The Tavern

Just for self-interest I wondered what would happen if you gave each character combo and each player an Elo score. The idea being that matching Elo scores means a player and a character combination should have a 50% win-rate . Using the backlog of online games I was able to achieve this. Note: there are assumptions made in the code that are probably not 100% fair. This only gives games of 0.14+. A score of 1200 is average for a player >= 5 wins in this period of time. Some of these results are skewed by competitions. I make no claims that any of these numbers really identify the easiest/hardest/best of anything, but thought that the numbers might be of interest for people to look at.

The results:

Player top 20:
1. keymashgrqeeg: 1888.34, 2. Tedronai: 1886.78, 3. bmfx: 1829.53, 4. Basil: 1805.93, 5. Sphara: 1794.31, 6. 78291: 1773.53, 7. zzxc: 1759.10, 8. ackack: 1754.39, 9. Zooty: 1729.28, 10. blakmane: 1699.36, 11. elliptic: 1677.08, 12. johnnyzero: 1666.31, 13. Lasty: 1658.35, 14. ManMan: 1628.07, 15. TheNoid: 1619.94, 16. ldf: 1611.21, 17. FiftyNine: 1582.12, 18. simm: 1580.70, 19. Berder: 1573.43, 20. Shadowmage952: 1572.73

Character combination easiest 20:
1. GrFi: 1293.11, 2. MfAs: 1358.95, 3. NaFi: 1425.71, 4. CeFi: 1425.75, 5. DDHe: 1469.77, 6. MiWn: 1470.38, 7. MiBe: 1477.72, 8. DDBe: 1477.82, 9. GrEE: 1481.55, 10. DDEE: 1483.40, 11. HOGl: 1494.69, 12. TrWr: 1501.90, 13. MiFi: 1505.61, 14. DDFi: 1510.39, 15. DDNe: 1520.45, 16. FeBe: 1525.96, 17. HOBe: 1530.80, 18. SpBe: 1532.88, 19. MiGl: 1534.37, 20. HaBe: 1535.95

Character combination hardest 20:
1. OpTm: 2009.50, 2. DjFE: 1957.91, 3. MuMo: 1948.20, 4. FoWr: 1930.98, 5. MuCK: 1929.06, 6. DgTm: 1927.42, 7. MuSk: 1926.26, 8. HESk: 1915.96, 9. SpAK: 1906.63, 10. TeSu: 1906.35, 11. OpSk: 1898.55, 12. FoWn: 1895.35, 13. HEAM: 1888.74, 14. MuNe: 1886.05, 15. OpSu: 1884.06, 16. TeFE: 1878.62, 17. OpWn: 1875.30, 18. DESu: 1875.01, 19. DEWr: 1874.56, 20. DEWn: 1870.65

It's "Elo", not "ELO". It's a guy's name.

Secondly I'm curious how your #1 player has a 4% winrate. That doesn't seem to make any sense to me based on the rest of what you're describing.

He has a 4% winrate overall, but:

he's doing great recently which has upped his score.

Its also worth nothing that the k-factor used in this implementation is 32, which is definitely on the high side. This means it strongly favours recent games as an indication of true-skill rather than luck.

Can you rank races and backgrounds independently by difficulty?

Legitimately came in to this thread expecting a discussion of Electric Light Orchestra.

I have one question: where did you get the data? Or if anyone else knows, where would be the right place to get the data for this kind of thing? Is it possible to download Sequell's game database?

SpAK is really hard

wait

It doesn't seem like it should be hard, but

Perhaps just bad luck, or possibly people attempting speedruns who usually don't speedrun. (someone who speedruns all the time would not bias the Elo of SpAK much because their player Elo would be low).

What explanation would you suggest?

Speedrunners wanted to get first rune before XL 7 and never left Abyss?

...people starving themselves with Banish/Corrupt? I dunno.

Edit: @Sandman25: you can't get a rune in starting Abyss but not everyone knows that, so I kinda like your explanation more. Also, I imagine people doing things like making a SpAK with spears and trying to kite some aboms for "easy" XP.

Thanks, I didn't know you cannot get the rune this way. I hope it is described somewhere. AK starts with


Let's make it

It's not just that the rune can't be found, you also get D:1 loot. Hm, actually, since rune is A:3 and deeper - does starting Abyss even spawn downstairs?

Special-casing it made sense when Abyss levels didn't exist (since one could startscum AKs until he got one with a rune in sight) but now that they do, I'm not sure it's worth the spoilers.

It would be pretty strange imho if starting Abyss didn't have portals deeper, and the rune on A:3 - 5. I mean, what would be the reason for that?

This is all irrelevant to player Elo but regardless... In the old days there was a chance of finding abyssal rune on any given tile, so AK abyss start was special cased so you couldn't start scum until getting a lucky abyssal rune laying around early on. I imagine a lot of SpAK's were killed this way.

In current crawl, the abyssal rune doesn't (or maybe only very rarely) appear outside of vaults on A:3-A:5 so I don't think there's much need for special casing stairs to not appear any more.

The most luck I've ever had in pre-dungeon abyss: Once I killed an eye of draining and exited the abyss at XL 4.

Whoops I haven't been keeping track of this thread.

Yes its possible to download the game databases. If anyone is interested in the code (be warned its not great, especially the database fetching part) I have it available on github.

https://github.com/triorph-emacs/dcss-elo-analyser