Interactive version where you can hover a bouble to see map name and numbers. Might take some time to load.
Background
This post made quite a discussion here at /r/dataisbeautiful a couple of days ago. As many posts on this subreddit it went into what I'd like to call "The Pie-Chart Trap", using a pie-chart even though the data is not really meant to be displayed using this chart type. In that post I suggested to use bar charts to show top x number of maps, and gather the others in an "other" category to make the chart easier to read. Some users meant that by doing this we remove some of the complexity and we hide the fact that there are A LOT of different maps being played in Team Fortress 2 while the pie chart at least gave an impression of the shear amount even though it was not necessarily beautiful. So this is my attempt at trying to make a better visualization of the player base while still showing all maps played in March on community servers for Team Fortress 2.
There are more than 14 000 different maps being played on community servers in March 2017 alone. A bunch of these maps are only used for trading items and is seen as modern chat rooms where people recognize eachother and have a good time in between games. https://np.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/677vav/player_distribution_within_team_fortress_2_over/dgpc3mj/ Capture the Flag is played mainly on two maps, while other game modes differ a lot more in which map is played.
Edit: The graph is showing "Player hit Scan" per map which is not the same as number of players. Every 10 minute a scan is done and the "Player hit scan" is the sum of all these scans.
While this looks neat, it does a bad job of presenting the number in a way that aids in understanding the distribution of numbers it represents, which I think defeats the "purpose" of having a chart in the first place.
![image showing Revisiting Player Distribution within Team Fortress 2 [OC]](dd7c30d9-f305-5bcc-861d-a77c251fd11c.jpg)
ostedog on April 26th, 2017 at 12:26 UTC »
Interactive version where you can hover a bouble to see map name and numbers. Might take some time to load.
Background
This post made quite a discussion here at /r/dataisbeautiful a couple of days ago. As many posts on this subreddit it went into what I'd like to call "The Pie-Chart Trap", using a pie-chart even though the data is not really meant to be displayed using this chart type. In that post I suggested to use bar charts to show top x number of maps, and gather the others in an "other" category to make the chart easier to read. Some users meant that by doing this we remove some of the complexity and we hide the fact that there are A LOT of different maps being played in Team Fortress 2 while the pie chart at least gave an impression of the shear amount even though it was not necessarily beautiful. So this is my attempt at trying to make a better visualization of the player base while still showing all maps played in March on community servers for Team Fortress 2.
Data source: https://teamwork.tf/. More precise the .csv given in this comment. Thank you /u/teamworktf.
Tool: D3.js Creation .gif
Some observations:
There are more than 14 000 different maps being played on community servers in March 2017 alone. A bunch of these maps are only used for trading items and is seen as modern chat rooms where people recognize eachother and have a good time in between games. https://np.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/677vav/player_distribution_within_team_fortress_2_over/dgpc3mj/ Capture the Flag is played mainly on two maps, while other game modes differ a lot more in which map is played.Edit: The graph is showing "Player hit Scan" per map which is not the same as number of players. Every 10 minute a scan is done and the "Player hit scan" is the sum of all these scans.
DesignatedBlue on April 26th, 2017 at 13:32 UTC »
Looks nice but no fucking idea what anything is representing
HatOfGloves on April 26th, 2017 at 13:57 UTC »
While this looks neat, it does a bad job of presenting the number in a way that aids in understanding the distribution of numbers it represents, which I think defeats the "purpose" of having a chart in the first place.