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User statistics


HAL2000
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I would really like to see some very basic statistics about the (active) user base in the multiplayer lobby. Things like how many players have registered and a histogram showung the distribution of players in dependence on their ELO would be especially great, since they would allow users to estimate, how strong players with a given ELO actually are. Also it would be good to see, whether the ranking system is doing its job well, i.e. whether the distribution is realistic (e.g. normally distributed) or has features indicating problems (like e.g. severeal local maxima in the distribution).

I have heard that the necessary data could be crunched, only it has not been done so far. Hence I would appreciate if either people with acces to the raw data provided some kinds of stats or made raw data available for me to crunch by myself.

Cheers, HAL2000

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  • 3 weeks later...

We can add in the list of purposes of the lobby privacy policy that we may publish anonymous statistics covering all active users. This is not an issue since the published result will not contain personal data, but we have to disclose it to the users since the calculations will be based on personal data.

In order to help, you can contribute scripts that crunch the data and generate the stats. We cannot share actual data for you to crunch them, but you can create a local lobby with dummy accounts (for instance in a virtual machine) in order to generate a database that you can test your scripts on.

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I had some trouble setting up the local lobby but finally got it to work today. I have attached a first quick script that collects very basic information. The imagined use-case would be to put it into `source/tools/XpartaMuPP` and execute something like:

python3 UserStats.py > userStats.dat
gnuplot -e "stats 'userStats.dat'; plot 'userStats.dat' with histeps title '# of Users'"

Assuming that you have gnuplot installed, this should give you a plot of a histrogram showing how many players have a given ELO.

I have noticed, that there is no information stored about when a given player has played his last rated game, so it is difficult to outrule accounts that have been there for a long time. I don't know if it would be worth the effort to store the date of a game, so that this could be done in future releases.

Also, it might be interesting to look at correlations between won games and the total score that are both stored in `games` and `players_info`, respectively, in the database. This might give interesting insight into how useful the score actually is from a statistical point of view. However, I have not yet found the time to write apropriate analysis scripts.

UserStats.py

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Under GDPR all data that relates to a directly or indirectly identifiable natural person is personal data. For instance we only have one player with 2200 score and we can identify the natural person behind that account using the svn repository or forums. The online time, number of rated games can also indicate to WFG and possibly to the public which accountname the data relates to. That's why you see privacy policies treating all processed user data as personal data.

Anonymized public release by Wildfire Games (WFG) team members" from the Terms of Service from 2014 would be very narrow, like "5000 players were present in June", but not "one unnamed player played every day at 20h CET in June", nor a pseudonymized copy of the raw database. "Private analysis by Wildfire Games (WFG) team members and their affiliates." allows only WFG to "crunch the data". At least that's the contract that the previous guy had put up.

I do agree that the rating data could be presented to players in a much more entertaining and conclusive way. For instance browsing the leaderboard and such statistics graphs on a website of Wildfire Games, or browsing the statistics of a particular release of 0 A.D.. The purpose of the personal data processing would have to be added to the Terms if it wasn't laid out to be implied in the previous ones.

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