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Wolf/Mafia project help required.

Ben

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Hey everyone,

First off if someone wants to punt this thread elsewhere as it's not a game, that's cool, I just wanted to hit the target audience.

I've played a couple of Wolf games now, although not to great effect. My time just isn't conducive to reading the myriad shitposts and trying to determine what's an in-joke or not. Regardless, I still enjoy them and it's been stuck in my head for a while.

So I decided to go another angle and see whether I could build out some kind of statistic tracking to give a visual layout of the games and how they'd played out. I've tried a few different methods, one being @Crystal being awesome and giving me a way to export the threads as CSV files and then trying to scrape the "I vote for", etc. out of the post bodies. This hasn't proven very accurate in so far as the outcome of the game though, as people mentioning other's voting and stuff gives false positive results on the searches.

I have a first version I started working with using that fuzzy method, but I've noticed a couple of spots where it got the data wrong. I started trying to correct it ad hoc, but it'd probably be better to fix the input rather than continue to deal with it after. One or two things might have broken in the live version I have up as I was tweaking the data but didn't go back through to correct things in the layout afterwards. I think it's probably around Alu or Raine, who I'd tried to group/rename other usernames under just the one. Still, it gives the general idea of what I'm going for. You should still be able to click on most elements and filter the other sections down based on that data point, like clicking a username to get their played roles, posts in each game, etc.

Preliminary workup of what I'm going for (https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/benjamin.talbot/viz/GWF_Wolf/Dashboard1):
Screenshot 2023-09-10 150719.png

That's why I'm asking for help in cleaning this up and making sure the data is accurate, so that the dashboard items are on point. I've made a couple of Google Sheets which aim to track the major data around these games. I've only so far entered some data from @Zell 17 games but I tried to build it with forethought to include any @Fire Queen Mafia games, or any others people have or will run.

I am tracking;

Game
This is where I really need the most help. My intent is for this page to track the general flow and results of the game phases. I entered a couple of items from the first thread, but I haven't had time to crawl through them all and fill this in.

Role
I copied in everything from Zell's dictionary and then tried to separate out the different actions each role could do, though I did take a few liberties to try to differentiate a couple. The seer roles for instance, I defined as "Sense Team", "Sense Karma", and "Sense Role" to convey what information they were gathering. I also adjusted all the Wolf roles to be "Berserk Wolf", "Seer Wolf", "Trickster Wolf", etc.

Player
This one tracks all the players who participated in each game and their win/tie/loss/MVP stats. It's pretty straight forward; the only real caveat is that Alu should just be entered as Alu and not whatever fanciful name he's been burdened with at that time.

Action
This is perhaps the workhorse of the setup. I've tried to set it up to essentially read as a statement defining what that player did during that phase. The orange columns are ones that shouldn't be edited, although after a new entry is submitted via the form some of the formula may need to be copied over onto blank cells.

I'm not going to drop the links to the Google Sheets directly, but I'd like to give @Zell 17 and @Fire Queen access to begin with, as these are their games and it might potentially help track running the games a little easier. I could use perhaps another 2 people who'd be down to do some data entry and crawl through the old game threads to make sure they're tracked correctly. I think for Zell's games, the majority of the work would revolve around identifying the votes everyone made, either on an individual basis or at least the team votes for each phase. I have nothing tracked for Mafia though so all of those roles, etc. will need to be defined too.

If you'd like to take a look and help out with the data, please drop me a PM and I'll share the sheet links.

I imagine the layout is going to change some from what I've got shown above, just because I'd be changing the data source and would have to tweak some things anyway. I'm hoping I could get more granular on the details too but I honestly need to play with the data once it's standardized to see what I can make work. If anyone has any thoughts or ideas of what would be interesting to track for these games, please feel free to drop the suggestion to me and I'll see what I can make happen.

Any other thoughts are welcome too!

Thanks!
 

Ben

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Is this the wolf equivalent of baseball analytics?
I'm no sports guy to really know what baseball stats track, but probably. I'm looking to get everyone's kill count and accusation accuracy, etc. if possible.

I can’t offer any help, as I’m not a player, but holy shit that is incredibly detailed. Excellent idea and execution so far.
Much appreciated.

Holy hell, Ben, this is some amazing work you're doing! Sorry the CSV extraction method didn't work out, but I can see you've got a great thing going here!
It'll still prove useful. I can continue to use it for grabbing the actual activity in the threads to graph over time, even if I'm not able to get the data from it alone.

I very much still appreciate you finding that solution for me.
 
Last edited:
Honestly I think I only deserve 1 but the people spoke
season 4 GIF
 

Ben

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lmao I've won games it's just been a while. I'm guessing that's part of what Ben was pointing out when he said some stats were messed up by all my name changes.
Yeah, in that version I linked, it'd lost the association between your posts and the small extra data set I'd defined the roles in. Some quirk in the grouping of usernames was causing a bunch of them to show as null values. I'm confident with using a more structured data format that won't be a continued issue. The only problem I've had so far has been from copying in some values directly from posts and it seems to fuck with the apostrophe in "Fool's Requiem", sometimes using the angled "typographer's apostrophe" instead of the straight one, and the difference in character is enough to throw off the VLOOKUP.

The original method was also very fallible to begin with. I was essentially trying to scrape all of the posts and looking for instances of someone posting another's username within a BBCode bold tag, with or without an "I voted for" or similar before it. Same for "abstain" and "skip" in bold tags. Of course, there were a ton of instances where this was finding results that weren't actual votes or actions. It worked enough to get a fuzzy idea of the statistics, but I want it accurate so people could actually get value out of this.

I do still want to try to preserve having the thread posts pulled in too, because I think once the games are concluded, having the ability to look back through and see how everyone was playing given the perspective of their role would be interesting. Counting the mentions of other usernames would still probably be worth it, I imagine there's insight around who was pushing suspicion on others and so on.
 

Ben

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Wait, why did this die? Need updates!
I never actually had anyone help me flesh out the data, or even respond that they wanted to use all the stuff I'd set up to track things for future games. So I just forgot about it, like playing.

All the shit's still there I guess, but I don't particularly feel the zest I did for the project like I had in September. If you want to look it over as a game runner you can request access or whatever. Hopefully I set it up with enough forethought to accommodate the new game styles, if not I'll try to revisit it when I can.
 

Raine

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I think I saw this thread when it was first posted, meant to do... something. Then got distracted and never found my way back because I'm one of those heathens that ignores stuck threads. 👀

Probably would've been useful to remember given how many times I compiled full voting history for phases, but alas. Alas and RIP, even, given the poll thing.

But super late good job on what's there! :^
 
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