[Introducing] Next-Gen WW Stats with WereBot!* (Suggestions Welcome)

[Phonemelter]

Introducing WereBot* - by Melter Industries!​

Have you ever wanted to know how many votes a player has made, or even wanted to see a full game's vote history, but can't be arsed to reread the whole thread? Ever wonder how many words per post a player has averaged and how it compares to the game's mean? Need to figure out who is spamming the most so you can kill them? Well look no further - the future of WW is now! These are just some of the statistics that can (potentially) be tracked with WereBotTM, the data-gathering "bot" that I have recently brought to life.

Next-Gen Stats promise to give you more statistical information than ever before about past and present Werewolf games!

So what *exactly* is WereBot?

Without getting too technical, WereBot is a screen scraper / web crawler that can also interact with web pages. Basically it can do everything you can do when reading the forums - it can login (to an existing account, given credentials), make posts, click around, etc. - but much faster. As you can imagine, this means it can process data in posts and produce just about any kind of information you might want to know (within reason).

Why?

I wanted to work on a fun side-project and play with some tools I hadn't used before. Plus I figured writing a program that can analyze and post data about Werewolf games would be useful for both hosts and players. The long-term goal is to either dedicate a website / application to it that people can visit and request data from (and / or display current game data), host it something and have it "interactable" (within reason) in the thread, generate charts and graphs to display relevant data (similar to my voting visuals), or something along those lines. It probably won't ever get to that stage and just remain on my end, but you never know! I'm willing to distribute the code / make it open-sourced.

Current Functions

• Post counter
• Lists who each player is currently voting

Planned / Potential Functions

Feel free to make suggestions!

Voting

• Vote count (gets who each player is voting for, but no count yet)
• Vote history (individual and overall)

Posting

• Post count
• Words per post (and statistical measures based off that)
• Time since last post
• Average time between posts

Examples

隐藏: The Appening Day 1 post count

For reference, here is the current WW game post count:

Sir Magorien Maxihand VI Esq.: 135
Moose!: 92
Big McLarge-Huge: 73
Lord Brutus: 56
Xardob: 48
Phonemelter: 32
Vieira: 29
MaHuD: 29
Lumos: 24
Twinkle: 19
Vermillion_Hawk: 16
Eternal: 12
Delta[K]: 9
Untitled.: 9
QuailLover: 1

隐藏: Black Death post count

So I am not sure where it is going wrong, but it seems to have counted an extra 10 posts somewhere along the lines (it didn't do that for the current game's count). Anyways, here's a what the post count was through 252 pages (or 3790 posts, according to my addition).

Black Death Post Count

Pharaoh X Llandy: 828
Phonemelter: 723
Xardob: 367
Leprechaun: 297
Adaham: 182
ejnomad: 172
AWdeV: 144
Seff: 138
Orj: 131
Whoopin: 108
Locke: 106
Twinkle: 89
Eternal: 85
The Wolf: 83
snoopy-91: 79
SootShade: 67
Shatari: 48
Velpulus: 40
Reverend L. Lamb: 39
Moss: 31
Moose!: 12
MaHuD: 11
Regendur: 8
Austupaio: 2

Want to get involved?

As mentioned, please suggest any kind of data you think would be beneficial to have both as a host and player! If you want to get involved on the coding side (I don't have time to do everything myself in any sort of quick timeline), all you need to know is javascript and how to access DOM elements with it - it's that simple! Just let me know what you want to work on and I'll tell you how the function should be structured.

*Name pending
**The artwork is not by me - go make something custom!

 

[Xardob]

*Name pending

I doubt you'll find a better name than WereBot.

And since we're discussing features, how about having WereBot look up how many times a particular thing was done by a wolf and by an innocent so we can finally put to rest the argument of what is a wolf tell? 

 

[Pharaoh Llandy]

Or have it analyse a player's scum play vs innocent play so it can reliably report back on meta. We can call it MetaBot, and it will save us all from having to read pages upon pages of meta arguments.

 

[Phonemelter]

The problem with both those suggestions is they require an in-depth understanding of language and are hard to capture purely with simple word parsing. For example, there are many ways to write a "oh no, we killed the seer" post, and I cannot capture those variances. I can calculate how many times a person has said "seer," though.

Basically, anything that involves meta and is more than a simple statistic is outside the scope of this project. However, this could theoretically be used to find more general trends (if they exist) to assist in analyzing meta.

 

[Pharaoh Llandy]

I was actually joking.

 

[Phonemelter]

I know you guys are, but in case anyone was actually wondering that, I figured I was give a serious answer for their benefit. 

 

[Pharaoh Llandy]

Could WereBot (that's it's name now, don't bother trying to call it anything else) handle prodding/poking once it determines that a player has gone 48 hours without a post?

BTW, how do we feel about prodding vs. poking? I personally prefer prodding, as it reminds me of cattle prodding. Whereas poking has more of a Facebook connotation, and I hate Facebook. Should we maybe make a new poll for it?

