Assistance in collecting data for the new MTGO Vintage Challenges

diophan

As you have probably heard, the Power 9 Challenges are now every Saturday at 10am Pacific (http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/magic-online/magic-online-format-challenges-2017-05-04). While this has many positives, one consequence is that Matt and I cannot put in the work involved in a metagame analysis every single week.

In the past several people have helped watch replays, which is much appreciated. To facilitate outside help, I have written up detailed instructions on the first sheet of this googledoc:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pf90NIxl15wYhJJVypMkdX-Thc2Mn9_1snbdrkSi9IY/edit?usp=sharing

The above link is editable, but is just a template. The current plan is to have people willing to help to contact Matt (@ChubbyRain ) or me via PM, replying to the appropriate thread, or Facebook message for access to the spreadsheet for a given event. If this is a huge inconvenience we can consider posting the links publicly.

If we can get 2 or 3 people working together for each week's event it shouldn't be much work for any individual. Note that although watching replays requires having joined the event, anyone can log onto MTGO and enter the match results.

Let's use this thread to gauge interest: who would tentatively be willing to help out this Saturday, or would be willing to help out for future events? If you are, please take a look at the link and see if anything requires further clarification. Usually Matt or I will be around on Saturday, but we can't guarantee that every weekend.

I have thought about this when the event was announced and was wondering if it's possible to program a bot to do it.

diophan

@desolutionist I believe mtggoldfish had a bot to scrape data from all the events, so it's definitely possible. It's not like MTGO has an API to pull this data from though so I never seriously considered attempting to automate this. It would certainly be great if someone wants to look into this route.

As a less daunting task, someone could figure out how to take a screengrab of the results from every round and convert it into text that's easier to work with. Several of us tried to figure out a way to do this over a year ago, but after minimal effort led to incomplete results we gave up. It's much easier to do metagame analyses for paper events because I just open the .WER file in notepad and parse the results.

This post is deleted!