Titanomachy event coalition leaderboard bar chart race

Larz70 · June 2020

I started collecting coalition leaderboard data about two years ago because I was curious to see how dynamic the leaderboard was (that rush in the end to finish all charges and get or stay in the top 10). I didn't really have a better way to visualize the data other than through line charts that I shared with my coalition teammates, so I took a break from that for a bit and missed the bar chart race craze that was the year 2019.

Recently, I got those videos recommended to me and was curious if they were easy enough to do and if so, I could revive my old coalition leaderboard project. Turns out that creating the animation was a snap (no programming required), all I have to do is feed it data, which turned out to be where the challenge was. Because, I wanted a higher resolution, I decided to take screenshots of the event's coalition leaderboard every 2 minutes. Unfortunately, I lost some data on the first day while I was asleep, but the second day went smoothly with only a brief 30-minute outage.

After a lot of data scrubbing and munging, I present to you last weekend's Titanomachy 46-hour event, condensed into two minutes:

https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/2745319/

The chart and data is public so feel free to make copies for your own use. I'm not sure if there is anything to be learned from the visualization about the event itself that a lot of you veterans don't already know from playing the game with coalitions in the last 2-4 years. It's still funny for me, though, to see most of the top 10 coalitions not doing anything in the first 80% of the event and then turning it up in the end to take the top rewards. It's also clear that GodsofTheros (and its overflow coalitions) has become a force to be reckoned with, congrats for topping the event by the way. Still, I'm hoping that this would give us some insight on how to improve coalition events.

Enjoy!

jtwood · June 2020

That's amazing! Awesome stuff!

I feel like the Top 10s showed up a little sooner than 80% of the way through, though. For me, it was around 12:00:00 when it was all "HI WE'RE OBLIVION AND TEAM RECKLESS. DO YOU HAVE A MOMENT TO HEAR ABOUT OUR LORD AND SAVIOR?"

Pity their API isn't open to all for all rankings. It would be fun to see battles happening at the cutoff points (T25, T50, etc) at the end of the event.

bk1234 · June 2020

jtwood said:

That's amazing! Awesome stuff!
I feel like the Top 10s showed up a little sooner than 80% of the way through, though. For me, it was around 12:00:00 when it was all "HI WE'RE OBLIVION AND TEAM RECKLESS. DO YOU HAVE A MOMENT TO HEAR ABOUT OUR LORD AND SAVIOR?"
Pity their API isn't open to all for all rankings. It would be fun to see battles happening at the cutoff points (T25, T50, etc) at the end of the event.

Do you say this because you share tinykitty chat and 2 hours before the end of every event I’m asking why we are sitting at 27th? 😂

jtwood · June 2020

bken1234 said:

jtwood said:

That's amazing! Awesome stuff!
I feel like the Top 10s showed up a little sooner than 80% of the way through, though. For me, it was around 12:00:00 when it was all "HI WE'RE OBLIVION AND TEAM RECKLESS. DO YOU HAVE A MOMENT TO HEAR ABOUT OUR LORD AND SAVIOR?"
Pity their API isn't open to all for all rankings. It would be fun to see battles happening at the cutoff points (T25, T50, etc) at the end of the event.

Do you say this because you share tinykitty chat and 2 hours before the end of every event I’m asking why we are sitting at 27th? 😂

Mayyyyyybe

Scydrex7 · June 2020

Loved it, Larz. Pretty fun to watch. Well, if you're into watching graphs and stuff!

TheHunter · June 2020

This is fabulous, thanks for the fun! Did you look for or observe any effects of timezone - wondering if mainly US/Central European/Asian teams fell back or advanced at particular points and if any particular zone benefited more than others?

Larz70 · June 2020

Xucachris said:

This is fabulous, thanks for the fun! Did you look for or observe any effects of timezone - wondering if mainly US/Central European/Asian teams fell back or advanced at particular points and if any particular zone benefited more than others?

No I haven't @Xucachris, and I think that would be cool to know as well. It should be easy to get, although it would be limited to the ribbons contributed by those who were top 10. Also, it would be great to compare it with the actual location of the players who were members of those coalitions. Sadly, I have no way of getting that and not all the players might not want to give out that information anyway. I'll post the timezone data here later today, or tomorrow.

Larz70 · June 2020

@Xucachris , here's a chart I created showing the hourly ribbon rate from the perspective of US Central Time. ZZZ Ribbons represent the ribbons earned while NA Central Time players were catching some Zs.

I wanted to create a chart with a button to click to switch to the different time zones but I couldn't find a chart in flourish that would accomplish that. In creating the chart, however, it seemed clear to me that either the player distribution is even or that the time zone doesn't really matter. In fact, the peaks you see in the chart coincide with when the time charges were refreshed, with the final charge getting more than twice the activity of the others. The chart would be more accurate if I were to only count the ribbons contributed by players in NA Central, but that's not possible. At any rate, it looks like I was still able to answer your question in that the timezone doesn't seem to affect the scoring more, in fact, it is the recharge time that affects it more.

In creating the data for this, I added a sanity check to the data to catch any negative ribbon contributions. To my surprise, I caught one happening from 6/7 2:49 PM to 2:51 PM, 7 hours before the end of the event

I'm pretty sure there was no mistake on this screenshot, BlackVise lost 88 ribbons! I checked the screenshots to see if this was maybe a "blip" on the leaderboard, but BlackVise consistently had 2100+ ribbons at least 2 hours before this, and then all of a sudden, they have less than 2100 ribbons and drops to 9th. Any BlackVise players here that can check if the lost ribbons actually did happen? I can post this in the bug section if this scoring anomaly is indeed a bug. In my years of playing, I've encountered some scoring bugs where the coalition reflected my true score but the solo leaderboard didn't (when encountering SWWs), but I'm not sure if this is similar. BlackVise did not finish in the Top 10 but I wonder if the 88 ribbons would have pushed them past TeamReckless (2593 ribbons). How many ribbons did BlackVise end up with?

Opperstamper · June 2020

The point loss was because BlackVise had a player leave mid-event. I'm sure @Julie71 would be very interested to see this chart.

It's strange that the points get subtracted anyway, because that doesn't happen outside of events. Why does it happen during events?

PS: Cool chart, nice work on that!

Larz70 · June 2020

Ah, ok, not a bug then. That's unfortunate for BlackVise. Thanks for clearing that one up Opperstamper!

TheHunter · June 2020

Thanks @Larz70 that's reassuring to know that time zone doesn't seem important, and it's all about the node refresh times.

Poppy99 · June 2020

@Larz70 love the data. Excellent, and thanks for sharing.

I observed Coalition event point loss from a player leaving mid event after 4.2 or so, I had it happen to a lower GodsOfThero coalition earlier this year. It did not happen as of late 2019, sadly I had that happen then too but my scoresheet method should have picked it up but did not.

Player Time zones do matter! GodsOfTheros comes in late regularly as we are loaded with USA Pacific time players and late evening USA players, so pretty routine to be late to the party. Our coalitions with more European players definitely show patterns of scoring earlier in the weekend.

For the data lovers, one of our members has been using Tableau to provide coalition and player performance visualizations. I can put you in touch with them on Discord if anyone is interested in how to use it. After working with the equivalent in business environments it was great fun to have someone apply it to MtGPQ alliance data and many of you think in terms of performance the way we do.