Hey everyone! A quick update about Karl.gg: we just deployed a new feature to the website! Inspired by the series of blog posts I had written in the past about "Pickrate Analytics", we wanted to make an interface where anyone can see the pickrates of the various classes, weapons, and weapon mods based on user-submitted loadouts to this website. Today, we're taking the first step!
- To access the new pickrates: at the top of the website, where the "Browse" link used to be, there's now a menu named "Loadouts". Click on that to expand the menu, and then you can either browse loadouts like normal, or go to the Pick Rates page.
- For this first iteration, we're starting with "global pickrate" calculations, instead of "relative pickrate" like I had done by hand for the Pickrate Analytics blog posts. What that means is: if there are 1000 loadouts that have been either submitted or edited during this update, and 12 of them use Engineer PGL T5.B mod "Spiky Grenade", then Spiky Grenade would show its pickrate as 12/1000 = 1.2%. That same formula gets used all the way down, starting at the Classes level, down to Primary Weapons and Secondary Weapons, and then all the way down to the Weapon Mods.
- Each pickrate statistic gets displayed in a small box with common elements: a picture in the top left, the name in the bottom left, the total number of loadouts that use it in the top middle, the current global percentage pickrate in bottom middle in orange font, the global percentage pickrate from the previous update just to the right of the current pickrate, and then on the bottom right the relative change from previous to current. For Classes, you can click on the class icon to view that class' Guns pickrates. For Guns, you can click on that weapon's icon to view that weapon's Mods pickrates. For all of them, you can click on the number of loadouts displayed in the top middle, and it will take you to the Browse page, filtering down to the loadouts that use what you clicked on.
- Regarding the pickrate percentage for the previous update: when a loadout submitted on a previous update gets edited, it will simultaneously remove it from the previous pickrate percentage while adding it to the current percentage. Because of how we've chosen to store information in our database, we don't keep information about old updates' values and corresponding loadouts. As we update the weapons and old loadouts get edited, the "historical data" slowly disappears.
- Regarding the relative percent change between previous pickrate and current pickrate: the formula used is (current pickrate / previous pickrate) - 1. As such, if the current value is higher than the previous one, then the relative change will be a positive percentage number. Vice versa, if the current is lower than previous, it will be a negative percentage.
- There is some special logic to explain about the Guns' pickrates. In particular, the percentages are split into two groups, between Primary weapons and Secondary weapons, so adding up all 24 weapons will yield >100%. Additionally, because loadouts can be submitted without a Primary (or without a Secondary, or with neither), the global percentages won't add up to 100% for the Guns of either category. That's just an effect of the formula being used right now; nothing to worry about.
Our goal with this first implementation is to start exposing the data to the public, choosing to use an easier but less nuanced formula in order to get the feature deployed quickly. Think of this as kind of the "first draft", sharing the data in a very basic form while we keep working on the improvements. We've got several ideas in mind of what we could add, how we can change the formulas, etc, but we wanted to make sure that we deployed the feature at this milestone first. Not only does this provide the functionality to our community earlier, it also lets us hear feedback from you about it as we keep iterating. If you have suggestions for the new pickrates feature, feel free to stop by the DRG Community Tools Discord server and share it with us there.
We're excited to share this new feature with everyone, and we hope that as we keep iterating on it and making improvements it will grow into a useful reference tool that the DRG community can use and enjoy. Karl.gg is still going strong, and we're committed to developing it for the forseeable future.
Rock and Stone!
The Karl.gg team: Rawrocopter, Darthmaul, and MeatShield