 

[NotAdaham]

Could WereBot (that's it's name now, don't bother trying to call it anything else) handle prodding/poking once it determines that a player has gone 48 hours without a post?

It's far from settled. There is still a chance it'll be called after the most memorable of second days in warfare, WW2-D2! 

BTW, how do we feel about prodding vs. poking? I personally prefer prodding, as it reminds me of cattle prodding. Whereas poking has more of a Facebook connotation, and I hate Facebook. Should we maybe make a new poll for it?

So that's why my stalking attempts on Facebook have failed. Get online, I wanna track your every move! 

 

[Phonemelter]

Ooo, prodding sounds good! It can totally do that

 

[NotAdaham]

Ooo, prodding sounds good! It can totally do that

From my work experience I have my doubts that automated prodding will yield the desired results, but here's hoping the best! 

 

[Pharaoh Llandy]

He just needs to put the correct level of sympathy/threat into the prod. I propose the following template:

Dear [playername]

Just a quick PM to let you know that it's been [# of days] since your last post. I know that for many players, Werewolf isn't able to take priority, but if you don't post within [# number of hours] I'm going to ask resident stalker, Big McLarge-Huge, to find you on Facebook and pester your timeline with his barely-dressed Kevin Sorbo avatar until you commence posting in a timely fashion.

Sincerely,

The Flying Monkey

 

[NotAdaham]

 

[Lord Brutus]

Or have it analyse a player's scum play vs innocent play so it can reliably report back on meta. We can call it MetaBot, and it will save us all from having to read pages upon pages of meta arguments.

That's a wolf tell right there, lazy bugger.  After my first game as a replacement, I spent 32 hours reading and analyzing old WW games for clues.  No, not in a row, you twit.

 

[QuailLover]

Ideas:

So we could make it a nice thing to organize a player's thoughts to. Have a note section. A dropdown menu with things like "Suspicious" "Most likely wolf"

Also for Hosts, it can look for votes.  (Especially after my last debacle...) But it could also have the list of players with their roles. A random number generator/random role assigner, and etc.

 

[Phonemelter]

What you are describing is basically a separate application (aside from the vote counting, which is in progress), but it wouldn't be too difficult to make a generic "WW tools" site that includes a notes UI that and role assigner. Technically (ideally) all of these parts could be combined, but WereBot is a separate piece.

 

[Phonemelter]

Alrighty, let's see how accurate my vote counting bot is!
(Note: It currently just returns a list of who each player is voting for and doesn't add up the votes yet due to name variations - will be adding that soonish)

Votecount

Big McLarge (3) - Moose!, Hawk, Eternal

Hawk (2) - QuailLover, Brutus
Brutus (2) - Xardob, Vieira

Vieira (1) - Big McLarge
Eternal (1) - MaHuD

Not Voting (2) - Delta[K],  Lumos

(Names I crossed off are not relevant to the current vote count, and the color coding I added is just to make comparison easier)
[quote author=WereBot]
Phonemelter: COLORLIMEGREEN CLASSBBC COLORCONFIRM
Moose!: BIG MCLARGE HUGE
Lord Brutus: VERMILLION HAWK
Vermillion_Hawk: BIG MCLARGE HUGE
Lumos: UNTITLED
Eternal: BIG MCLARGE HUGE
MaHuD: ETERNAL
Big McLarge-Huge: VIEIRA
Twinkle: BRUTUS
Vieira: LORD BRUTUS
Sir Magorien Maxihand VI Esq.:  UNTITLED
Untitled.: BRUTUS
Delta[K]:  ETERNAL
Xardob:  BRUTUS
QuailLover: VERMILLION HAWK
[/quote]

Looks about right! I'll probably have to handle dead players and votes from previous days by changing the range of pages it looks at and change the formatting a bit.

隐藏: Raw Output

Phonemelter: COLORLIMEGREEN CLASSBBC COLORCONFIRM
Moose!: BIG MCLARGE HUGE
Lord Brutus: VERMILLION HAWK
Vermillion_Hawk: BIG MCLARGE HUGE
Lumos: UNTITLED
Eternal: BIG MCLARGE HUGE
MaHuD: ETERNAL
Big McLarge-Huge: VIEIRA
Twinkle: BRUTUS
Vieira: LORD BRUTUS
Sir Magorien Maxihand VI Esq.:  UNTITLED
Untitled.: BRUTUS
Delta[K]:  ETERNAL
Xardob:  BRUTUS
QuailLover: VERMILLION HAWK

 

[Pharaoh Llandy]

I actually like the colour coding.

 

[Phonemelter]

I can probably figure out a way to always have it output that automatically (instead of manually adding it)

 

[Xardob]

Does the forum support that many colors?

And just so you know, as soon as WereBot goes live, I'll do my best to break him.

 

[Phonemelter]

This is the forum green.

This is a manually-entered hex-value dark green.

So yes, you can add colors outside of what the dropdown gives in case more are needed.