Tuesday, July 8, 2008

What (not) to wear

The Quest Progression Chart was fun to do, and it taught me more about the game than I probably would have had the patience to scroll through in the tiny little quest window. When people say "I'm stuck on Zuluhed", I actually know wtf they are talking about.

I also learned a very key lesson: doing that kind of thing by hand completely sucks.

Since I've been working on doing data mining of our server's SPriest population, I thought I could put that to some use. To that end, here's a teaser of what I am working on now:



Of course, the final version will include all gear slots, not just feet.

This time it's completely automagically generated. But ... right now it's only seeing around 450 SPriests. I'd like to open it up to get a better sampling of the population, but that takes time.

We'll see how it turns out.

3 comments:

chronic said...

Hey, cool. I find data mining fascinating, and I've embarked on several similar projects. I'll be watching with interest to see what you come up with.

I couldn't quite come to grips with your example, though - what exactly does it represent? I'm guessing it's spell damage along the bottom judging by the scale, but what does the vertical axis and the size of the bars represent?

apanthropesp said...

That's correct. Horizontal is +Shadow. Vertical doesn't really mean anything, it's just how they are stacked.

Bar length, however, is the key here. That bar represents the range of characters using that gear at that +Shadow. FSW Boots, for example, are used by players roughly from +520 out past +1400.

What isn't (yet) represented is how many players are using them and what the distribution is. Right now, you can't tell if it is just 2 players using FSW boots, one at 520 and one out past 1400. That's part of why it is still a work in progress.

I'd also like to color the gear based on how it is obtained: red for Arena, orange for Honor, blue for Badges, etc. But I need to do some testing to see if it doesn't look like Circus vomit.

chronic said...

Oh nice, so it's sort of like a whole bunch of box and whisker plots except with only the range information rather than the median and upper/lower quartiles.

I guess you could get number and distribution of players across pretty well by varying the vertical height of the bars (so they'd become all wavy), I bet the FSW bar would end up massive ;)

It's a cool dataset, though, looking forwarded to seeing it colored!