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Gameplay statistics


William Blake

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It is usual for a development team to have assumptions about player behavior and expectations on how particular mechanics would be understood and used. As we know from experience these assumptions maybe very far away from reality. Even most obvious things are perceived differently and sometimes this could lead to fundamental issues with a gameplay.

In this light, it would be very helpful to measure actual player behavior, both during demo and after a release in order to correct any mistakes made during development. It is also quite important to gather objective gameplay statistics rather than few anecdotes from the most outspoken members of community.

 

Proposed solution

Introduce data collection for raw gameplay data and sync to back to your servers in order to have an objective data to be analyzed after the fact.

Off the top of my head I would do the following:

  • With each game save and at an end of a game I would update game statistic record and try to send to your server if available at a next gaming session.
  • If not, save the data and try to sync it back to your server on other game sessions once the connection becomes available.

 

For the basic game data package I would have at least the following:

 

GameID guid -  a game id continuous for all saves in a current game

Starting date, options, kingdom, map or scenario selected

Number of manual saves for the current game

Game time since the game start at the moment of data collected

Current kingdom resources (gold, books, piety)

Number of player Kings so far

Number of Marshals, Clerics and so per class hired to royal court

Number of Marshals (and so on by class) killed, captured, dismissed, died of old age, turned to be spies, executed

Number of provinces captured by player

Number of provinces lost by player

Number of provinces re-captured by player after being lost

Number of battles started by player

Number of battles started by AI

Number of battles won, lost

By the type of a city building, total counts of built for a given type

By the type of an army unit, total counts of units created/lost for a given type

By the type of marshal skill, total count of a skill being trained

By the type of marshal/cleric/etc special abilities, total count of a given ability being used.

 

 

Even with this very little info you can do quite a lot of data mining, especially grouping snapshots of the same game using GameID.

Pushing these data snapshots to a cloud server is petty trivial task and I think it would provide very valuable tool for the better of the game.

 

Oh yeah, and the first thing you want to add is an opt-in checkbox “I would like to send anonymous gameplay statistics back to Black Sea Games” somewhere in game settings.  Just saying.

Thanks.

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