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Ladder Analysis: Activity Metric - Page 2

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deama
Profile Joined June 2013
Germany4 Posts
Last Edited: 2013-11-20 01:34:09
November 20 2013 01:33 GMT
#21
because reality makes people feel even more insignificant

thanks for the data though!
It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything. Tyler Durden
Slydie
Profile Joined August 2013
1929 Posts
December 07 2013 00:21 GMT
#22
Leagues motivate me, being no. 65376 rather than 83244 on the EU ladder do not.

The competition within the league is a little stupid, but ppl only care about promotions anyway.
Buff the siegetank
Kakaru2
Profile Joined March 2011
198 Posts
January 07 2014 20:03 GMT
#23
Now, after their situation report, I think we can safely say that their active threshold is 2 weeks time.

Do you have any new data from sc2ranks with the situation of players with bonus pool <= 2 weeks time from the last season lock?
Excalibur_Z
Profile Joined October 2002
United States12240 Posts
January 07 2014 20:22 GMT
#24
Unfortunately I can't get any more SC2Ranks data parses which contain bonus pool information, and Nios can't give me any either.
Moderator
Koshi
Profile Blog Joined August 2010
Belgium38799 Posts
Last Edited: 2014-01-07 21:40:49
January 07 2014 21:40 GMT
#25
damn wrong thread and I have nothing interesting to say.
I had a good night of sleep.
frajen86
Profile Joined February 2014
168 Posts
April 07 2014 22:25 GMT
#26
Thank you for this post!!! Have you thought about linking it to the more popular one: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/starcraft-2/195273-comprehensive-sc2-league-and-ladder-guide

I haven't seen anything else online that actually shows a league distribution sorted by bonus pool remaining, and it is very helpful in showing that the ladder distribution is not as incorrect as it would seem on SC2Ranks or nios.

Also, I wonder about this - would there be anyway to somehow calculate the "league distribution" of non-laddering players who are active in playing unranked?
frajen86
Profile Joined February 2014
168 Posts
Last Edited: 2014-06-15 08:29:29
June 15 2014 08:16 GMT
#27
I grabbed all the remaining bonus pool values for 102,158 players (using the NA player list from nios.kr - http://nios.kr/sc2/us/1v1/hots/).

The program to do this was written in .NET, source code here: http://19hz.info/Starcraft/SC2RanksParser/SC2RanksParser/SC2RanksParser.vb

Using the method of bonus pool weeks remaining, these are the results:

[image loading]

[image loading]


The smaller the "Weeks Remaining," the more "active" a player can be considered.

There are about 10,000 "super-active" players - people that are probably playing 7+ games a week. (estimating this based on your bonus pool changing by about 20 every time you win or lose).

There might be about 25,000 "semi-active" players - people that play 3-4 games a week.

A huge part of the "playerbase" (say, half) have probably played less than 15 games total.

Overall, one could argue that for "active" players, Bronze and Silver leagues are actually undersized, and that Gold to Diamond leagues are oversized. Diamond league especially seems inflated.

Raw data is here: http://19hz.info/Starcraft/US Battle Net Bonus Pool.xlsm

Thanks Excalibur_Z for the background info. Please let me know if you see any issues with the data/analysis.
Excalibur_Z
Profile Joined October 2002
United States12240 Posts
June 15 2014 16:55 GMT
#28
This is great stuff, thanks a lot for doing the scraping. You've crossposted to Reddit as well I trust?

I think they might have changed the activity metric. No parses had been made since they started to adjust the boundaries based on decayed players around the beginning of 2014. If you compare your chart to mine from last year -- and both use the same method -- the lines now seem to be kind of all over the place.

The last piece of the puzzle would appear to be the amount of real time elapsed in between games played. There are many ways to spend, say, 100 bonus pool: 1) play 8 games in a day, 2) play 1 game per day everyday for 8 days, 3) play 4 games today and 4 games a month from today, and so on. And the same is true for letting 100 bonus pool accumulate, where you take some time off but it doesn't have to be all at once. What if decayed players are flagged in some way? I don't really see how we would get this information for every single game, but we could at least get it from the most recent game, though that might not tell us everything.

Here's how I'm thinking they might categorize decayed players now and factor them in:
1) If you played 0 games in any 2-week period within a season, you are flagged as "decayed" and removed from the raw counts for the rest of the season.
2) If you are currently "decayed" or were previously "decayed" but you play a game, is your "decayed" flag removed for that season?

The reason I say we may not be able to get this data is it would require full histories of every player for a season. It's easy enough to see "last game played: a month ago". It's entirely different to find "the gap between the 5th and 6th game played this season: 3 weeks".

It's also possible that I'm wrong and they didn't change the metric, but instead they're making manual changes. In any event this is a fascinating and much-needed update to the topic.
Moderator
Kakaru2
Profile Joined March 2011
198 Posts
June 15 2014 17:16 GMT
#29
Wow, impressive work.
I don't think Blizzard is analyzing inside the period, doesn't seem to be worth the effort for 10,000 players. It's much more credible that they do manual adjustments in order to compensate the decay.
frajen86
Profile Joined February 2014
168 Posts
Last Edited: 2014-06-16 11:23:40
June 16 2014 11:22 GMT
#30
On June 16 2014 01:55 Excalibur_Z wrote:
This is great stuff, thanks a lot for doing the scraping. You've crossposted to Reddit as well I trust?

