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This is a super cool project! It would be especially interesting to use on pro-level games, maybe you could even sell services to pros who want to get better. L

This is a super cool project! It would be especially interesting to use on pro-level games, maybe you could even sell services to pros who want to get better. Like being able to say "your baneling run-bys are most cost-effective with 7 banelings around the ten minute mark" etc. With a relatively larger dataset you could come up with some real interesting statistics on individual players performance, use of certain units, the success of various strategies and build orders, etc. It would be real fun to try to predict the outcome of a game based on the first 3 minutes or something.

sebosp 3y ago
Indeed, another thing is that imho, casters and you tubers are data scientists that have the indexed dB in their heads, they say "at second X in this map Y you would have Z upgrade" and they talk about efficiency of mining, but I always wanted to see these things as statistics visually, like, how much faster or slower is player X in this game compared to the standard? How does the meta evolve? Or worse... If I check your replays, and you never ever scout this area, I could proxy there. You could find the build that in this map you never prepare for because let's be honest we are much more predictable than what we'd like to admit... I hope this project unlocks these kind of possibilities
jsphweid 3y ago
I'm messing around with a project now to featurize game states at arbitrary points and predict the winner with the idea of creating some sort of "eval bar" like in chess. Supply is a pretty good indicator but it's not always helpful. Definitely not in broodwar. If it's quite good it could be useful as a tool for people trying to get better (although various tooling and custom maps have been around for these types of purposes since the game came out and most people even pros seem to just grind ladder for practice). I was also hoping it could be used to analyze a replay and indicate how "back and forth" the game was, or if it was more one-sided, etc. Or if the top 100 pros were part of the featurization, then you could potentially determine how the odds change given a certain game state depending on who the pro is.
reaperman 3y ago
https://sc2replaystats.com https://sc2replaystats.com is one service already doing that, at least to some degree. Some features are locked behind a subscription payment. There's definitely room for improvement -- but some of what you're looking for is "unsolved"...optimal strategies are unknown, and the best strategy for a professional player may not be the best strategy for you. You'd likely want to practice strategies which won't get you top-100 in the world, but will work better with lower APM and lower overall "game sense".
- sebosp 3y ago
  Is there a way to get a replay pack with order of millions of games (maybe more?) ? I'd like that to be able to create meaningful Stats, proper data analysis, training, etc... Wouldn't mind paying a bit for that... So far for the exploratory data analysis I've done I only have my own games and 2 or 3 replays I've been sent that don't work...
  - reaperman 3y ago
    The only groups I know of with millions of games are sc2replaystats and Blizzard themselves. SC2replaystats had 4,440,656 replays uploaded in 2020 and 3,390,117 in 2019 (the only years I can quickly find data for). Searching and downloading replays is now paywalled, probably to limit scraping. > Wouldn't mind paying a bit for that... Google probably paid Blizzard a good amount of money to help them develop AlphaStar and in the process got access to all the replays. But I doubt you'd be offering enough money to get executive-level attention for such a deal. Sc2replaystats might be more receptive to selling you a randomly selected subset of their total data, but you'd still have to offer enough cash to be clearly worth the time of going through the negotiation process. I doubt they'd sell you all of their replays, as that's essentially the business' moat. Perhaps you could buy the sc2replaystats business though. (Yes, I know none of these suggestions are practical for the vast majority of interested hackers) ---------- There are smaller free replay packs available with a quick Google search. I'm sure if you looked around or asked around either Harstem's SC2 discord server or the SC2AI discord server or SC2 subreddit, someone would be able to point you to a free vault offering on the order of 10,000's of replays. However, the game is undergoing a period of large updates right now which are dramatically changing the details of the gameplay ... so really you'd want as many as possible starting from the most recent "balance patch" which went live just 6 days ago[0]. It will take the SC2 community quite a long time to establish known "best practices" for the current balance patch, and it's highly likely that it will be significantly modified again soon -- the most recent patch seems to be politically fragile at all levels of the game. Casual to professional players all have valid constructive criticism of it, so more changes soon are essentially inevitable. 0: https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/starcraft2/24009150/starcraft-ii-5-0-12-patch-notes https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/starcraft2/24009150/starcraf...
ZephyrBlu 3y ago
Extremely difficult to create a useful product like this for pros. They are looking for very specific things that are highly dependent on matchup, their build, opponent build, who their opponent is, how the game is going so far, etc. Feedback like "your baneling run-bys are most cost-effective with 7 banelings around the ten minute mark" is firstly unlikely to be accurate, and secondly unlikely to be useful to a pro because their play is so situational. There also isn't enough data in the replay files to piece together the kind of specific information they would want. SC2 has extremely high variance, even at the pro level. It's very hard to mine useful insights from game data. Even pro builds, which are supposedly standardized, have crazy variation: https://sc2.gg/reports/top-openings-2022/ https://sc2.gg/reports/top-openings-2022/. There are so many variations in games, and there are often adjustments on the fly or even sometimes mess ups.

