I have been meaning to post about this for a long time and since I am in the house alone, I am catching up on all my commentary-type posts.

If you missed this piece of news then allow me to be the one to tell you about it. Valve have posted Episode Two Playing Stats and mighty interesting they are too.

The most interesting feature is the Death maps. The image above is a cut out from them. I didn’t look too closely because I don’t like spoilers but it seems that Valve records exactly where we die in each map. For me that is so cool. The other stats are very useful too, in fact it begs the question Why aren’t these stats available for all mods?

I am very interested in Beta testing and trying to promote it to other mod teams. In my opinion too many teams have a few people to play the maps looking for bugs and that’s about it. There’s much more to Beta testing than that.

Anyway, this tool would be so useful for amateur developers, especially ones who have fallen for the episode (king’s New Clothes!) idea.

Is there a technical reason why they aren’t available for modders? Does anybody know?

Onto to some of the stats themselves….

At the time of writing the average session time is 27 minutes. This seems a perfect length for a mod. Or at least multiples of this. If a mod was released that made it clear it had an average play time for 30 minutes I would be so happy. I love being able to play and finish something in one short session. Although actually staying a time would be quite hard. CubeDude89 and I were working on a soon to be announced Super Project when we realized that our playtime of a level ranged from 90 seconds to over 8 minutes. So, stating a 30 minute playtime will be almost impossible.

This is also very interesting. The shortest was 2.5 hours, which seems very fast and the longest was 9.5 hours. Which sounds more like my stats. Average completion time is listed as 6h 26m, which seems quite low for the cost of the game on its own.

I could go on and on about each individual stat but neither you nor I am that interested! The point is that these stats are too useful for Valve to keep to themselves:

Come on Valve, share the love!