Dominion Strategy Forum

Archive => Archive => Innovation General Discussion => Topic started by: palangus on April 09, 2013, 11:13:39 am

Title: Opening Meld Statistics
Post by: palangus on April 09, 2013, 11:13:39 am
All the brouhaha over the value of writing got me curious.
Some numbers on initial melds (data from march, usual caveats apply, N ~ 16000)

Initial meld popularity:
(http://i.imgur.com/KhAWwrfl.png)

EDIT: once more, with errorbars
Winningness (# won) / (# won + # lost) - 0.5:
(http://i.imgur.com/K7O3PO4l.png)

Of course this may be inaccurate due to skill effects, when there is more data it will be interesting to rerun this broken down by player level.
Title: Re: Opening Meld Statistics
Post by: theory on April 09, 2013, 11:23:10 am
I am genuinely surprised that Tools beats Metalworking.
Title: Re: Opening Meld Statistics
Post by: palangus on April 09, 2013, 11:36:36 am
I am genuinely surprised that Tools beats Metalworking.

I should mention that the error bars on winningness are quite large - I don't know enough to calculate something rigorous, but I'd estimate sigma is about 0.01-0.02
See modified graph for errorbars
Title: Re: Opening Meld Statistics
Post by: rrenaud on April 09, 2013, 12:05:35 pm
Let n = number of times played, w = games won.

p = w / n
var = p * (1 - p) / n
sigma = sqrt(var)
confidence_interval = p +- 2 * sigma

Title: Re: Opening Meld Statistics
Post by: HiveMindEmulator on April 09, 2013, 12:18:12 pm
A similar thing was discussed here (http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=7505.0), but some of the results are quite different. The data is from a couple weeks ago, so maybe trends have changed (as there are a lot more people playing now). Does that account for all the differences?
Title: Re: Opening Meld Statistics
Post by: palangus on April 09, 2013, 12:28:49 pm
A similar thing was discussed here (http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=7505.0), but some of the results are quite different. The data is from a couple weeks ago, so maybe trends have changed (as there are a lot more people playing now). Does that account for all the differences?

Interesting. One thing I noticed is that he saw no first player advantage, however in the data I analyzed the 2nd player won 57+/-1% of the time.
Title: Re: Opening Meld Statistics
Post by: ipofanes on April 10, 2013, 05:45:49 am
A similar thing was discussed here (http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=7505.0), but some of the results are quite different. The data is from a couple weeks ago, so maybe trends have changed (as there are a lot more people playing now). Does that account for all the differences?

Interesting. One thing I noticed is that he saw no first player advantage, however in the data I analyzed the 2nd player won 57+/-1% of the time.

I don't see a contradiction here.
Title: Re: Opening Meld Statistics
Post by: Hideyoshi on April 10, 2013, 06:10:26 am
Well, after reading the statistics, I may say that the opening meld is very important to the game, and the game seems to depend on luck of the first meld.

(Well, it seems I am saying something useless...)

Then, the next question will be:

what should we do if we get something useless for the first card, such as archery and agriculture?
Title: Re: Opening Meld Statistics
Post by: timchen on April 10, 2013, 07:04:05 am
I have to say that I cannot really make any conclusion before we understand the huge discrepancy between this and the previous result...
Title: Re: Opening Meld Statistics
Post by: WinterSpartan on April 10, 2013, 07:32:09 am
A similar thing was discussed here (http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=7505.0), but some of the results are quite different. The data is from a couple weeks ago, so maybe trends have changed (as there are a lot more people playing now). Does that account for all the differences?

Interesting. One thing I noticed is that he saw no first player advantage, however in the data I analyzed the 2nd player won 57+/-1% of the time.

I don't see a contradiction here.

If I had to explain this, I would point out that a lot of the alphabetically early cards are inferior (Agriculture, Archery, City States, Code of Laws). 2nd player winning more, to me, does not imply 2nd player advantage as much as that a player who decides to meld one of those is more likely to be lower-skill and thus lose anyway.
Title: Re: Opening Meld Statistics
Post by: palangus on April 10, 2013, 10:17:51 am
A similar thing was discussed here (http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=7505.0), but some of the results are quite different. The data is from a couple weeks ago, so maybe trends have changed (as there are a lot more people playing now). Does that account for all the differences?

Interesting. One thing I noticed is that he saw no first player advantage, however in the data I analyzed the 2nd player won 57+/-1% of the time.

I don't see a contradiction here.

If I had to explain this, I would point out that a lot of the alphabetically early cards are inferior (Agriculture, Archery, City States, Code of Laws). 2nd player winning more, to me, does not imply 2nd player advantage as much as that a player who decides to meld one of those is more likely to be lower-skill and thus lose anyway.

Yes, I think this is probably right. Of course, they might not be low skill, they could just happen to have ended up choosing between Agriculture and Archery.
Title: Re: Opening Meld Statistics
Post by: palangus on April 10, 2013, 10:18:41 am
A similar thing was discussed here (http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=7505.0), but some of the results are quite different. The data is from a couple weeks ago, so maybe trends have changed (as there are a lot more people playing now). Does that account for all the differences?

Interesting. One thing I noticed is that he saw no first player advantage, however in the data I analyzed the 2nd player won 57+/-1% of the time.

I don't see a contradiction here.

I could have worded that better - they saw an exact 50-50 split (don't know what their uncertainty was), while I saw a quite significant bias towards the 2nd player.
Title: Re: Opening Meld Statistics
Post by: ksasaki on April 10, 2013, 06:48:44 pm
I'm really surprised that an opening of domestication has a <50% win percentage, I feel like that's a pretty top tier card right there!

However the wheel up there at the top is no surprise...it remains super powerful even in echoes, particularly if you can tuck umbrella and splay it left.
Title: Re: Opening Meld Statistics
Post by: ipofanes on April 11, 2013, 02:41:14 am
A similar thing was discussed here (http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=7505.0), but some of the results are quite different. The data is from a couple weeks ago, so maybe trends have changed (as there are a lot more people playing now). Does that account for all the differences?

Interesting. One thing I noticed is that he saw no first player advantage, however in the data I analyzed the 2nd player won 57+/-1% of the time.

I don't see a contradiction here.

I could have worded that better - they saw an exact 50-50 split (don't know what their uncertainty was), while I saw a quite significant bias towards the 2nd player.

Have you controlled for powerful cards likely to be second in alphabetical order? (These effects may not be properly separated.)