1. I want to know: Which weapon is most efficient for me from Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War? This question is very interesting to me because I love the game and always want to get better. Plus if I have an opportunity to use my own data this will drive me even further.

  2. I intend to answer this question by gathering data from from cod trackers website. This will require table scraping from their website but through my playstation network account. This is suitble data because there is about 30 observations and over 10 variables. Some of this data includes weapon type, stats regarding weapon performance, time played, and other variables. The tidyverse, xml, httr, and rvest are some of the main packages I will be using to gather and manipulate the data.

  3. Almost all of the variables needed to be transformed into numeric in order to calculate performance statistics. Any variable that reached over 1000 needed to use the gsub function to sub out the comma in order to successfully make it a numeric variable. The new variable that was made was weapon_class. This is a helpful variable that can help break up and organize the data for easy manipulation.

To narrow the weapon variable, this chart was made to show the differences in damage between weapon class. You can see that sub machine guns and assualt rifles not only did the most damage, but you can assume that these classes had the most time played. To find the best weapon, the choices are now between aassault rifles or sub machine guns.

Even though I am mostly searching for weapons in the assault rifles or sub machine gun class, I decided to select all weapon classes because this chart displays such an interesting variable. Assault rifles have the highest number of games played and maintain accuracy at least 24% across all weapons in its class. With less games playes, however, the sub machine guns maintian at least 25% across all weapons in its category. You can see that with less games played, the sub machine guns have a relatively higher accuracy.

Although the accuracy and damage reveal important statisitcs, one of the most prominant stats in a first person shooter is the kill death ratio. This can show truly how good a player is with a weapon. Are they killing the enemy more than getting killed? If true, this will yeild a positive K/D ratio, which is more or less the goal of any player. The results show that pistols have the highest K/D but remember we were looking for assault rifles and sub machine guns because they are the most played. Even though both classes are just above a 1.0, sub machine guns have a higher average K/D among all weapons used in its class. Higher average K/D could mean that I perform better with this weapon class. This filters the weapons even further and takes me one step closer to finding the best weapon.

Taking all weapons used from the smg and ar classes, I threw the data in a bar chart comparing the kills per minute. This is important because it shows how active I a being with each weapon per match. For example, If I have over 4 kills a minute I am most likely going on a streak and/or not ‘camping’. This can tell me that I am very succcessful with that weapon. Looking at the chart, the Mac-10, KSP 45, and the AK-74u are the only weapons in which I kill four enemies a minute. All three of these weapons are apart of the sub machine gun class. Based on the previous information, there is no need to look at any other weapon class. This will take us to the next visualization which can show a more in depth comparison of these weapons.

The sub machine gun class seems to be the most efficient. This chart looks at the kill/death ratio for all guns in the smg class. This statistic might be the most important statistic when solving which weapon is most efficient. In a game like Call of Duty, not many players are concerned about score/minute, assists, or even wins. The KSP 45 has the highest K/D, making this the best weapon in its class and ,therefore, the best weapon for me.

  1. My analytical methods were good and produced results that can be understood. With that said, there are some methods that I can do in the future to make my results even more significant. For starters, I am curious about the accuracy data and if it is significant or not. If you recall, the assault rifles had more games played but the sub machine guns had a higher accuracy. At that analysis, I concluded that there were enough games played with the smgs so that their accuracy was truly better than the assualt rifle class. To proceed with this method, I beleive putting in an alpha of a specific significance can tell me if the smgs are more accurate than the assault rifles or not. Another statistic I would like to include would be the average life of each weapon. I was unsuccessful in converting that column into a time or numeric variable, but I believe I had enough information to conclude that the KSP 45 was my best weapon. If I were to successfully convert this variable, I would insert it into a bar or scatter chart against Kills or K/D to see if the longer I am alive, I am actually producing kills/score. Versus if I am just camping with the weapon.