The Energon Pub

News Credits: 33 · by **Glyph** » Fri Jun 06, 2025 8:04 am

I started out with a little side project to catalogue every mission currently in the game, along with all their slots, briefing text, debrief texts if available and so on... Then I started wondering about win rates and whether there was a difference in participation between the factions... then it cascaded...

BEHOLD MY MADNESS

: Start with the types...

: ... wind up analysing the entire history for win/loss stats...

: ... what madness is this?

Interesting to see that the 'Cons have a slight edge in overall missions, but it's mostly concentrated on the sheer number of L11 fights happening at the top of the table.

That chart of mission types really brings home two things that I was pretty sure of, but now have data for: the prevalence of just a handful of high-level mission types, and the near-complete absence of low-level players. Just look at the difference between the top handful of missions, that a relatively decent number of players join, and the long tail of less-valuable missions that get ignored or don't get generated at all because the typical player is too high level for the mission page to select them. Anecdotally, the site's really empty during the first half of the day GMT too, though I haven't run a chart on that yet.

But also, for the lower level missions, look at how many are won by default because only one side joins - only a tiny fraction end up in an actual fight. That generally means that no other players of the right level are around at that time, or that the player who generated the mission joins because they have to - so they just get the basic XP for the win - but any others around will pass over it in favour of a more lucrative mission if available. Is it any wonder that the low level game is such a joyless, grindy slog?

As to how many active players we still have: it's 67, total, taking players who've been active recently enough to be in the high score table (90 days). There's a similar high peak and long tail for number of missions per player as there is for mission types, unsurprisingly (and even if I expand the selection to all players since the last Great Mission Purge, it still only gets up to 203 total). Note any low-level players with only a few missions - those would either be players who've very recently started or who joined, tried HMW and didn't stick around.

: All current players. There aren't many.

This one surprised me a little, as I felt anecdotally that there were a lot more low-level Bots than Cons, but that... doesn't really seem to be the case? They must all play at different times from me.

Am I salty that I was 95% through collecting the data for all this when the Unknowns struck and all the legit empty missions got arbitrarily deleted along with the bugged ones? You bet I am.

News Credits: 33 · by **Glyph** » Fri Jun 06, 2025 8:12 am

Here's some more data, this time looking at the total number of missions played per faction. I've highlighted the top 10 players per faction (by number of missions) and added all others grouped together as pale grey.

Interesting that the Autobot is much 'spikier' than the Decepticons (except for Kurn96 chugging away like a machine at the bottom there), with a lot more players outside the top 10 - compare the Decepticon chart, where the top 10 players account for almost the entire area of the chart. Congrats (...I think?) to Bumblevivisector for managing to rack up almost twice as many total missions as all Decepticons outside the top 10... combined!

That's something that the charts show too - as there aren't many players, a single prolific player can make a big difference to the overall figures. In the weekly timeline in the previous post, see that bit near the start where the Decepticons suddenly climb to equal / pass the Autobots, who'd been leading significantly until then? That's when Bumblevivisector started playing again. :lol:

News Credits: 33 · by **Glyph** » Fri Jun 06, 2025 8:34 am

What else can we do with this?

Hmm, let's see - how about, what percentage of actual fights (both sides show up) end in a timeout rather than a wipeout? (Only 4.8% - or 2% of all missions including defaults)

Minicons don't exist any more, but 290 invisible ones have still been destroyed in battle all the same!

Most efficient killer? Well, there's a number of ways to calculate that, but on pure ratio it's going to be Name_Violation's Nobody, who has to date made a grand total of 1 attack in missions... and put a bot in stasis lock with it.

How about a weekly leaderboard of kills? (By the way, something like this could totally be the basis for rotating challenges and leaderboards for various different stats...)

I can also pull out a whole bunch of performance stats for individual characters... here's a few of my beleaguered bots, who are all quite annoyed that I keep using them to try to manipulate the mission page into spitting out uncommon missions so I can check their details instead of, you know, trying to win battles and the like. Want me to do a summary for your bots? Drop a link below!

Here's a fun one: a full listing for the Millionaires Club - all the bots who've gotten million-plus XP scores in a mission (at least since the Purge, I know a bunch of you had it well before). Linking this image offsite rather than putting it in the post 'cos it's obnoxiously huge - apparently there are some 226 millionaire bots out there!

https://imgur.com/a/HBX3ljB

Have I driven you all crazy yet?

OK, just one more - I wanted to know just how much non-usable armour we've piled into each faction's warehouses since the armour bug was first reported in October...

