Welcome, Guest
After a lot of procrastination, I’ve begun work on the player stats pages. Right now they only show data readily available from steam, but I’ll be adding in the more advanced features as time allows. The design isn’t finalized, and some bits are still missing, but feel free to chime in with any feedback
Another update is to the server stats root page, which now once again shows server summaries.
Finally, there’s this, which I’m not quite happy with yet but eventually will be linked to on the item stats page.
Item stats are now updated automagically every 3 days, so no more 2 week spans of “Oops, FS forgot to run the update script”.
I spent last weekend at Ohayocon 2011, and as usual TF2 was well represented.
As a break from the constant bug report posts, here are some highlights from the con. I don’t personally know any of these players, but if they want to email me their steam profiles, I’ll do a little something special for their tf2stats profile pages.
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| From Ohayocon 2011 |
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| From Ohayocon 2011 |
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| From Ohayocon 2011 |
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| From Ohayocon 2011 |
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| From Ohayocon 2011 |
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| From Ohayocon 2011 |
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| From Ohayocon 2011 |
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| From Ohayocon 2011 |
Recently I’ve seen a lot of people making comments about the accuracy (or lack thereof) of the data on this site. So I thought I’d take a moment to address those concerns.
“I hate it when people cite TF2stats as a legitimate source of information. It’s infamous for having screwed up stats, and doesn’t take into account that people trade things, have private backpacks, or never play on servers using it. It also only samples a small portion of the TF2 population, a population that seem to be overly concerned with rare items and are more likely to possess them.” – talkingwires
Above is the more common argument floating around on forums such as Steam Powered. So let’s get the cat out of the bag now: The data on this site isn’t perfect. This shouldn’t be a surprised to anyone, since it’s basically impossible to get “perfect” data without Valve aggregating it for me. As a response to this, I’ve gone with a large data sample to provide data that I feel is accurate enough to give us useful data.
So let’s take a look the data sample methodology. Profiles have been sampled from three separate sources, as detailed below
The stat savvy among you probably notice the second figure actually creates a bias in the data. Profiles explicitly searched are more likely to contain something “interesting” (such as a large quantity of hats or unusuals) than a random sample and will almost always contain active players who are well rooted in the community. This naturally corrupts the randomness of the data. However, its also true that a random sample over steam accounts creates a reverse bias, since not all of those accounts are still active.
Therefore the relationship between the two data sources is that they start to balance each other out. When I pulled the original data sample, I ran some quick numbers to get a guesstimation of how many profiles were abandoned or unused, and blended in known active data in to help combat this. A similar ratio continues to be enforced by adding more random accounts into the pool as the active pool grows.
So at the end of the day, the data sample tries to be accurate, but ultimately can’t be perfect. So let’s consider for a moment how much noise might be in the data. It’s impossible to know for sure, but if we assume every Unusual hat effect has a perfectly even drop rate, then we can guess from the recently added effects page. By subtracting the high and low ends of the unusual scale, we find a variance of 0.14%, giving us an estimated noise level of ±0.08%.
Another possible method to approach this is via paints, again assuming black and white paint are evenly distributed (Since they can’t be purchased or crafted, but do drop from crates and naturally), we see a variance of 0.03, producing an estimated noise level of ±0.015%.
Another common complaint is that because private backpacks can’t be scanned, people could be hoarding tons of promo items and they’d just vanish! Or perhaps they were traded to an account that wasn’t scanned! This is true to an extent, but how pervasive is the issue in reality? We’ll use the Sam and Max promo items as a test point, as the set is often (but not always) broken up during trades. We see that Max’s Severed Head is on the low end of the scale at 3.18%, and the Big Kill is sitting on the high end with 3.29%. The gap is somewhat smaller here, at 0.11% giving us a variance of ±0.055%.
So if we assume a worst case scenario of a highly traded promo item which randomly drops, we can consider at worst the variance in the figures shouldn’t exceed 0.135%. This is an extreme example, but it does indicate that the data sample is fairly stable.
So why do the figures on TF2Stats not line up with what you see in TF2? The answer is simple: The people you see in TF2 aren’t a random sample. In-game you’re more likely to see people who play more (Since they’ll have more total online time), and hence these people will naturally own more items due to the drop system’s general mechanics. The lesser voices of the casual players will rarely be seen. Since TF2Stats doesn’t bias data based on play time, the two will likely never match.
Hopefully this clears up any concerns and misconceptions about the data collection method, sample size, and accuracy of data. If you have any other questions, feel free to drop a comment and I’ll amend this post to address them.
Due to popular demand, paint stats have been added! This is a separate page from the item specific breakdowns, which lists overall paint ownership, usage, and how much of it is still sitting in the can. A similar page with unusual effects is on the back burner pending some graphics.
Other fixes and changes include:
I’ve improved the map and server pages a bit, specifically adding graphs to the map pages, and a map list.
I also sorted out a number of bugs in the server and map stat algorithms. The important fixes were the bugs that allowed maps that hadn’t been played in months to maintain their high rank, and for a single server with some nefarious configuration to boost a map’s score 10+ times. The complete changelog is below.
First off, big thanks to [GM] Geit, who wrote an incredibly clever script to automagically generate screen shots for maps. He was nice enough to share this with me, and as such tf2stats now has a nice chunky library of map screen shots, which updates itself as new maps arrive. Please still continue to upload additional images (The script in question only generates one), and filling in the gaps that get missed. I should also remind some of you that if your map screen shot has viewmodels or the HUD.. don’t upload it. No killcams either. Jeez.
I’ve also mostly addressed the often raged over issue of item tooltips sliding off the edge of the browser window. My previous fix (Telling people to buy bigger monitors) didn’t go over so well, so it’s fixed for real this time. Some very tall tooltips may still not properly fit in some circumstances, but scrolling up or down should correct this. (Or buy a bigger monitor)
last but not least, I’ve been working on some new stat pages, with data collected from Luigi30, who has opened up access to some of the data he scrapes from his trading/idling servers. More to come with that later.
Sorry for the slow response to this last update. Over the weekend I participated in Ludum Dare 19, which pretty much consumed all of my time. Now that it’s over, back to work.
Backpacks have been updated to support the full number of pages, should you choose to purchase them. For the sake of my bandwidth, profiles will only show as many pages as the highest placed item, so if you bought all slots but only use to page 6, it’ll look like you haven’t bought the upgrades on tf2stats. If that REALLY bother you, just toss an item on page 20.
A lot of new items were also added, which can be found here. Nothing too surprising really.
For those curious, the item token format in the API has changed slightly, to support larger backpacks. Changing your code to support this should be easy though.
Welcome to TF2Stats 3!
This has been a total rewrite of the old version 2 site. As such, expect lots of changes, enhancements, and general mucking about in the coming months. Not everything is 100% complete yet, but the important bits of the site are alive or linking to stuff that is where applicable.
I really look forward to the feedback the community has always given me, so I can further improve the site! I’ve already made tons of changes on the hat stats page from feedback from users, and much more is in the works.
Thanks!