lol x-stats
The Contest Simulator (often refered to by its unofficial title, "lol x-stats") is a web application developed by Ngamer64. lol x-stats makes use of both raw X-Stats and the adjusted values calculated by creativename to statistically "predict" the result of any character (or game) matchup. The site also makes use of all available Match Pics when displaying results, which allows the user to determine for himself how much a character's value may have been determined by Pic Factor.
Check it out! thengamer.com/xstats
The Sim Explained[]
The Basic Concept is simple enough. Once all of the x-stat values for each character have been entered into the database, it just takes a few lines of code to calculate how one would be expected to perform on another, and that gives you your "simulation."
Hot Updates! RockMFR recently discovered the 3 missing match pics from 2003, so now all, uh... 455 are on display on the site. If you refresh on the main page, you get to see 3 of them randomly. If one looks interesting, you can click it to see the full size version. Once you've made your choice and seen the results, you can click the character's name to read Ulti's bio for them. You could also paste the result directly, like so:
Alyx Vance (2006c) VS Auron (2006c)
Alyx Vance has a strength of 11.02.
Auron has a strength of 34.68.
Auron wins with 84.11% of the vote!
A win of 82,267 with 120,584 total votes cast.
The update I've made recently is that you now have another option for getting that result out. If you don't want to paste all that text, you can just paste
http://thengamer.com/xstats/?name1=Vincent&year1=2006c&name2=Auron&year2=2006c
And anyone taking that link will see the exact result. This is also a potential time saver; instead of clicking through the radiobuttons to get your year and dropdown box to get you characters, you can now just type them directly into the URL, and the results come right up. So you could switch that to
http://thengamer.com/xstats/?name1=Crono&year1=2006c&name2=Ganondorf&year2=2006c
and BAM, there's your simulation. Pretty nifty!
Yearly X-Stats Listings[]
The X-stats Listings themselves have also seen a major facelift. You can now list the yearly standings in a variety of ways, all of them listed off the top of the site. You can look at just 2006, adjusted
http://www.thengamer.com/xstats/ranks.php?year=2006c
or Raw... http://www.thengamer.com/xstats/ranks.php?year=2006c&raw
Or the combined years of every character we've seen
http://www.thengamer.com/xstats/ranks.php?type=c
Or, mix and match between both Games and Series and see how things look
http://www.thengamer.com/xstats/ranks.php?type=gs
Click a name on any of those charts and you'll be taken to the third new addition, and my favorite.
Character Contest Histories[]
A Complete Character History is just what it sounds like. On this page you get to see not only the yearly x-stat value for a character, but also his rank each year, how he did unadjusted, the match pic he used to earn that ranking, and now every match he was ever involved in! Let's look at Snake as an example.
http://www.thengamer.com/xstats/ranks.php?name=Snake
18 wins against only 5 losses; a fine History. But glancing across the top you say, "wow he sure sucked in 2004! what happened?" Fortunately the answer can now be found right underneath. After a pounding of Tanner Snake started to crumble, starting with a 4% worse showing against Knux and continuing with an embarrassingly difficult battle against Frog before being blasted in the face, literally, by Mega Man. But what makes it worse is what happens next... MM gets Nintendo SFFed into the ground by future Champion Link, making Snake look quite pathetic.
If you want to find out if MM rebounded from that loss, you can click his name to move to the Mega Man character history. However, you could ALSO just let your mouse hover over that link. Look, his value pops right up! Looks like MM was worst 38.60% in 2004, good for 6th place overall.
6th place behind what 5? Click the [ 2004 Stats ] on the bottom, and you'll find that it was Link, Cloud, Seph, Samus and Crono who bettered him. But is that really accurate? Maybe Crono and Samus were just involved in better matchups, where they didn't get SFFed. Click the [ 2004 Bracket ] and see for yourself. Looks like Samus took a shot at Cloud and Crono crossed swords with Link, and since Square v Nintendo generally brings out the best in everyone, you may have a strong case.
2007 Update[]
Good news everyone! After Haste came up with semi-reasonable stats for '07, I spent a bunch of time the last two days and brought everything over on lol x up to date, along with some great improvements! Let's take a look.
We've got such a long listing of previous years now that I felt it was time to clean up and tighten up the front page to keep it from scrolling too far. All non-Character years have been turned blue to help them stand out, and I also switched the naming format from "Summer 2007" to "'07 Characters" and so on- this makes more sense I feel since our Character Battles barely even qualify as happening in the Summer anymore, and also a newcomer shouldn't be expected to know that Summer 2004 = Characters while Spring 2004 = Games... with the new system there's no uncertainty.
Also, I'm now of the opinion that the best thing about the site isn't even the matchup simulator anymore, but rather the full Character history pages. With that in mind I've added the "Pick a Character" dropdown to the top of the page full-time (it used to just show there once you looked at yearly x-stat ranks, so it was possible to calc a few matchups and never realize that Character Histories were available).
The biggest change, of course, is that we finally have '07 rankings:
thengamer.com/xstats/ranks.php?year=2007c
I've made the text in all these rankings a little larger and increased the table size, so they should be easier to read. As before, click any character's name to be taken to their History page, for instance...
thengamer.com/xstats/ranks.php?name=Snake
Here there's some cool updates as well. I've added a note that non-1v1 matchups can't be displayed in Complete Results, and also that they won't be counted in the character's win/loss history. And below that, what's this? A direct link into the B8wiki! Now you'll always be able to see all these very precise results from every character's past, then if you want to continue by reading an in-depth text analysis of those results you can just click in to their official article. And on the flip side, if you came from the wiki and saw that writeup but it didn't contain enough cold hard stats for you, great, because the Character History link is on the bottom of every Bio for you to click through!
...of course it doesn't work so perfectly when a character doesn't have any kind of article up yet, which is still the case 75% of the time. But we're getting there!
On the lol x side, things would be perfect if only I get exact results input to Complete Results area... unfortunately the algorithm I'm using to generate those was only built for 1v1 brackets. But having the '07 stuff in there would be so useful that I'm going to try to come up with some kind of solution anyways, even if it ends up being pretty dirty.
The last set of updates comes on the Matchup Results page, like this one as an example:
First off, clicking the character's name on top takes you directly to their B8wiki article. Neato! Secondly, I've added a new section at the bottom that points people toward the Contest History page for both of the characters they selected; again, I think that has evolved into the coolest section of the site these days, so I'm doing what I can to make sure people don't miss it. Thirdly, the VS box on the bottom of every results page now remembers what your character choices were the last time you created a matchup- pretty handy! (If you wanted to see how Mario would do against a bunch of different people, you used to have to keep selecting Mario from the dropdown after every new result.)
Keep in mind though that, as before, the quickest way to create a new matchup is just to edit the info directly in the URL. So if you're like "sure Mario beat Samus in '05, but she was actually stronger in 2002! ...I think" Now you can easily check- just flip those 5s in the address bar to 2s and you're over to
http://thengamer.com/xstats/?name1=Mario&year1=2002c&name2=Samus&year2=2002c
What Samus domination!