Why are we doing this?

There are two reasons.

The first is that this work is connected to our research. A while ago, I posted some information in response to a thread about predicting tournament match outcomes. At that point, our project was still in its early stages, but it occurred to our team that there were some interesting research problems we could start looking into if we had a cohesive-enough dataset. Current player/team ranking systems (Elo, Glicko, and TrueSkill, for example), do not account for teamwork or "chemistry." Anyone who's played any team sport knows chemistry is critical, but is hard to model from a statistical point of view. In high-level competitive play, teamwork is clearly a huge component of success and, as such, pro player match data will be useful in helping develop better ranking systems.

The second reason — and the main reason we invested so much time in the stats web site — is that we're all huge fans of MLG and figured this project would benefit the entire community. Again, we're stats geeks. It just made sense to do this given our interest in MLG and the availability of player/team data. We would like to thank MLG and Bungie for making the data accessible, without which none of this would be possible.

Hope y'all enjoy it.

- Colin