sebosp 3y ago

Indeed, another thing is that imho, casters and you tubers are data scientists that have the indexed dB in their heads, they say "at second X in this map Y you would have Z upgrade" and they talk about efficiency of mining, but I always wanted to see these things as statistics visually, like, how much faster or slower is player X in this game compared to the standard? How does the meta evolve? Or worse... If I check your replays, and you never ever scout this area, I could proxy there. You could find the build that in this map you never prepare for because let's be honest we are much more predictable than what we'd like to admit... I hope this project unlocks these kind of possibilities

jsphweid 3y ago

I'm messing around with a project now to featurize game states at arbitrary points and predict the winner with the idea of creating some sort of "eval bar" like in chess. Supply is a pretty good indicator but it's not always helpful. Definitely not in broodwar. If it's quite good it could be useful as a tool for people trying to get better (although various tooling and custom maps have been around for these types of purposes since the game came out and most people even pros seem to just grind ladder for practice). I was also hoping it could be used to analyze a replay and indicate how "back and forth" the game was, or if it was more one-sided, etc. Or if the top 100 pros were part of the featurization, then you could potentially determine how the odds change given a certain game state depending on who the pro is.

reaperman 3y ago

https://sc2replaystats.com https://sc2replaystats.com is one service already doing that, at least to some degree. Some features are locked behind a subscription payment. There's definitely room for improvement -- but some of what you're looking for is "unsolved"...optimal strategies are unknown, and the best strategy for a professional player may not be the best strategy for you. You'd likely want to practice strategies which won't get you top-100 in the world, but will work better with lower APM and lower overall "game sense".

sebosp 3y ago
Is there a way to get a replay pack with order of millions of games (maybe more?) ? I'd like that to be able to create meaningful Stats, proper data analysis, training, etc... Wouldn't mind paying a bit for that... So far for the exploratory data analysis I've done I only have my own games and 2 or 3 replays I've been sent that don't work...
- reaperman 3y ago
  The only groups I know of with millions of games are sc2replaystats and Blizzard themselves. SC2replaystats had 4,440,656 replays uploaded in 2020 and 3,390,117 in 2019 (the only years I can quickly find data for). Searching and downloading replays is now paywalled, probably to limit scraping. > Wouldn't mind paying a bit for that... Google probably paid Blizzard a good amount of money to help them develop AlphaStar and in the process got access to all the replays. But I doubt you'd be offering enough money to get executive-level attention for such a deal. Sc2replaystats might be more receptive to selling you a randomly selected subset of their total data, but you'd still have to offer enough cash to be clearly worth the time of going through the negotiation process. I doubt they'd sell you all of their replays, as that's essentially the business' moat. Perhaps you could buy the sc2replaystats business though. (Yes, I know none of these suggestions are practical for the vast majority of interested hackers) ---------- There are smaller free replay packs available with a quick Google search. I'm sure if you looked around or asked around either Harstem's SC2 discord server or the SC2AI discord server or SC2 subreddit, someone would be able to point you to a free vault offering on the order of 10,000's of replays. However, the game is undergoing a period of large updates right now which are dramatically changing the details of the gameplay ... so really you'd want as many as possible starting from the most recent "balance patch" which went live just 6 days ago[0]. It will take the SC2 community quite a long time to establish known "best practices" for the current balance patch, and it's highly likely that it will be significantly modified again soon -- the most recent patch seems to be politically fragile at all levels of the game. Casual to professional players all have valid constructive criticism of it, so more changes soon are essentially inevitable. 0: https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/starcraft2/24009150/starcraft-ii-5-0-12-patch-notes https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/starcraft2/24009150/starcraf...

ZephyrBlu 3y ago

Extremely difficult to create a useful product like this for pros. They are looking for very specific things that are highly dependent on matchup, their build, opponent build, who their opponent is, how the game is going so far, etc. Feedback like "your baneling run-bys are most cost-effective with 7 banelings around the ten minute mark" is firstly unlikely to be accurate, and secondly unlikely to be useful to a pro because their play is so situational. There also isn't enough data in the replay files to piece together the kind of specific information they would want. SC2 has extremely high variance, even at the pro level. It's very hard to mine useful insights from game data. Even pro builds, which are supposedly standardized, have crazy variation: https://sc2.gg/reports/top-openings-2022/ https://sc2.gg/reports/top-openings-2022/. There are so many variations in games, and there are often adjustments on the fly or even sometimes mess ups.