I think they might have changed the activity metric. No parses had been made since they started to adjust the boundaries based on decayed players around the beginning of 2014. If you compare your chart to mine from last year -- and both use the same method -- the lines now seem to be kind of all over the place.

The last piece of the puzzle would appear to be the amount of real time elapsed in between games played. There are many ways to spend, say, 100 bonus pool: 1) play 8 games in a day, 2) play 1 game per day everyday for 8 days, 3) play 4 games today and 4 games a month from today, and so on. And the same is true for letting 100 bonus pool accumulate, where you take some time off but it doesn't have to be all at once. What if decayed players are flagged in some way? I don't really see how we would get this information for every single game, but we could at least get it from the most recent game, though that might not tell us everything.

Here's how I'm thinking they might categorize decayed players now and factor them in:
1) If you played 0 games in any 2-week period within a season, you are flagged as "decayed" and removed from the raw counts for the rest of the season.
2) If you are currently "decayed" or were previously "decayed" but you play a game, is your "decayed" flag removed for that season?

The reason I say we may not be able to get this data is it would require full histories of every player for a season. It's easy enough to see "last game played: a month ago". It's entirely different to find "the gap between the 5th and 6th game played this season: 3 weeks".

It's also possible that I'm wrong and they didn't change the metric, but instead they're making manual changes. In any event this is a fascinating and much-needed update to the topic.


Yes I did post it on reddit.

http://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/286ugt/na_battlenet_player_activity_analysis_based_on/

I've also thought about tracking "last game(s) played" as well but to do so in the script would at least double the time required to run the program, which already takes 8-9 hours for 100,000 players, and I would have run this program constantly (every single day) to make sure I grab every single player's match history. I suppose we could run this for a smaller set of players but that's getting into statistics I'm not too familiar with anymore

That being said I'm doing a similar run for the European servers, and I'll be doing Korea next.

Thanks for your guidance!
Faust852
Profile Joined February 2012
Luxembourg4004 Posts
June 16 2014 11:51 GMT
#31
It's only for NA right ? So there is at least 30k active players only on NA, that's a good number I think ! Especially since it counts only 1v1 games. Doesn't count customs, multi and arcades, which represent the major part of sc2 players.
#sc2nowaydead
Textual
Profile Joined June 2014
Saudi Arabia57 Posts
Last Edited: 2014-06-16 12:23:28
June 16 2014 12:17 GMT
#32
Not sure I understand all the fine details, but a very interesting read nonetheless! And I certainly get the drift of it. Thanks for all the hard work! Talk of the ladder is usually uninteresting (for the same reason talk about balance is uninteresting), but a technical analysis with actual information sheds a lot of light.
I always wondered how Blizzard handled the problem of league distribution, since distribution of players varies a lot depending on definition of "players". Drilling into the meaning of "activity" helps reveal how Blizzard solves this puzzle.
Thanks!
frajen86
Profile Joined February 2014
168 Posts
Last Edited: 2014-06-17 12:47:26
June 17 2014 12:47 GMT
#33
On June 16 2014 20:51 Faust852 wrote:
It's only for NA right ? So there is at least 30k active players only on NA, that's a good number I think ! Especially since it counts only 1v1 games. Doesn't count customs, multi and arcades, which represent the major part of sc2 players.
#sc2nowaydead

Yes, this is just for NA 1v1 ladder.

I'm running the same analysis for EU right now - but this time it's taking over 24 hours. Eventually the data will be there though. It's running off my desktop so I can leave it on indefinitely.

I plan on doing the same thing with the KR server as well.

Someone on Reddit suggested I do this every week to keep up with activity statistics, so I might end up doing that too
Faust852
Profile Joined February 2012
Luxembourg4004 Posts
June 17 2014 12:53 GMT
#34
On June 17 2014 21:47 frajen86 wrote:
Show nested quote +
On June 16 2014 20:51 Faust852 wrote:
It's only for NA right ? So there is at least 30k active players only on NA, that's a good number I think ! Especially since it counts only 1v1 games. Doesn't count customs, multi and arcades, which represent the major part of sc2 players.
#sc2nowaydead

Yes, this is just for NA 1v1 ladder.

I'm running the same analysis for EU right now - but this time it's taking over 24 hours. Eventually the data will be there though. It's running off my desktop so I can leave it on indefinitely.

I plan on doing the same thing with the KR server as well.

Someone on Reddit suggested I do this every week to keep up with activity statistics, so I might end up doing that too

Would be awesome if you could do that !
frajen86
Profile Joined February 2014
168 Posts
Last Edited: 2014-06-17 14:08:50
June 17 2014 14:07 GMT
#35
One thing about team ladder I've noticed is that I can't always tell how much bonus pool someone has in a team setting because some people are on two teams that end up in the same division, and I think Battle.net only shows bonus pool for the lower ranked team in that case.