: It's a lot.

Anything else you'd like to know that I might be able to pull out of the data? Ask away!

by **ashe5k** » Fri Jun 06, 2025 8:54 am

Oh wow, that's kind of neat to see. I knew we didn't have as many players as we used to but I didn't think we were that low.

by **sprockitz** » Fri Jun 06, 2025 9:46 am

Wow I love this kind of stuff! If you want to do it for my team that’d be awesome. Adding mission wins to that top left box on team page would be a nice addition.

Love the idea of using this for some form of competition.

What is top single mission score looked like several in 2.6 mil range. Saving that image sorted by top score would be cool. Millionaires club shows how overpowered repair is…not shocking but thought tf’a like storm front would have a few more…and tf’s like donkeykong would not be so absurdly high.

Probably not possible to do accurately bc of overkill/overheal but a xp gained distribution based in tactics and weapon would be cool. I imagine it could be done as a lower bound anyway assuming no overkill/heal.

I wanna check stats in a bit more detail and give some comments about interesting observations when I have time.

News Credits: 2 · by **-Soundwave-** » Fri Jun 06, 2025 10:08 am

That's in depth. I have tracked xp gain, and kills. Whew though. That's awesome.

Website · by **Silver Wind** » Fri Jun 06, 2025 12:34 pm

To be honest, I thought the active HMW player count was under 50. Do miss having a lot more people around...

Thanks for all the info you compiled, Glyph!

News Credits: 33 · by **Glyph** » Fri Jun 06, 2025 4:14 pm

Thanks all!

sprockitz wrote:Wow I love this kind of stuff! If you want to do it for my team that’d be awesome. Adding mission wins to that top left box on team page would be a nice addition.

Done and done!

sprockitz wrote:What is top single mission score looked like several in 2.6 mil range. Saving that image sorted by top score would be cool. Millionaires club shows how overpowered repair is…not shocking but thought tf’a like storm front would have a few more…and tf’s like donkeykong would not be so absurdly high.

Overall top score right now is vintron's Sinewave with 2,696,328xp - your Mantis is in the #5 sport as of... this morning! with 2,590,024xp

Annoyingly, I seem to have lost the millionaires query, so I've rebuilt and refreshed the dataset. Rather than share an image, I've copied the results to my GDrive so you can take a look and sort as desired.

sprockitz wrote:Probably not possible to do accurately bc of overkill/overheal but a xp gained distribution based in tactics and weapon would be cool. I imagine it could be done as a lower bound anyway assuming no overkill/heal.

Sadly, I opted to just take basic stats and not do a full parse of the log, and have been kicking myself over it - I already had code to do that and calculate the overkill etc for a browser extension I didn't finish, a while back. By the time I decided I really should have added it, I was already in scraping stepp'd so far that, should I scrape no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er. :-B

I may add it to the parser and do a re-run to grab the extra data; the first run took the better part of two weeks to grab all 348K-ish missions while I tuned the parser and ran it r e a l l y s l o w l y to make sure I didn't strain the server at all!

News Credits: 2 · by **-Soundwave-** » Fri Jun 06, 2025 7:00 pm

Glyph wrote:Thanks all!

sprockitz wrote:Wow I love this kind of stuff! If you want to do it for my team that’d be awesome. Adding mission wins to that top left box on team page would be a nice addition.
Done and done!

hmw_bots_sprockitz_1_2.PNG
hmw_bots_sprockitz_3_4.PNG
hmw_bots_sprockitz_5_6.PNG
hmw_bots_sprockitz_7_8.PNG
hmw_bots_sprockitz_9_10.PNG

sprockitz wrote:What is top single mission score looked like several in 2.6 mil range. Saving that image sorted by top score would be cool. Millionaires club shows how overpowered repair is…not shocking but thought tf’a like storm front would have a few more…and tf’s like donkeykong would not be so absurdly high.
Overall top score right now is vintron's Sinewave with 2,696,328xp - your Mantis is in the #5 sport as of... this morning! with 2,590,024xp
top10xp.png

Annoyingly, I seem to have lost the millionaires query, so I've rebuilt and refreshed the dataset. Rather than share an image, I've copied the results to my GDrive so you can take a look and sort as desired.

sprockitz wrote:Probably not possible to do accurately bc of overkill/overheal but a xp gained distribution based in tactics and weapon would be cool. I imagine it could be done as a lower bound anyway assuming no overkill/heal.
Sadly, I opted to just take basic stats and not do a full parse of the log, and have been kicking myself over it - I already had code to do that and calculate the overkill etc for a browser extension I didn't finish, a while back. By the time I decided I really should have added it, I was already in scraping stepp'd so far that, should I scrape no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er.

