CoC Track

CoC Track

1. What is CoC Track?

It's a spreadsheet on which I stored specific gameplay statistics of some Clash of Clans players.
The green button above links to the spreadsheet on Google Docs.

2. Explanation:

From December 2014 until July 2015, I tracked some players evolution in Clash of Clans.

One of the main aspects of playing Clash of Clans is gathering resources by attacking other players bases, then using those resources to upgrade the defense and offense capabilities of the home base. This process is called farming.

We can loot several types of resources: gold, elixir, and dark elixir. Amounts of resources gathered by a player from his attacks are publicly stored in the player profile:

Gathering enough resources to build up a base takes up a lot of time: months, even years. Higher farming stats can be a pride amongst farmers. Tracking farming numbers across time is 1) interesting and 2) motivating. Competitive farmers are eager to farm more and boast their performances.

The first time I saw people tracking players stats was in the clan Exploiters. Exploiters was one of 3 clans in a family of Clash farmers. Some clan leaders would track the looted gold at the end of each week, in order to evaluate players activity.

In December 2014, I started tracking farming stats in different clans: Unity Titans, then Mactatores, then Exodias Exalted. Each Sunday, I'd sit and write down on a spreadsheet several numbers for dozens of players:

3. How does it work?

The data is organized as follows:

• The spreadsheet extends:
  • Vertically for players,
  • horizontally across time.
• Older periods of time extend to the right.
• Most recent week is on the left most part.
• Some players names are grayed out or don't have stats: they have either left the clan, or joined the clan less than a week back.
• Relevant farming stats are distributed on the columns.
• Each specific stat is color coded.
• Each stat spans across 2 columns:
  • Left one for the current number,
  • Right one for the delta with the previous week.

It's that delta that is charted and displayed as a graph. Each relevant stat has its own delta and therefore graph. The graphs rank farmers according to their weekly numbers.

The graphs are weekly published in the clan chat group, usually a messaging app like Band or LINE. That created a weekly challenge event awaited by many members. Some were indifferent. Some others laughed at the absurd effort.

4. Playing with numbers:

In addition to the resources farmed by the player, Clash of Clans records several other interesting stats. I kept track of some of these, like the number of attacks won.

With this new number, I wanted to discover patterns about farmers behavior by cross referencing it with other numbers. For example, maybe we can extract a "farming efficiency index" by dividing the total amount of looted gold by the number of attacks won.

The chart above shows a "gold grab index", i.e. the average looted gold per attack won. This number is supposed to quantify the efficiency of a farmer: a better farmer gets more resources while minimizing cost. Attacking is costly, both in play time and in resources to train the army. So a higher gold index means the farmer gets more from each one of his attacks.

Unfortunately, this number is questionable, because the attacks won stat that Clash of Clans records only records the attacks won. The stat doesn't include attacks the player started but lost, while still getting resources from the attacked base.

5. Link to the spreadsheet:

Here is the link to the public spreadsheet maintained from December 2014 until July 2015 on Google Docs: CoC Track