Playername statistics

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Blockhead
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Playername statistics

by Blockhead » Post

Hey there server operators,

I was wondering if any of you would be kind enough to share some anonymous player statistics with me. I'm wondering what the most common characters that players use to start their usernames are, although other statistics of interest are welcome. I've analysed the postboxes in LinuxForks Spawn and PandoraBox HiFi City post offices. The results so far are interesting and not the same as the usual statistics about letter frequency in the English language as a whole:
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player-pobox-stats-aggregated.png
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Re: Playername statistics

by Desour » Post

You could also gather data from servers.minetest.net, assuming the servers don't lie about the playernames.
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Re: Playername statistics

by Blockhead » Post

Ah, great idea DS. Though I do know LinuxForks anonymises its player list, and there are bot accounts like Bailiff on Your Land, plus alts which often share a name and other issues (though post offices can have alts too), nevertheless there are a lot of players listed on the server list. I wonder how much variance there will be over time if I take the usernames at different times of day when different timezones are peaking.

Here is my methodology. I'm sure it could be fully automated if I knew how to really use gnuplot. I start with this script:

Code: Select all

curl https://servers.minetest.net/list > serverlist
jq -r '.list[] | select(.clients_list | length >0) | .clients_list[]' serverlist | sort > playernames
xclip -i playernames -selection CLIPBOARD
then I paste it into LibreOffice calc, set up a sheet with a table header and another column with the formula LOWER(LEFT(A2)) (paste this down the length of the sheet), then using a pivot table to create a sheet with the counts and making a bar chart of that. Results for 2023-02-08 17:05 (UTC):
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player-serverlist-stats.png
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Re: Playername statistics

by Blockhead » Post

Here are the statistics from a creative server I have access to (which server exactly won't be disclosed unless the owner wants me to). This covers all player records in the auth database, not just those at a post office, so it can include a lot of nonsense usernames and players who joined once for about 2 seconds then left.
PlayerStats2023-02-11-chart-publish.png
PlayerStats2023-02-11-chart-publish.png (36.28 KiB) Viewed 339 times
Results are mostly in line with what I have seen so far from counting the server list before, though 's' is a bit less popular on this server it seems. Numbers, underscores and dashes remain very unpopular, as do letters that start non-European names like Q and X (which are more popular in Romanisations of Chinese names, for instance).

I'd like to particularly point out one significant subset of players. 267 players had usernames of the form "Player<x>" where x is a number between 1 and 999. From what I recall being told this is the Multicraft default username pattern. When these usernames are taken out of the pool, the popularity of 'p' drops from first by almost 2x, down to 5th place, just below but almost equal to L.

Some of the a and 1 usernames tend "spammy", mostly the 1 usernames. I did not judge many of the usernames in the 'a' range to actually be very "spammy", like those involving mostly asdf from the QWERTY layout home row. I conjecture the number of spammy a usernames would only be somewhat if at all above the average for "spammy" usernames. Another word to describe what I mean by these usernames could be "gibberish" or "faceroll".

Table of aggregated results:

Code: Select all

_	9
-	1
0	5
1	48
2	11
3	14
4	8
5	7
6	6
7	9
8	8
9	5
a	258
b	102
c	119
d	136
e	80
f	68
g	90
h	108
i	63
j	132
k	133
l	151
m	257
n	101
o	38
p	416
q	15
r	109
s	198
t	100
u	52
v	59
w	61
x	17
y	50
z	35
Total Result	3079
As a little aside, most players (94%) had no dashes or underscores in their names.

Code: Select all

Contains Underscore	Contains Dash	Contains Neither	Contains Both
127	49	2907	4
4.12%	1.59%	94.41%	0.13%
Also, most players have all lowercase letters in the usernames (54%), followed closely by mixed cases or no letters at all (41%), and lastly a small minority have all uppercase (6%) (does not add to 100% due to rounding)

Code: Select all

Sum - All Caps	Sum - All Lower	Sum - Mixed case or no letters
181	1651	1251
5.88%	53.62%	40.63%
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