I may add it to the parser and do a re-run to grab the extra data; the first run took the better part of two weeks to grab all 348K-ish missions while I tuned the parser and ran it r e a l l y s l o w l y to make sure I didn't strain the server at all!

I'm so jealous right now.

News Credits: 33 · by **Glyph** » Sat Jun 07, 2025 3:17 am

-Soundwave- wrote:I'm so jealous right now.

I have to admit, it's a lot of fun to be able to come up with a question and then just write a query and get the answer!

I know you didn't ask but as you're also into tracking, I ran the numbers for your team too (hope that's ok). Hopefully these match the figures you've collected!

Y'know, when I started this, I justified it as a project to learn Python data science tools - pandas, jupyter, that kind of thing. But so far I've defaulted to SQL and Excel for analysis, both of which I already knew... should really get on to the other half of that.

Like steve2275 on Facebook · by **steve2275** » Sat Jun 07, 2025 6:56 am

How the bleep do you know all this

News Credits: 2 · by **-Soundwave-** » Sat Jun 07, 2025 9:34 am

Glyph wrote:
-Soundwave- wrote:I'm so jealous right now.
I have to admit, it's a lot of fun to be able to come up with a question and then just write a query and get the answer!

I know you didn't ask but as you're also into tracking, I ran the numbers for your team too (hope that's ok). Hopefully these match the figures you've collected!

hmw_bots_soundwave_1_2.PNG
hmw_bots_soundwave_3_4.PNG
hmw_bots_soundwave_5_6.PNG
hmw_bots_soundwave_7_8.PNG
hmw_bots_soundwave_9_10.PNG
hmw_bots_soundwave_11_12.PNG

Y'know, when I started this, I justified it as a project to learn Python data science tools - pandas, jupyter, that kind of thing. But so far I've defaulted to SQL and Excel for analysis, both of which I already knew... should really get on to the other half of that.

You are awesome thank you ❤️

News Credits: 33 · by **Glyph** » Sat Jun 07, 2025 10:58 am

steve2275 wrote:How the bleep do you know all this

Li'l bit of backstage insight from ye olden days, an insatiable curiosity, and a whole lotta crunching mission logs :lol:

-Soundwave- wrote:You are awesome thank you ❤️

No probs, you're very welcome

by **Drop Bear** » Sat Jun 07, 2025 7:39 pm

Well, Glyph, it seems that Seibertron does indeed contain nuts. But we still love ya anyway.

by **ashe5k** » Mon Jun 09, 2025 8:50 am

Ok, now I'm curious, when you get a chance Glyph can you run my team?

News Credits: 33 · by **Glyph** » Mon Jun 09, 2025 10:30 am

Ask, and ye shall receive!

Like steve2275 on Facebook · by **steve2275** » Mon Jun 09, 2025 1:42 pm

can i get in on this action?"
https://www.seibertron.com/heavymetalwa ... hp?id=1138

News Credits: 42 · by **Psychout** » Mon Jun 09, 2025 1:58 pm

It's been over a decade since the last reset and I still forget that Dragonslayer and Sprok are cons now. :lol:

And as someone that fits into the 'Other D' category, its just so good to have you around again giving us these insights Glyph, never change. <3

News Credits: 33 · by **Glyph** » Mon Jun 09, 2025 5:55 pm

Steve!

News Credits: 33 · by **Glyph** » Mon Jun 09, 2025 5:57 pm

Psychout!

News Credits: 33 · by **Glyph** » Mon Jun 09, 2025 6:03 pm

Psychout wrote:And as someone that fits into the 'Other D' category, its just so good to have you around again giving us these insights Glyph, never change. <3

Today's random query: I went looking for the mission with the most turns taken, and turned up this 10 vs 9 Inferno: Hell Unleashed with a whopping 366 turns... and no timeout!

Like steve2275 on Facebook · by **steve2275** » Tue Jun 10, 2025 9:16 pm

Thanks a lot

News Credits: 42 · by **Psychout** » Sat Jun 14, 2025 4:16 pm

Glyph wrote:Today's random query: I went looking for the mission with the most turns taken, and turned up this 10 vs 9 Inferno: Hell Unleashed with a whopping 366 turns... and no timeout!

Good to see these can still happen.

Pretty sure both of these have seized up from lack of use.