Doom Stats - Know Your Players, NSA style

[Zalewa]

I've put together a small site as an excuse to learn Django and a bit of web programming.

http://doomstats.co.nr/

The site uses the same protocol as a server browser such as Doomseeker would. It collects and stores data on who's playing what, player scores and pings, how many servers are online and which WADs are hosted. Site collects statistics for Zandronum, Chocolate Doom and Odamex (ZDaemon probably won't ever be here).

Right now the data displayed is minimal: I have an average server count and a chart for average player count, which still needs some work to not display zero for days where daily player count averages down to it. However, there's a lot more data being collected right now and it's only a matter of adding appropriate tables or charts to have it displayed. I was primarily thinking about displaying which servers and which mods are the most popular.

Links to source are available in the footer.

[Ænima]

Awesome! Should have it embedded in the forum somewhere.

[Slim]

Maybe it should be called Snowden. lol jk

Anyways, nice to see that Zandy has it's own stats thingamajiggy.

[Lord Smash]

Cool. Statistical proofs nobody plays odamex.

I can't wait to see how it goes for ZDaemon

[Ru5tK1ng]

Cool. Statistical proofs nobody plays odamex.

I can't wait to see how it goes for ZDaemon

http://stats.zdaemon.org/

554 unique IP Addresses have logged in to the Master today, 2015-06-28

[Medicris]

It would be neat to have something like this on-site:
http://store.steampowered.com/stats/
http://store.steampowered.com/stats/content/

Perhaps instead of "Top games by current player count", there'd be top server by avg. player count. A player country heatmap would be interesting to see, if possible.

[Catastrophe]

Cool. Statistical proofs nobody plays odamex.

lmao

[Zalewa]

Thanks for the input. I changed displayed average values to floats so that charts for Chocolate Doom and Odamex get a chance to actually display something for daily range.

Regarding mentioned points:

> Unique player tracking

I'm afraid that's not possible as server refresh protocol simply doesn't specify any information that would allow to identify unique players. You can track them by nicknames, of course, but then if a nickname list differs on a server between refreshes you will never be sure whether some players left and others joined or whether the already playing players changed their nicknames.

> Player "heat" world map

Same as above. I can do such map for servers popularity, as their IP addresses are public, but the protocol doesn't disclose IP addresses of players (and by all means that's how it should be, let's not go full NSA on this.)

> ZDaemon

The backend for the site is, basically, Doomseeker. We tried to add ZDaemon support for Doomseeker once. It resulted in drama and ZDaemon protocol obfuscation. There's no support for ZDaemon in Doomseeker ever since. Unless ZDaemon staff changes their stance on this, there's no chance that ZDaemon will ever be on the site.

[Kara Kurt]

Cool. Statistical proofs nobody plays odamex.

I can't wait to see how it goes for ZDaemon

> ZDaemon

The backend for the site is, basically, Doomseeker. We tried to add ZDaemon support for Doomseeker once. It resulted in drama and ZDaemon protocol obfuscation. There's no support for ZDaemon in Doomseeker ever since. Unless ZDaemon staff changes their stance on this, there's no chance that ZDaemon will ever be on the site.

A shame.

[Ralphis]

This is a really cool tool. I am getting a weird bug in firefox though. No matter what I set the dates to, it will start to cycle back through all of the dates (refreshing the page every 2 seconds) until it returns to http://zalewa.strangled.net/doomstats/e ... =2015-6-22. Not sure why it does it and I can't find a way to stop it. It happens anytime I change the dates or pick a specific day.

[Zalewa]

This is a really cool tool. I am getting a weird bug in firefox though. No matter what I set the dates to, it will start to cycle back through all of the dates (refreshing the page every 2 seconds) until it returns to http://zalewa.strangled.net/doomstats/e ... =2015-6-22. Not sure why it does it and I can't find a way to stop it. It happens anytime I change the dates or pick a specific day.

Should be fixed now.

[Ralphis]

Confirmed. Again, neat page. Thanks for making it.

EDIT: Out of curiosity, does this track bots as players as well?

[ibm5155]

Heh, nice stuff you did there, I did once a kind of map database, since I couldn't test my map all the time online, I did a crap but functional method, the bad side is, I needed to log on the server and wait my map, and hope the server wasn't reseted for geting hot stuff...)

OFF:hmm, It may sound like an evil idea, but, could zandronum send information for an address, like "send(192.168.1.1,"hi",1)" from a script? that way I could avoid requiring to log to each server to colect the data :D...

ON: hmm, maybe someone from this fórum just saw the odamex score and decided to log in just to remove it from 0 players online status

[Zalewa]

EDIT: Out of curiosity, does this track bots as players as well?

Bots are collected and stored in database and they're marked as bots. Every display I have on the site filters them out. So, no, bots are not counted.

[Fluffles]

Nice work making the stats database, looks pretty cool. I noticed in your original post you stated you are trying to make more detailed stats for players. Does this mean you are working towards creating a stats/ranking database for the playerbase on competitive game modes? or haven't you thought about it yet :)

[Zalewa]

Nice work making the stats database, looks pretty cool.

Thanks.

I noticed in your original post you stated you are trying to make more detailed stats for players. Does this mean you are working towards creating a stats/ranking database for the playerbase on competitive game modes? or haven't you thought about it yet :)

I'm afraid that's not possible with current server browser protocol. Remember that my site doesn't do anything more than an actual server browser would. There's no way to track individual players. Such system would require cooperation of Zandronum servers and some kind of player authentication system.

Anyway, tracking individual players scores was never the intended goal of the site. Right now I'm only thinking about adding filter forms for servers and WADs so that users can see popularity of any server (or set of servers) or WAD over time. Right now you can only view the 20 most popular servers/WADs.

[Kara Kurt]

Bring back Zan+

[Zalewa]

Bring back what?

[Torr Samaho]

I'm afraid that's not possible with current server browser protocol. Remember that my site doesn't do anything more than an actual server browser would. There's no way to track individual players. Such system would require cooperation of Zandronum servers and some kind of player authentication system.

If there is interest, we could expose the authentication system we added in 1.3.