every game I'm in at silver level for the next two weeks. Was interesting to read through your Reddit comments and see you discuss biases and statistical effects.
EPT![[image loading]](http://skillcraft.ca/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/ByLeague.png)
![[image loading]](http://skillcraft.ca/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/ByCountry.png)
![[image loading]](http://skillcraft.ca/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Wednesday-Update.png)
