We Can Fix That with Data

• “For past four weeks, TiVo has been using its second-by-second audience measurement to determine which [American Idol] performers had the highest and lowest viewership. It turns out, this information […] is highly predictive of which contestant will be voted off. Viewers tend to rewind and watch their favorite performances multiple times, while fast-forwarding through the ones they don’t like. These viewing preferences correlate with voting patterns …” (via Marginal Revolution)
• Pirates of the Burning Sea’s data service API. Are any players doing cool stuff with it yet?
• Gamasutra interviews Dave Sirlin on the rebalancing of Street Fighter. He’s gotten tons of press on that gig, and I haven’t seen much that’s terribly applicable — until now.
  

  My biggest secret is that, even though I have a math degree from MIT, it’s not about math at all. If I was going to make a fighting game from scratch, starting with nothing, there’d be a tiny bit of math to make sure that, if you make them block a move, you can’t block it again to prevent infinite loops, so there’s already a little bit of maths done for me in Super Street Fighter, but when it comes to things like, should this guy’s priority be a little bit better or not?

  It’s just this holistic approach. We know the results from all these tournaments from all these years, and it’s just having an intuition of what a tweak is going to do.

  But NO, YOU NEED EDUCATION! Even glorified worldbuilders need math degrees.

• Raiding Represented in Mathmatical Graphs. (Hahaha.)

I’m home with a cold. Thanks a lot, fellow AGDC attendees, for getting me sick. I’m home drinking Nyquil on this fine Monday morning. Maybe too much Nyquil.

I got up this morning to email my boss and send out a few mails I had planned to take care of at work this week, one of which was to mail out a link to an interesting website a World of Warcraft player put together: Changes from Live Patches to World of Warcraft Classes, via the Elitist Jerks forums. He’s listed every class change made since the beginning of recorded history (i.e. early beta), and he’s categorized it by buffs, nerfs, bug fixes, changes, new features, and overhauls. (If you read the Elitist Jerks link, you’ll see that he’s been revising the classifications with their feedback.)

As I reviewed the list, I realized that if I sat back and squinted, I could see patterns in the category colors, and it occurred to me that I could write a Perl script to parse the data and chart it. (Thanks, Nyquil!) But I’m home, and I don’t have Office on my new desktop, and my laptop’s screen is broken. Enter Google Docs and their (new-to-me) charting feature.

Class-specific charts after the jump.

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