Introduction
New Year's traditional masquerade of colors and ranks is going to end pretty soon, and before it goes away, I decided to download a snapshot of everyone's true ratings and current handle colors to see how everyone's using the feature. I regret that I only have one snapshot; I only managed to push myself to finish this today. It would have been really cool to see how people's usage of the feature has evolved — perhaps an initial surge of masquerading as a nutella, then slowly coming to one's senses and opting for something milder?
Data was collected on January 9th, at about 01:00 UTC. I collected the data by scraping the pages of the "rating" tab (sorry for making a lot of requests!) — the table contains people's actual ratings, and by looking at the title-text of people's handles, I could also get their possibly-magicked ranks. I only included the active people because it was already taking a lot of time, and I believe we got most of the interesting parts anyway. Sadly this excludes magic-using unrated and inactive users, but I think they won't affect the statistics much.
The data
First, let's look at the basic data: how many people of a given rank are masquerading as another given rank?
| Down: true rank, right: magic rank | N | P | S | E | CM | M | IM | GM | IGM | LGM |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Newbie | 70554 | 209 | 253 | 407 | 394 | 245 | 125 | 136 | 136 | 1565 |
| Pupil | 162 | 12087 | 93 | 146 | 195 | 101 | 62 | 43 | 45 | 430 |
| Specialist | 213 | 27 | 7467 | 129 | 161 | 80 | 65 | 57 | 38 | 329 |
| Expert | 260 | 71 | 60 | 6202 | 161 | 111 | 62 | 47 | 40 | 308 |
| Candidate Master | 99 | 48 | 44 | 35 | 1886 | 43 | 17 | 27 | 16 | 90 |
| Master | 76 | 34 | 66 | 40 | 23 | 1311 | 7 | 31 | 12 | 61 |
| International Master | 18 | 9 | 12 | 9 | 8 | 1 | 249 | 8 | 3 | 13 |
| Grandmaster | 18 | 22 | 18 | 14 | 12 | 3 | 4 | 326 | 6 | 20 |
| International Grandmaster | 10 | 5 | 16 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 2 | 0 | 182 | 7 |
| Legendary Grandmaster | 4 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 41 |
| Down: true rank, right: magic rank | N | P | S | E | CM | M | IM | GM | IGM | LGM |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Newbie | 6% | 7.3% | 12% | 11% | 7.1% | 3.6% | 3.9% | 3.9% | 45% | |
| Pupil | 13% | 7.3% | 11% | 15% | 7.9% | 4.9% | 3.4% | 3.5% | 34% | |
| Specialist | 19% | 2.5% | 12% | 15% | 7.3% | 5.9% | 5.2% | 3.5% | 30% | |
| Expert | 23% | 6.3% | 5.4% | 14% | 9.9% | 5.5% | 4.2% | 3.6% | 28% | |
| Candidate Master | 24% | 11% | 11% | 8.4% | 10% | 4.1% | 6.4% | 3.8% | 21% | |
| Master | 22% | 9.7% | 19% | 11% | 6.6% | 2% | 8.9% | 3.4% | 17% | |
| International Master | 22% | 11% | 15% | 11% | 9.9% | 1.2% | 9.9% | 3.7% | 16% | |
| Grandmaster | 15% | 19% | 15% | 12% | 10% | 2.6% | 3.4% | 5.1% | 17% | |
| International Grandmaster | 19% | 9.6% | 31% | 7.7% | 7.7% | 7.7% | 3.8% | 0% | 13% | |
| Legendary Grandmaster | 20% | 10% | 10% | 15% | 20% | 15% | 10% | 0% | 0% |
The percentage of fake nutellas goes down so smoothly as the true rank increases, it's very satisfying to watch. Meanwhile, the popularity of grey is almost constantly 20% among all participants. Cyan is more popular than its neighbors (I noticed this last year too); in particular there is a spike among IGMs. Masquerading as one color below your own is universally unpopular.
Since the two yellow ranks are largely interchangeable, and so are the two red ranks, I decided to make a variant of this table that consolidates these same-color ranks. Note that in this table we don't consider masters masquerading as IMs and other such combinations as magic participants.
| Down: true rank, right: magic rank | N | P | S | E | CM | (I)M | (I)GM | LGM |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Newbie | 6% | 7.3% | 12% | 11% | 11% | 7.8% | 45% | |
| Pupil | 13% | 7.3% | 11% | 15% | 13% | 6.9% | 34% | |
| Specialist | 19% | 2.5% | 12% | 15% | 13% | 8.6% | 30% | |
| Expert | 23% | 6.3% | 5.4% | 14% | 15% | 7.8% | 28% | |
| Candidate Master | 24% | 11% | 11% | 8.4% | 14% | 10% | 21% | |
| Master | 22% | 9.9% | 19% | 12% | 6.7% | 13% | 18% | |
| International Master | 22% | 11% | 15% | 11% | 10% | 14% | 16% | |
| Grandmaster | 16% | 20% | 16% | 13% | 11% | 6.3% | 18% | |
| International Grandmaster | 19% | 9.6% | 31% | 7.7% | 7.7% | 12% | 13% | |
| Legendary Grandmaster | 20% | 10% | 10% | 15% | 20% | 25% | 0% |
Percentage of participants
Finally, it's interesting to see which ranks feel the largest need to pretend to be someone else.
| True rank | Percentage of magic users |
|---|---|
| Newbie | 4.69% |
| Pupil | 9.56% |
| Specialist | 12.83% |
| Expert | 15.30% |
| Candidate Master | 18.18% |
| Master | 21.07% |
| International Master | 24.55% |
| Grandmaster | 26.41% |
| International Grandmaster | 22.22% |
| Legendary Grandmaster | 32.79% |
The popularity of magic increases as rating increases. This is perhaps not so surprising, considering that Div. 1 are the more active part of the community (although Div. 2 people are dominant in discussions, there is an even larger silent majority).
Thanks for reading! I still have the raw data, so what else would be interesting to see?
