[MUD-Dev] Mud Metrics

[rayzam]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Justin Rogers" <justin at mlstoday.com>
To: <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
Sent: Sunday, August 06, 2000 4:19 AM
Subject: Re: [MUD-Dev] Mud Metrics


> [rayzam]
> >     Very true. Other things worth tracking: race usage, guild
memberships,
> > both overall, and averages by time of day, cash and experience given by
> each
> > area, skill & spell usages separately by players and monsters, etc. We
> even
> > track the amount of damage done by each damage type [i.e. physical,
magic,
> > fire, cold, psionic, sonic, holy, unholy, acid, etc].
> >
> >     Track everything you can, it will pay off in the end. That's how
> science
> > advances, and that's what a mud is in a sense, a new world. Even as a
> staff
> > member, there are many things to discover about it, in some ways more
than
> > as a player. These metrics are the pulse of the mud. So far, the only
> thing
> > we've ever tracked that has turned out to be worthless to track was
> > identd's, as most systems didn't use them in the first place..
>
> More a question than anything.  One guy in this thread mentioned taking a
> week
> to implement functions for player statistics.  And it seems like most
people
> are
> hand coding statistics into their muds.  However, putting this stuff out
to
> log files
> which can be parsed later or shot into a database where queries can be run
> seems
> much more fruitful.  You could also make usage statistics available to
> players at that
> point so they know when they are more likely to find more players of their
> level,
> race, clan, etc...  online.
>
> So the question.  Do you hardcode or come up with more flexible statistics
> mediums?

    It really depends on what you're tracking. Anything based on being in
game, such as race/guild stats, is easy to track via
entering/leaving/linkdeath/recovery of the player character. Also, things
like the experience gained in an area/player deaths in an area/cash value of
items gained from an area, are easily triggered into statistical daemons.
Some things are snapshots, like the alignment of players at that instant, or
even a social snapshot [how many groups of 1,2,3,etc are there at that
instant].

    Personally, I keep track of the statistics within the game instead of
shooting them out to logs to be parsed later. However, for statistical tests
[in case you need to determine how things are going on subtler issues, or
for the hell of it], it's easy to output the data to a text file and import
in SPSS, or other statistical package. I doubt it's much less time to code
output logs for the data instead of tracking it internally, and then adding
an external output function if you need it.

    Some of these statistics are available on our web pages. Others are
meant for staff use only. And some are awaiting coding graphical output from
them for the web pages.

    Rayzam
    www.retromud.org






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