I’ve mentioned several times on this blog how much I love to gather C:SI usage numbers, and I’ve finally started gathering some of the specific information that C:SI members have asked about in response.
Specifically, while we already gather and display every C:SI user’s all-time win/loss record by region, I’d really like to be able to track numbers over a given time period such as "How many duels have I fought this week", or "Which clan is most active this week".
To this end, I’ve started a data-mining project that will allow me to calculate these things. Right now I’m only gathering data on a per-week basis while I test the concepts and work through the technology, but my goal is to be able to provide the same kinds of data for daily, weekly, and monthly queries.
This project uses the data stored in the C:SI grid-wide scoring database, but in order to minimize the risk of breaking any existing systems or slowing down the C:SI server, I haven’t changed any of the C:SI code responsible for gathering or reporting this data. Rather, I’ve made a library that takes periodic "snapshots" of the current data and performs it’s processing on that data.
I’ve set up a page on this blog for testing this functionality, which can be found by clicking the "Weekly C:SI Stats" button at the top of the page.
Here is a snapshot of the data on that page as of the time of writing:
Be warned, that page is being actively and frequently mucked with, so it’s pretty darned likely that at any given time it will be horribly mangled :) It also doesn’t currently display all of the information that I hope it will eventually be able to gather, and any suggestions would be welcome.
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Pretty cool! Just don’t use this data for evil:
“Dear sim owner,
Our records show 738 C:SI duels were fought in your sim this week. You now owe us $42.39 in C:SI tax.”
/me nods sagely, pulling on his mustache thoughtfully, then starts chuckling menacingly.
Awesome, I like the addition of the Weekly Stats. Very cool.
I’m pretty sure this isn’t possible, but I’d love to see a display of wins-losses between specific opponents. For instance, Bob wants to know how many times he’s beaten Babs, so he types Bob in one field, Babs in another, and finds that it’s 5 kills for Bob, 10 for Babs. However, you can’t really keep track of who is killing whom at the moment, can you?
I also would like to keep track of that information. It *is* possible, though right now I don’t believe we are tracking that information. At this time, although the data storage requirements to do so are not small, they are not immense either. Over time, though, as C:SI grows by roughly 1000 users per month, our data storage requirements might well exceed the budget that we have available for such things.
It may be possible to mine the data from what’s already being stored, and I will certainly look into whether we can do it. I’d surely love to be able to review that, even if it were only for a “during the last 30 days” period.