So I think I'm just going to give up on the detailed team ladder stats for now

The best I could do is go through the team list and get summary stats on when the last game the team played was, and how many total wins/losses they have.
frajen86
Profile Joined February 2014
168 Posts
Last Edited: 2014-06-18 02:12:57
June 18 2014 02:08 GMT
#36
EU analysis done. Raw data is here: http://19hz.info/Starcraft/EU Battle Net Bonus Pool.xlsm

Analysis:

[image loading]

[image loading]

There are about 12,000 "super-active" players - people that are probably playing 7+ games a week. (estimating this based on your bonus pool changing by about 20 every time you win or lose).

There might be about 30,000 "semi-active" players - people that play 3+ games a week.

About half the total player count has played less than 15 games total.

For "active" players, Bronze and Silver leagues are actually undersized, Gold and Platinum leagues are relatively close to their target sizes, and Diamond and Master leagues are inflated.

KR server analysis should be done tomorrow.

Reddit crosspost: http://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/28faj7/eu_battlenet_player_activity_analysis_1v1_ladder/
Excalibur_Z
Profile Joined October 2002
United States12240 Posts
June 18 2014 03:19 GMT
#37
haha. I remember you told one of the guys you would change your topic name to "ladder activity" rather than player activity, but I guess you forgot to do that. Oh well!

EU appears to be basically the same, which is good, because it means the data collection and analysis aren't flawed.
Moderator
frajen86
Profile Joined February 2014
168 Posts
Last Edited: 2014-06-18 03:24:28
June 18 2014 03:24 GMT
#38
On June 18 2014 12:19 Excalibur_Z wrote:
haha. I remember you told one of the guys you would change your topic name to "ladder activity" rather than player activity, but I guess you forgot to do that. Oh well!

EU appears to be basically the same, which is good, because it means the data collection and analysis aren't flawed.

It's in there, it says 1v1 Ladder now!

And yes it looks the same. Diamond league seems big.
Archiatrus
Profile Joined June 2014
Germany64 Posts
June 18 2014 06:39 GMT
#39
Is it possible to extract the race distribution per league as well? I always wondered if there is a difference between the "super-active" and the "I-play-one-game-per-season" player in terms of races actively played (and secretly hoped it is nearer the 1/3-1/3-1/3 distribution).
korona
Profile Joined October 2009
1098 Posts
Last Edited: 2014-06-18 09:26:58
June 18 2014 09:14 GMT
#40
On June 15 2014 17:16 frajen86 wrote:
I grabbed all the remaining bonus pool values for 102,158 players (using the NA player list from nios.kr - http://nios.kr/sc2/us/1v1/hots/).
On June 15 2014 17:16 frajen86 wrote:
Raw data is here: http://19hz.info/Starcraft/US Battle Net Bonus Pool.xlsm
On June 18 2014 11:08 frajen86 wrote:
EU analysis done. Raw data is here: http://19hz.info/Starcraft/EU Battle Net Bonus Pool.xlsm

Interesting data. It also highlights the problem with the current 'harsh' MMR decay. As so considerable portion of players are inactive most of the time, the decay causes general MMR level to go down.

If you are going to run the data collection (semi-) regularly, I would suggest to collect some more individual data, so it would be possible follow up the number of players who have longer than 2 weeks breaks during the 1v1 season (or who have several such breaks) (decay starts after 2 weeks and reaches its max value after 4 weeks). This would give better estimate how many players face direct MMR decay during the season (Of course those numbers would be only pointers as the unranked 1v1 games reset the decay counter too and they cannot be followed).

But what extra data would be needed: 1) Timestamp for each player data (fetch time) e.g. to be able to calculate max bonus pool (and potentially calculated max pool value based on it), 2) recording player-id:s (IDs cannot change like nick, for example id for http://eu.battle.net/sc2/en/profile/123456/1/example/ would be 1-123456 or long ID would be 2-S2-1-123456, where first number is the server 1 US, 2 EU, 3 KR, 5 CN, 6 SEA, 'S2' is static for all. Of course the URL itself contains that info too), 3) league, 4) division name (or id, but division name is ok as names are unique), win and loss counts and ladder points. By comparing the earlier data one can see if the player has played ranked 1v1 games during the period.


Bonus pool accumulation starting times for this season S18:
+ Show Spoiler +
## US, EU, KR, SEA, CN
Sun 13 Apr 2014 07:00:08 GMT
Sat 12 Apr 2014 23:00:08 GMT
Sat 12 Apr 2014 15:00:08 GMT
Sat 12 Apr 2014 16:00:08 GMT
Sat 12 Apr 2014 16:00:08 GMT

or as long in milliseconds (Unix epoch time):
1397372408000
1397343608000
1397314808000
1397318408000
1397318408000



Edit 1: You have some problem regarding EU master players who have 9 weeks worth of bonus pool (should be 230 instead of 11).
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