Analytics

[Mark]

Out of curiosity, and out of a desire to improve my programming, I decided to try to answer the question "has there been a winner of every race and class combination?" by using a script to scrape the character dumps from the ladder and then spit out a CSV and then analyze them in Excel. (I filtered for only Vanilla dumps, but kept dumps across all version numbers)

Very happy to explain/share any of the details if anyone is interested.

Here is a screenshot of the results!

There are many questions we could try to answer through analytics (cautiously!), the next one I want to try is analyzing the "Last Messages" part of the dump to discover which are the most deadly monsters!

[Derakon]

Interesting! High-Elves are a heck of a lot more popular than I expected, and meanwhile the poor Half-Troll is sadly neglected despite being one of the best races.

And nobody likes elves or half-elves, but I guess that's to be expected.

[MattB]

10 half-troll rogue winners?!

That's got to be tried next...

[Estie]

Originally Posted by Derakon

Interesting! High-Elves are a heck of a lot more popular than I expected, and meanwhile the poor Half-Troll is sadly neglected despite being one of the best races.

And nobody likes elves or half-elves, but I guess that's to be expected.

High elves are the best race bar none, as I keep saying *broad grin*.

Interesting indeed. What surprises me is dwarf making it second, I would have expected highelf-dunadan-halftroll as top 3, in this order. Maybe its just Timo playing dwarf priests all day though

@Matt: Half Troll rogues are awesome! Both from a rp viewpoint (sneaky lumbering....) and powergame viewpoint (rogue class countering the 2 big troll weaknesses, stealth and device). Yes, I feel the urge, too.

[donalde]

Interesting how many hT mage winners there are, rd most common winner on hT classes... and hT is actually 4th most common race to win as mage ... go figure. As priest class, hT priest is 2nd most common .. nice. I think I might play another hT game in any time soon.

Another interesting fact: All race / class combinations have been won, at least once.

[Derakon]

I suspect that half-troll mages are disproportionately likely to be posted to the ladder. I also wouldn't be surprised if several of the "only one dump has been posted of this race/class combination" instances were posted by the same person, who was out to do a victory with every combination.

[Malak Darkhunter]

Originally Posted by Derakon

Interesting! High-Elves are a heck of a lot more popular than I expected, and meanwhile the poor Half-Troll is sadly neglected despite being one of the best races.

And nobody likes elves or half-elves, but I guess that's to be expected.

I think this encourage the idea that perhaps these classes need to be made more interesting?

[Patashu]

Originally Posted by Malak Darkhunter

I think this encourage the idea that perhaps these classes need to be made more interesting?

Well, not necessarily. In Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, some of the least played races are really well balanced and fill their niche well, it's just that they're not 'trendy' or 'fashionable' to play, so they don't get played.

[Derakon]

Originally Posted by Malak Darkhunter

I think this encourage the idea that perhaps these classes need to be made more interesting?

I think a lot of races could stand to be better-differentiated; notice that Half-Orcs and Gnomes also have considerably smaller play counts. The whole Human -> Half-Elf -> Elf -> High-Elf spectrum is problematic though because it is a spectrum, and min-maxers are only ever going to see sense in picking one end of the extreme.

I'd suggest renaming Half-Elf and Elf to something different at the very least, to reduce the "spectrum problem".

[Timo Pietilä]

Originally Posted by Estie

Interesting indeed. What surprises me is dwarf making it second, I would have expected highelf-dunadan-halftroll as top 3, in this order. Maybe its just Timo playing dwarf priests all day though

I have very few ladder dumps. Maybe two or three total from comps. Or less.

Dwarf priest is easiest combo there is. Not the fastest, but easiest. You get high HP, bonus to CON, STR and spellcasting stat, one ingredient of the lock as innate resist and zero failure rate to spells. Priest with lock is also only class that can get to situation where it doesn't absolutely need any consumables at all (though restore mana potion or two is useful).

With dwarf priest you can play more relaxed game than with any other combo. It allows you to get near-fatal mistakes and survive, and it can stay toe-to-toe with any single opponent for entire duration of fight without any healing potions.