Girl Power!

Who doesn't love numbers?  Well, sadly most people, and yet they still remain the best way of measuring things.  Go figure.

Special thanks to NetHack 4's maintainer, ais523, for the data.

These numbers do not include games that were started but never finished.  The player either had to die, ascend, die, quit, die, escape, die, or be killed.  There were 2788 games in total.

First, let's look at starting role vs. max xp level:

Okay, nothing too surprising here.  Valkyrie remains a solid choice.  Wizard has a tough early game but can become very powerful in the mid and endgame.  Tourist did remarkably well, meaning there are quite a few badass NH4 players out there.

One thing I'd really like to point out is that the Monk dominates the early game.  Lots of people dump on the monk, I don't know why, because they're not bad.  Only drawback, of course, is that they can't wear Gray or Silver Dragon Scale Mail unless at a high enough level to get over the big to-hit penalty.

Role vs. points is pretty similar, no surprise there, so I won't bother with the graph. How about ascensions by role?

Once again Valkyrie, Wizard, and Tourist take the lead!  More importantly, I'd like to see role popularity, because that will clearly affect the number of per-role ascensions.  (Thanks to the HockeyblogAdventure for pointing out the typo in the below graph title.  I'll maybe fix it when I get home from work).

This confirms one of my theories about Barbarians: they're boring to play.  Wizards are always interesting, though it's sad to see a lack of love for my favorite role, the Rogue.  It also confirms that Valkyries are strong role.  They are relatively unpopular (perhaps because they are so strong) yet have the most ascensions.

Also interestingly, people prefer to play Male characters, but Females have more wins.  Only ~24% of the players used female characters, but they accounted for ~64% of the ascensions:

I usually play female characters because I figure that if I polymorph into an egg-laying monster, like a dragon or cockatrice, I can make myself lots of awesome pets.  On the other hand, if an egg hatches in a male character's inventory, there's a 50% chance of it being tame.  On one hand, I don't use the egg-laying trick in most games, but on the other hand, when I do use the trick, I get lots and lots of pets out of it.  I'm curious what other peoples' preferences are.

Anyway, this post was just about some fun with numbers.  Let me know if there are any other interesting or more complicated stats you want to see.  I use the R project for a stats program, and it is superb.  Here are the fields with which I have to work:


"points"    "deathdnum" "deathlev"  "maxlev"    "hp"
"maxhp"     "deaths"    "deathdate" "birthdate" "uid"
"role"      "race"      "gender"    "align"     "name"
"charname"  "death"     "conduct"   "turns"     "event"
"carried"   "starttime" "endtime"   "gender0"   "align0"
"xplevel"   "exp"       "mode"


Also let me know if there are questions about what the fields mean.  I think the most confusing one might be align0 and gender0 which refer to starting alignment and gender, where as align and gender refer to alignment and gender at the game's end.  I don't know what the event field is.