This is a question I like to ask (and answer) frequently. When I started with C:SI, there were about 4,500 unique users in the duel database. Even as recently as July 29th of this year, there were only 9,271 users. As of right this moment, there are 10,819 10,820 10,821 unique users recorded in the Combat: Samurai Island Scores Database.
That’s an increase of 1,549 users in just about a month and a half!
I’ve mentioned before how much I like data (I’m such a geek), but the only thing better than raw data is live data, so today I decided that I would take advantage of my new blog theme’s very easy integration of Sidebar Modules to create a live data feed indicating how many people have used C:SI at any given time. The entire process took less than an hour, from adding support for the data feed to the C:SI website to coding the sidebar module and adding it to my blog.
If you are viewing this blog directly rather than from inside the Second Life profile Web tab or an RSS reader, then you will see on the right side panel of my blog that there is an up-to-date count of how many people have used C:SI, how many duels they’ve fought, and how many different sims they’ve fought in:
It’s currently set up so that the data is only retrieved from the source once per hour, so that my desire for live - and essentially useless but personally interesting - statistics does not add significantly to the load of our score database.
I’m now starting to wonder if I should be tracking data like the number of new users per day or month and throwing that in a pretty graph. On the other hand, I have enough projects already, and not nearly enough time to do them in.
Popularity: 25% [?]
If there is any data stored that would indicate when the last change was made to a particular avatars record, it would be interesting to see some sort of ‘active fighters’ tally… Fighters who have had data changed in the last week or last month perhaps. To me this would be a more valuable gauge of the health of c:si. This could also lead to more useless data by taking the duels totals delta for a week or month and dividing it by the active avatar figure for the same period to obtain the fights per avatar for the previous week or month. ”
Thanks for your time and happy data mining!
Actually, that’s a good idea, and now that our update is released we are working on gathering stats like that.
I am gonna save the details for a separate blog entry, but we’ve got some pretty neat plans for data mining all sorts of number-crunching goodness
What about; a users over all ratio, maybe something that would show if someone spared the same person like 50 times in a row; something that would show stat padding.
Some sort of dealy like that.
We are already working on detecting stat padding, and also making stat padding far less effective, but there’s really not much I can say about that until we get farther along on that process.
Still, it’s an interesting idea Atrus.