Rolling Thunder Forums

What statistics can we gather?
The bad news is, we're basically limited to what is in the log file - ie the text you get in the bottom left. This is what BBM uses too. Whilst the replay file has everything needed to recreate the game in the client - my research & other people's posts has revealed that you basically have to reverse-engineer the client to get all that information. For example, the dice rolls are not stored there (only the seed used by the random number generator) and neither are some events like "picked up the ball" - you have to track where the ball is by keeping track of where it landed, where all the players moved to etc...

It would seem therefore that seemingly simple things like what turn it is is not doable... as it's not in the log file.

The good news is that we will still have some improvements over BBM, such as centralising of the information, and better analysis of the block dice & the skills of the people involved.

When will the stats come?

Processing the log files is a different process to processing the replay/matchdetail files. It's in a different format (text rather than sqlite) so will need a whole new load of code around it. Therefore this will be in a future phase of development. November or later. I would still like everyone to upload their log files, so I have some data to test on and so that when it's done we will have lots of stats to look at. I'm concentrating on getting teams/matches/players in first. Even these will still have some advantages over BBM as hopefully you will see....

So is the NetCommands table useless?

One thing it may be useful for is for finding out what inducements were bought. As far as I can tell they aren't in the log file, and as they don't rely on the dice the information should be relatively easily visible in the table. Also as it's something that happens right at the start of matches, it's easy for people to test - start a hotseat game, pick inducements, quit game and upload. If people want to do that testing now then great. No rush though.

Is it actually possible to track the turns though? Based on turnovers / kick offs / switch in which team's players are actuve or something similar?

Hmmm, I suppose it might be. So long as you roll at least one dice on your turn it *should* be possible. So it 'll always be a bit of a "best guess" as sometimes people don't roll any dice on their turn, and also the clock can wind a turn forward or back at kick-off, I'm not sure if that is logged.

Interesting fact #1

Let's take the recent Ogre-underworld game as an example. The JPG we post on the forums ("match report") said that I inflicted 6 injuries and la inflicted 4. But a look at the 2D6 table shows I inflicted 4 and la inflicted 3. How can this be? Answer - the 2D6 page does not consider stunty for injury rolls. I verified this by going through the match report. Stunty says "a player treats any roll of a 7 or 9 after modifications as a KO or injury respectively". I found examples where a 9 was rolled (after Mighty Blow) and the 2D6 page says "stunned" whereas actually the net end result was "injured" because of stunty.

The log file applies stunty after the roll & modifications, so that's what BBM does. In reality I think we can be a bit cleverer and treat stunty as being an extra +1 modifier to the injury roll.