Tom,

I wonder if these statistics are available in the data stored for each game.  The big one I can think of is seat winning %, such as

'Possibly Unbalanced Map'

Players        Seat1%       Seat2%      Seat3%

2                   72%             28%

3                    38%            33%           29%

ect..

It's not stored anywhere but it could be easily retrieved by trawling through the game data. I'll look into it.

I like this idea.

ditto

I'm torn on it, cool idea and info, although my guess is people will call unbalance when Seat 1 is at 60% and Seat 2 is at 40% with 10 games played. Or if Seat 1 is 22% and Seat 6 is 20% it will be used as an annoying excuse that Seat 1 won because they "always" win.

I'm more interested from the perspective of author. I usually go back after a a hundred or so games have been played on a map and see if there's any seat preference. This would make that job a lot easier.

What other board stats would you be interested in?

tom wrote: What other board stats would you be interested in?

Could you aggregate the bonus armies given out by each particular continent across all turns? i.e. ContinentA has a bonus of 7 and Continent B has a bonus of 2, but ContinentA is held for X turns, and ContinentB for Y, thus X*7 and Y*2 bonuses granted. That'd be cool.

Hmm that might be a bit more tricky to do! I'll see what I can do with the the win stats though...

My initial thoughts on it were, there aren't a lot of maps that are well balanced 1v1, but if a map shows up as an extreme unbalance, maybe the # of players allowed should be changed.

I would never expect it to be 50/50, maybe 55/45 to 60/40 would seem like a maps about as balanced as it can get. There are equations that can tell us if the difference is statistically significant.

Yertle wrote: I'm torn on it, cool idea and info, although my guess is people will call unbalance when Seat 1 is at 60% and Seat 2 is at 40% with 10 games played.

That's the whole point, to detect unbalances and maybe address those issues.

But with just 10 games played it is very hard to tell if that is really unbalanced, even with 100 games played it can be hard to tell. Just look at Circles of Death, it took what, like 8 games maybe for it to be "UNBALANCED!!!", yet as more games have been played it's kind of oh wait, maybe it's not soo bad. Same with dice rolls, people complain when they have a very small sample size of bad rolls and call unbalance on that system.

Even if it tells if it is statistically significant or not, people will ignore that and only look at the numbers and 60/40 is unbalanced no matter the scenario, I guess stats could not be displayed until they are "statistically significant".

In short, I see statistics being used as an excuse for a loss, and that bugs me. I'd say map designer's will also catch flap when the stats aren't 50/50 and be "forced" to either deal with those crying out or to make adjustments (which can just lead to more "unbalance").

Like I said though, I'm not against it, and think it can be cool stats/info, just my guess is there will be drawbacks to making that information easily accessible.

Yertle wrote: But with just 10 games played it is very hard to tell if that is really unbalanced, even with 100 games played it can be hard to tell. Just look at Circles of Death, it took what, like 8 games maybe for it to be "UNBALANCED!!!", yet as more games have been played it's kind of oh wait, maybe it's not soo bad. Same with dice rolls, people complain when they have a very small sample size of bad rolls and call unbalance on that system.

Even if it tells if it is statistically significant or not, people will ignore that and only look at the numbers and 60/40 is unbalanced no matter the scenario, I guess stats could not be displayed until they are "statistically significant".

In short, I see statistics being used as an excuse for a loss, and that bugs me. I'd say map designer's will also catch flap when the stats aren't 50/50 and be "forced" to either deal with those crying out or to make adjustments (which can just lead to more "unbalance").

Like I said though, I'm not against it, and think it can be cool stats/info, just my guess is there will be drawbacks to making that information easily accessible.

We could always just make the information available to authors. Or to all premiums, so that inattentive authors have someone to hold them accountable.

Also, I have a very quick answer for anyone who wants to complain about imbalance with fewer than 60-100 games played on a map: "%#$* you." Problem solved.

Yertle wrote: Just look at Circles of Death, it took what, like 8 games maybe for it to be "UNBALANCED!!!", yet as more games have been played it's kind of oh wait, maybe it's not soo bad.

Except that the initial questions about the map's balance had nothing to do with results were actually based on LOOKING AT THE MAP and seeing that one seat had an advantage. I can pretty much guarantee that if the board had stayed the way it was, the top player would have won a strongly disproportionate number of games in which they went first, and a majority of games in which they went second as well.

Also, what Cram said. Who cares what people think/say? You think having these stats around is going to cause anybody to complain about your maps any more than I already do?

I'd like to see eliminations per # of players, or at least a gathering stat for total # of players played against in ranked games so I can compare that to my elimination counter.

Eliminations of/by particular players. So I could look at Yertle's player stats page and somewhere there or on h2h be able to see that he's knocked me out, say, 35 times and I'm still working on that first kill of him (whereas I've eliminated Andernut like 80 times to his 10 or so of me, which I could see by going to his player page).

asm wrote: I'd like to see eliminations per # of players, or at least a gathering stat for total # of players played against in ranked games so I can compare that to my elimination counter.

You mean on a per board basis, or like the one already present on player Profiles?  Profile >> Player Stats >> Overall Stats >> Player Played

Um... I mean exactly like what's right there

I'd like to see the # of games that were voted to end, broken down by # of players & maybe avg. # of turns broken down by # of players. I think some maps are prone to disaster in particularly large or small groups, and this might make that more obvious.

I would like to see the average number of turns it takes to finish a game for each different number of players. I think it would be cool to see, but may also help see if you want to play a particular board with that number of people or not.

I want to see how many times I've eliminated an individual player, so I can quantify how much better I am than other people (I'm looking at you, asm).