Part 0 - Introduction + Activity
This part's gonna be short (2 graphs)- I'm basically just posting a little bit of content so I have an excuse to talk about some of the methodology. (Scroll to the bottom if you don't care).
To do this whole analysis, I sampled as many games I could from the MDL (4101), removed all the ones that were deleted (due to not being accepted), and only used games where both players had played enough to get ranked on the MDL (in order to trim inaccurate ratings). This came out to 3502 games played by 140 players.
For each of those 140 players, I also retrieved their ratings from their MDL profiles. I initially used their current ratings, but that broke due to something I'd like to call the "Muller-Chigurh Effect" (comparable to the "Boston Phenomenon" on the 1v1 ladder)- Lucien Muller (
http://md-ladder.cloudapp.net/player?playerId=2854345641) and Anakin Chigurh (
http://md-ladder.cloudapp.net/player?playerId=287161802) broke a lot of my analysis because of how poorly their current ratings effect their actual skill. I could've just removed these two from the analysis, but they weren't the only offenders- plus, if I could get reduce their data to just the accurate parts, then they're still useful. So I went by peak ratings since (despite their flaws) they're less inaccurate on the whole.
Except that broke too- see, if you're a bad player, your rating keeps going down quite a bit but your peak doesn't reflect that. I'll pick on Benjamin628 (
http://md-ladder.cloudapp.net/player?playerId=9936698896) since he's retired, but if you check his profile you see that he's been declining ever since he hit his peak rating of 1333. If we go by peak rating, all the weak players are all going to cluster somewhere around the 1300-1450 range. So the ratings I use are your peak rating if you peaked over 1550, and your current rating otherwise. 1550 might seem arbitrary at first (hint:
because it is) but the odds of a <1450 rated player hitting 1550 or higher at any point (even with some crazy unlikely matchups) are well below 5%.
So that's the ratings, and with those ratings, you can go to the analysis (
http://bit.ly/mdl-analysis) and check some other stuff that came out of them. Under "Matrix" you can see how players are rated on different templates (along with their overall rating that I use), and under "Upsets" you can see the biggest upsets I was able to find (and the biggest beatdowns, if you scroll all the way to the bottom). You can also look under "Players" for more general player stats.
For benchmarking reasons, I also sampled about 1600 games from the 1v1 ladder + the corresponding ratings of ranked players. And now, onto the real substance.
If you're like me and keep tabs on all the failed competitors to Warzone, you'd have noticed that one of them- Art of War- apparently has a serious activity issue (
https://www.artofwar.cc/forums/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=876&sid=0947949cd618a9f2460c096991e6bb41). It turns out that over 40% of their games are played by just the top 10 players.
So that got me wondering, do we see any hint of that in Warzone? There's clearly a participation gap on the forums and some ladders- some players are
way more active than others, and 99% of Warzone is invisible.
But within ladders, are the good players also just way more active than the rest?Well since we have ratings + game results, we can just directly compare how good a player is and how many games they've played (among the ones I've sampled).
Multi-Day Ladder: Game Count vs. Rating(interactive:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vR1rBQasy4-hlhM1D-VJy7eP7IaE4qIw0wAZ81ho_qCFfUrAlABDtY7egV4pXEl9iJPucHgBeyYvvpB/pubchart?oid=980615800&format=interactive)
1v1 Ladder: Game Count vs. Rating(interactive:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vR1rBQasy4-hlhM1D-VJy7eP7IaE4qIw0wAZ81ho_qCFfUrAlABDtY7egV4pXEl9iJPucHgBeyYvvpB/pubchart?oid=229198557&format=interactive)
The r^2 is basically the percentage of players whose game count can be "explained" by their rating (using a polynomial regression here, which is near-identical to the linear one for the 1v1 ladder). Sidenote: r^2 doesn't actually work for non-linear regressions, but this one's close enough to linear and Google Sheets doesn't make it easy to retrieve standard error so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It looks like there is a bit of an increase in activity as players get better, but it's also not at the level where your skill level and your activity on either ladder is closely tied together (you can see a lot of noise). You can also see that the activity increase is a bit more pronounced on the MDL than the 1v1 Ladder- perhaps because you can play more games at once, or just because better players like the MDL more than the 1v1 Ladder.
You probably also see a couple of dots hovering real far above everyone else. Who are these two that need an intervention? You can click the interactive links to find out :) Since the font size is a bit small and some of the names still cover each other up, you can also just get this activity + rating data by looking at the Players tab in the analysis.
I'll just tell you, though. The most active player on the MDL is Muli (341/3502 games! He was involved in nearly 10% of the last 3500 games on the ladder!) and on the 1v1 Ladder it's KneelForZod (32/1100). KneelForZod, as Nauz would tell you, is one of many alts of the same Italian guy, and across all those accounts he might also be giving Muli a run for his money.
That's all for now! Feel free to chime in with ideas, corrections, or whether you think Bill Belichick is gonna stick around in New England after Brady retires (it's in Off-topic, after all). I promise you there's going to be less boring paragraphs in the next one- I just wanted to get the methodology-shaped elephant in the room out of the way.
Edited 12/30/2017 08:19:21
