Boring Data Collation Post

For some unknown reason over three people (three! Different!! People) have asked me how the data is collated. Hence the following, highly unthrilling, post for most people connected with L5R. But if you are one of the three then prepare to be enthralled!.

Usually daily I collect the raw data from the turn reports that has been nicely collated by the leagues admin team of Reiga , InsanityRises and Khrytos.

This is in spreadsheet format and basically summarised the report sheet you fill in post game.

My first issue is that people cannot type and get the names wrong plus names is just a dodgy concept as a unique identifiers anyway so I have to validate the entry to see who everyone is. For this I wrote a cheap and cheerful winforms app.

I enter the raw results in the left pane and in the right pane I enter a sheet of names and alias for all the known valid players. I then press valid and every record it recognises goes in the top middle box and any name it doesn't in the bottom lower. You will notice it attaches the players correct player id if it finds the player.

I then work through the bottom list working out 'why'. Most in that current box were uinexpected spaces or cleared spaces with a few name typos. If those aren't obvious then I go to the group list to see if the name is easier matched there.  

Any players without id's are usually indicated at this point so I enter the id on the summary spreadsheet and highlight yellow so I know to add them to the primary app later.

This continue until all reports are 'valid'

I then copy the valid check box contents and paste into word. When a line has been correctly entered I switch the fore color to red.

Then for each record I search for the player id and manually adjust the background colour of the summary box. If I see just one report then the colours are pink and light blue if two then red and dark blue. This allows me 'catch' any late reports which might otherwise get double reported. If a clan has not appeared it is also entered now. The little coloured grid serves two purposes. Its primary one is to ensure results do not get double entered and the secondary is that it provides a nice visual representation of who is dominating/not dominating the current pod.

Then the player ids along with rough name gets entered onto a results tab.

Finally the web app is fired up. After adding any 'new' players the results pane is opened. 

Here the competition id is entered which loads all the current data then the ids are entered. On id entry the players tag will appear which is then checked against the rough names so we can check the loaded players are correct.

Then the add button is pressed, the results are added to the end of the table and the table is checked to see that the correct results have gone in.

This is repeated until the league ends when a 'commit' button is pressed which throws all the results at the code black box which re-calculates everyone's Ratings allowing me to then access a summary page for the global stats that also allows the result to be filtered by clan showing the clan leaders.

So there we have it. Not very exciting but how the data is collated for the ratings.