{"id":5505,"date":"2017-02-13T12:07:04","date_gmt":"2017-02-13T17:07:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/?p=5505"},"modified":"2021-02-17T17:28:12","modified_gmt":"2021-02-17T22:28:12","slug":"x-wing-pilot-statistics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/2017\/02\/x-wing-pilot-statistics\/","title":{"rendered":"X-Wing Pilot Statistics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently I got hassled at the local shop<\/a> for breaking out my B-Wings<\/a> for yet another Friday of X-Wing,<\/em> so\u00a0I started developing\u00a0some new\u00a0lists.\u00a0In one idea\u00a0I had a\u00a0point to spend and open slots on a\u00a0Green Squadron A-Wing<\/a>. I realized that you could combo Veteran Instincts<\/a>, A-Wing Test Pilot<\/a>, and Adaptability<\/a> to bump it\u00a0up 3 pilot skill levels\u00a0for just 1 squad point cost, taking it\u00a0to PS6. But would that be actually do anything, let alone be the best option? A credible theory I’ve put some stock into is that there’s almost no value to increasing pilot skill in the\u00a0middle band from ~3 to ~6, because aces will still beat\u00a0you and swarm ships were already below you.<\/p>\n

So, I got to wondering: What is the average skill of all the pilots in the game? The theory is that if the combo puts the A-Wing’s pilot skill\u00a0above\u00a0half the ships in the game then it would get to shoot more than half the ships it might encounter before they\u00a0could shoot it, and\u00a0that’s maybe worthwhile. But then I had an\u00a0important follow-on observation: There are a ton of unpopular pilots and ships\u00a0in the game. So what is\u00a0the\u00a0average skill of all the pilots people actually use?<\/p>\n

To answer those questions I wrote some simple programs\u00a0to compile\u00a0the necessary data from a couple sources. That data is then exported as simple CSV files, so that even non-programmers can play around with them using any spreadsheet tool they wish and conduct their own data-driven investigations toward\u00a0squadron building. The scripts as well as archived outputs are linked below, along with an example of\u00a0how to use the data in answering those\u00a0pilot skill questions. From there\u00a0I also continue\u00a0development of my metrics for evaluating beginner squadrons<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/a>

A brave Green Squadron pilot homes in on a B-Wing.<\/p><\/div>\n

Data<\/h2>\n

The X-Wing<\/em>\u00a0community has built a number of great resources and\u00a0data sets, many of which interoperate.\u00a0In particular,\u00a0most of them use identifiers\u00a0and schemas from the X-Wing Squadron Specification (XWS)<\/a> so that they can do things like import and export squad lists to and from other tools. Several tools also directly utilize the comprehensive card data\u00a0and images\u00a0collected in the X-Wing\u00a0Data<\/a> repository. Many tournament lists have been upload over the past ~3 years to List Juggler<\/a>\u00a0by event organizers and community members. The\u00a0latter itself presents a lot of interesting data for analysis (e.g., its time series charts<\/a>), but I couldn’t seem to clearly answer some of the questions I had with just its web interface. So I wrote a script to download\u00a0lists from\u00a0List Juggler, and another to correlate them with the ship and pilot data from X-Wing Data. Those scripts are available\u00a0in the X-Wing CSV<\/a>\u00a0repository on GitHub.<\/p>\n

So that non-programmers don’t have to set up the programming environment\u00a0required to run the scripts, archived data is\u00a0included<\/a>\u00a0in the repository. These are\u00a0linked from\u00a0the main README page<\/a>, which will be updated as new releases come out.<\/p>\n

There are currently three files\u00a0generated by the compilation script:<\/p>\n