Stamp statistics falsification
Those who've been around TF2M for a while will know that I have an uncanny love of data, and of collecting it. Most of you will probably remember the stamp tracker that I tacked onto the feedback system about a year and a half ago and kept running for about 6 months, until I got too many data points to feasibly plot with the flash based graphing library I was using (160k data points over 6 months).
Anyway, I made a post a few days ago in the news thread that was cross posted from the TF2 Blog announcing the revamped rewards for Map Stamps and the addition of map-specific strange filters. Just in case you missed it, here's the chart of map stamps that I produced:
As you can see: most of the maps have a huge amount of stamps behind them, which would easily put their authors in line for some fairly large payouts. The strange thing being, no map author has even had anywhere close to even the most conservative estimates I could come up with.
Firstly, I should explain where the data for this graph, and the original tracking page comes from: Valve provide a series of leaderboards which typically show only the top 225 stamp owners, however the leaderboard system in steam also has an XML API (which can be accessed by appending ?xml=1 to the end of the URL) attached to it that can be used to get the full list of stamp owners, and the amount of stamps they each have. When I started tapping into this data source, I had no reason to doubt it's legitimacy, it should be based on Valve's own internal data and be accurate down to the last stamp. Apparently not, I can now say without doubt that the data source has been falsified.
After having talked to Rexy, who has been a great help in tracking this down over the past day or so, I decided to search around for my old data archive and trawl through it and look for any evidence of falsification, I honestly wasn't expecting to find anything, but as I was trawling through the rows of data I noticed this period of sudden growth:
Each subdivision on this graph represents one hour of time, it shows the growth rate for Mann Manor over a few days. On either side of this dataset the average growth rate was about 2 per hour, on this part of the dataset it fluctuates between 500 and 14000 an hour.
The period of growth shown above accounts for 80% of all map stamps recorded for Mann Manor.
This same period of growth occurred for all other maps at the exact same time, in total it would have required around $1.25 million USD in legitimate sales to generate. Yeah, that's definitely not right. I'm not sure if the data has been falsified because of a bug within Steam, a rouge hacker or possibly even by Valve for some reason, it's all very odd either way. (Note: The amount of people who actually had stamps, according to Steam, also increased similarly during this period)
I've taken the liberty of calculating a new estimate by removing the estimated inflation from each map's total count, for those that are curious:
I've checked these statistics with Rexy, and he's verified with me that they are almost bang on the money in terms of the (estimated) revenue he's earned from map stamps on Mann Manor.
I'll be reaching out to Valve for comment on the matter, and will be sure to update you if I get anything back.
Have a happy New Year!
Those who've been around TF2M for a while will know that I have an uncanny love of data, and of collecting it. Most of you will probably remember the stamp tracker that I tacked onto the feedback system about a year and a half ago and kept running for about 6 months, until I got too many data points to feasibly plot with the flash based graphing library I was using (160k data points over 6 months).
Anyway, I made a post a few days ago in the news thread that was cross posted from the TF2 Blog announcing the revamped rewards for Map Stamps and the addition of map-specific strange filters. Just in case you missed it, here's the chart of map stamps that I produced:
As you can see: most of the maps have a huge amount of stamps behind them, which would easily put their authors in line for some fairly large payouts. The strange thing being, no map author has even had anywhere close to even the most conservative estimates I could come up with.
Firstly, I should explain where the data for this graph, and the original tracking page comes from: Valve provide a series of leaderboards which typically show only the top 225 stamp owners, however the leaderboard system in steam also has an XML API (which can be accessed by appending ?xml=1 to the end of the URL) attached to it that can be used to get the full list of stamp owners, and the amount of stamps they each have. When I started tapping into this data source, I had no reason to doubt it's legitimacy, it should be based on Valve's own internal data and be accurate down to the last stamp. Apparently not, I can now say without doubt that the data source has been falsified.
After having talked to Rexy, who has been a great help in tracking this down over the past day or so, I decided to search around for my old data archive and trawl through it and look for any evidence of falsification, I honestly wasn't expecting to find anything, but as I was trawling through the rows of data I noticed this period of sudden growth:
Each subdivision on this graph represents one hour of time, it shows the growth rate for Mann Manor over a few days. On either side of this dataset the average growth rate was about 2 per hour, on this part of the dataset it fluctuates between 500 and 14000 an hour.
The period of growth shown above accounts for 80% of all map stamps recorded for Mann Manor.
This same period of growth occurred for all other maps at the exact same time, in total it would have required around $1.25 million USD in legitimate sales to generate. Yeah, that's definitely not right. I'm not sure if the data has been falsified because of a bug within Steam, a rouge hacker or possibly even by Valve for some reason, it's all very odd either way. (Note: The amount of people who actually had stamps, according to Steam, also increased similarly during this period)
I've taken the liberty of calculating a new estimate by removing the estimated inflation from each map's total count, for those that are curious:
I've checked these statistics with Rexy, and he's verified with me that they are almost bang on the money in terms of the (estimated) revenue he's earned from map stamps on Mann Manor.
I'll be reaching out to Valve for comment on the matter, and will be sure to update you if I get anything back.
Have a happy New Year!
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