Finding your ideal team, with math? (Destiny)

by ckamp, Saturday, February 14, 2015, 00:56 (3382 days ago) @ BeardFade

Setting aside the fact that I'm not certain this is possible*, I am curious why we're using a K/D spread and not a K/D ratio? For example, 5 kills and 4 deaths is the same spread as 20 kills and 19 deaths, but the ratios aren't the same.

Games are won by spread, not ratios. Well, that is kind of true, but the data is a bit easier to read, work with, and normalize with a spread. You add up all the spreads and you get the amount your team won by. You add up all the ratios and average them and you get ???? I see why you would like to use a ratio, but it can muck things up because then you have to account for divisions by zero, mapping the #'s onto something that is intelligible, etc. For instance (I'm thinking of 3 kills and 2 deaths or vice versa), most people don't know readily that .67 is the inverse score of 1.5, but they can tell that that +1 and -1 are related.

I'm fine with other solutions, but I'm curious as to what formula you would use to bring k/d into relationship with the other parts of the equation.

Also, there is something to be said about simply the quantitative value of kills and deaths when playing with another person. For example, my average Kills per Match might be 11 when I play with randoms, but 18 when I play with you (ckamp) or 7 when I play with iconicbanana. As you (ckamp) pointed out the other night, a good crucible player will actually absorb more of the available kills and thus my quantity of kills be lower. So, we also need to make an algorithm that gives some weight to the quantity of kills and deaths that cannot be measured solely with a spread or ratio.

Hopefully this is where the aggregate kills and deaths of the two of you will balance that out a bit. The win/loss category will also help account against this phenomena. I'd also like to add assists into the personal part of the equation which will offset kill-absorbing a bit.

I think this also requires some adjustments made for match type. For example, captures lead to increased points per kill. Average captures per match could be useful, though of more use would be how many zones and duration of holding did you get? Not sure how these would way in, but 2 people could be great control partners, but horrible clash partners.

Ooof. Good question. I hadn't even considered control zones. Hopefully that is accounted for in the win/loss category, but I don't know of a way to measure control zone efficiency. You could probably sort the ranking by gametype?

Lastly, what considerations would we need to make in order to make this work for relationships greater than 2? How would we do this between 3-6 players?

I hadn't really thought of that yet, as I was focused on single-person comparisons, but I suppose that in part 1 of the equation you could simply do a combined k-d spread for the team. Each player would have their own score because of the individual component.

*What I need to find out (and I simply haven't looked yet) is if there is a way to pull in info for individual matches. If Bungie keeps stats of matches, great! I was thinking perhaps the best way to do this query would be to pull in an object of player 1's games and then search through that object for games that Player 2 participated in. Seems like a simple way to reduce the amount of data the query needs to process. Might be more challenging as we add Players 3-6. Once we're able to get which games are played together, we then need to evaluate performance separately and apply maths to quantify the relationship.

Sounds solid, but I'm horribly inexeperienced with APIs and the way the Destiny databases are configured.