An Analysis of The Leaderboard

This is an analysis of Subterfuge, created by Ron Carmel and Noel Lopsis for iPhone and Andriod. The data was scrubbed from the leaderboard, found here: http://subterfuge-game.com/leaderboards.html. This table includes records from when the game was beta-testing.

A glimpse of the data is provided below:

## Observations: 5,221
## Variables: 15
## $ rank         (int) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15...
## $ player       (chr) "RedQueenn", "HoodedKangaroo", "PudgyNinja", "Rad...
## $ rating       (int) 1709, 1680, 1661, 1658, 1642, 1640, 1635, 1634, 1...
## $ gold         (dbl) 17, 7, 9, 14, 11, 5, 17, 4, 7, 5, 17, 8, 9, 13, 1...
## $ silver       (dbl) 5, 3, 0, 6, 4, 2, 8, 5, 2, 5, 0, 8, 4, 2, 0, 3, 4...
## $ bronze       (dbl) 2, 8, 1, 6, 0, 5, 3, 8, 2, 5, 1, 2, 1, 0, 0, 3, 3...
## $ rated_games  (int) 22, 22, 11, 31, 18, 12, 29, 23, 12, 19, 11, 19, 1...
## $ total_games  (int) 37, 25, 12, 42, 22, 14, 46, 28, 16, 24, 20, 23, 1...
## $ finished     (dbl) 95, 96, 100, 93, 86, 100, 91, 100, 100, 88, 95, 9...
## $ eliminated   (dbl) 5, 4, 0, 7, 14, 0, 7, 0, 0, 4, 5, 9, 6, 6, 0, 0, ...
## $ resigned     (dbl) 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 2, 0, 0, 8, 0, 0, 0, 6, 0, 0, 0...
## $ joined       (date) 2015-10-18, 2015-10-19, 2015-10-21, 2015-10-20, ...
## $ total_medals (dbl) 24, 18, 10, 26, 15, 12, 28, 17, 11, 15, 18, 18, 1...
## $ adj_medals   (dbl) 63, 35, 28, 60, 41, 24, 70, 30, 27, 30, 52, 42, 3...
## $ total_days   (int) 174, 173, 171, 172, 168, 165, 385, 176, 176, 166,...

Top 10 Subterfuge Players

Congratulations to RedQueenn for being in first place out of a total of 5221 players. The current Top 10 players are:

Rank Name Rating Total Medals Days Since Joining
1 RedQueenn 1709 24 174
2 HoodedKangaroo 1680 18 173
3 PudgyNinja 1661 10 171
4 Radioactivity 1658 26 172
5 Hazelsmasher 1642 15 168
6 Jimidy 1640 12 165
7 AdmiralAdama 1635 28 385
8 Trent 1634 17 176
9 oz0n3 1627 11 176
10 Sydogg 1614 15 166

Visualizing The Games

Games Played

A lot of games have been played. The average player has played a mean of 9.2836621 and a median of 6 games.

Note: One player has played in 158 games. For visualizations purposes, s/he was excluded.

Ratings

The rating system is the heirarchy of Subterfuge. The place a player finishes at the end of each game adds or subtracts points to the player’s rating. The formula for points giving is complicated in the fact that a player earns or loses points based off their place finished and the relative poitns of their opponents.

A 9th place finish subracts more rating points than a 7th place finish, just as a 1st place finish adds more than a 3rd place finish. But if a player beats opponents with a higher ranking than his/her’s, the gain is higher than normal.

All players start with a rating of 1200.

The median rating of the players at each level or rated games played, signified by the thick black line in each box and whiskers plot, show a general increase of rating as the number of rated games increase. However, there are better ways to show this. The bow plots show the distribution of ratings at each level of total rated games played.

The line represents the average rating and standard error of players at each level of games played. The rating tends to peak between 20 and 30 rated games played before dipping again. With fewer observations as the Total Rated Games Played increases, the standard error expands.

Medals, gold, silver and bronze, are earned for 1st, 2nd and 3rd place finishes. Bronzes are only awarded with games of 8 or more. Silver medals are awarded in games of 5 or more, and a gold medal is always awarded.

Medals earned are inherently related to Rating, as a gold silver or bronze nearly walys equates to adding points to the rating. However, a player could earn 10 medals in 10 games, earning a very high Rating or have 10 medals in 30 games, finishing in the bottom half of the 20 other games, and have a low Rating.

It seems as if the peak rating is at 25-30 medals earned. Again, the standard error expands as Total Medals Earned increases due to low observations.

Top 10% of Players

There are a total of 5221 players registered on Subterfuge. Most players are rated below 1200. Likely, they played one game and gave up after losing. :(

However, the top 10% of the these players consist of 522 players with a minimum ranking of 1326.