Most people that know me in-world (or out, for that matter) know that I am a hardcore geek, and totally fascinated with data in all it’s myriad and beautiful forms. One of the projects I’ve had on the back burner for a while is the gathering of statistics about individual duels. Most of you already know that we track win/loss ratios across the grid, but less people seem to know that you can actually see that information on a per-user or per-sim basis at the official C:SI website. As an example, here is the win/loss record for Aimee Congrejo, as well as the record for the Shrouded Isle Sim.

For some time now, we’ve also been tracking individual fights instead of just keeping the overall win/loss numbers, meaning that we could - if desired - figure out the win/loss comparison for any two particular combatants when facing each other. For example, looking at the raw data shows that Aimee Congrejo kicked my butt 3 times on 2007-06-10, while on that same day I managed to emerge victorious 5 times.

Esprite reminded me recently that I’ve got a little side-project to take that data even further, creating statistics about individual duels. That might be a little hard to visualize without an example, so here’s one way I’m envisioning presenting the data:

The table above is just something I made up off the top of my head, a real duel would of course contain much more (and probably more accurate) data, but I think it shows the idea nicely. The idea is to have sort of a “blow by blow” recount of a fight, where you can see each attack and the damage it caused, or whether a slash was blocked, etc. Data like this could be used to figure out, in this example, that Aang takes too long to block after he’s been stunned, and lets me get in a “free slash”.

I’m not exactly certain what uses people would have for this kind of data, so it may be that I’m just doing it for the sake of doing something geeky, and that’s why it’s a back-burner project. I can envision data like this being somewhat interesting for people to study the fighting style of someone like Kasumi and attempting to glean information from it, such as “Does Kasumi usually do a double kick when her opponent is stunned, or does she try to slash first then kick?”

I also wonder whether it would be useful as a means to relieve the pressure on clan sensei, who typically have the burden of testing lower-ranked members of their clan for advancement. If a sensei could bring up a student’s record against higher-ranked members of the same (or another) clan and compare the win-loss data plus whether they are properly addressing weaknesses (not blocking enough, not kicking when appropriate, etc) then perhaps the need for formal testing and the scheduling of such could be reduced somewhat.

Or, perhaps, nobody would find it interesting or useful at all. I just don’t know. There are, of course, some concerns with doing such intensive data-mining; Does it cause lag? Not that I’ve ever seen, and I don’t want to get into the technical details here but it’s pretty safe to say that it likely wouldn’t. It would be an on-demand opt-in system that was only running when a fighter wanted it to, and it would be seperate from the swords so it wouldn’t add to the script load in heavily populated sims (such as during a tournament).

I also wonder, is there any other data that could be collected that would be useful or interesting to members of the C:SI community? If so what would it be, why would it be useful, how should it be presented?

If you have ideas on this subject, please leave feedback! If there’s something I’m missing that would help C:SI members and clans, tell me and I’ll see what I can do to get it implemented.

One last thing: If anyone is wondering why I’m picking on Aimee above, it’s because I found out that she has a blog and she never told me

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