Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Part I

For Christmas I was a recipient of an Xbox 360 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. There are three options to play, Spec Ops (2 players online mode or single player), Campaign (the single player mode), and Multiplayer on Xbox Live. On Xbox Live there are multiple different types of games you can play ranging from Team Deathmatch to Search & Destroy to Free-For-All mode. Since I got it, I've been neglecting this blog and felt kind of bad about it. So, I thought of a way to incorporate statistics with CoD:MW2.

The game records certain statistics like your kill:death ratio, accuracy, score but it lacks in that it doesn't record your round-by-round stats for you to look back on. This limited what I could take straight off of Xbox Live and use for this, so what I had to do was start recording my own data for each game.

What I did:

I got a notebook and a pen. I made several columns, one for each of: kills, assists, deaths, difference, map, weapon type (between Assault Rifles, Sub Machine Guns, Sniper etc.), and game type. At the beginning of each game, I recorded what map I was playing and what kind of load out I was playing (this is for a future analysis). At the end of the game I recorded my kills, assists, deaths and whether or not my team won or loss the match.

When I was done playing, I took the information and transferred it into an Excel Spreadsheet. The Spreadsheet will be available for your use in the next post.

My main interest was not how many kills or deaths I had but it was the difference between kills and deaths that I was interested in, or the kill:death ratio. The kill death ratio is a good way to determine how useful you are to your team whether or not you win or lose. A positive kill:death ratio means that you killed more people than killed you which means you gave your team more points than you gave the other team points. A negative kill:death ratio means you were bad. A 1:1 kill:death ratio means, essentially, that the game could have been played without you (except for the timing of the kills and deaths - which means that if you end up with a 1:1 ratio but you're the losing death).

Below is the graph of my ratio after 36 games:

I think it's pretty cool to be able to go back over and look at it and see if there are any trends. Hopefully, when I get enough data and play longer, I'll start to see a positive trend and less variance so that it looks more like a logarithmic function instead of the random mess I have charted already.

Also, this way, you can actually see your progress and you'll be able to see where you actually started getting better.