Downloading matches

[yujinwunz]

Is it ethical to download many many matches and use that data for our strategy?

If so, are we allowed to use scripts to scrape tens of thousands of replay files?

I mean this for matches between other opponents too.

Thanks

[KauffK]

Not sure about official statements, but there are a few implications about what you’re asking in some forum topics. The dev’s have mentioned future potential to make it easier for players to get the kind of data you’re talking about. Consider this post:

Feedback on replay file distribution

Hey Everyone, We are looking for your feedback. We are considering methods to distribute large numbers of replays to use locally for purposes such as machine learning. We are testing out our content distribution system with this first batch containing 28 replays, around 2 from each of our top 15 players top algos, indexed by match ID. https://storage.googleapis.com/terminal-cdn/replays/batch-00001.zip We already have ideas about how we will reduce the size of replay files, and know more metad…

There has also been an increasing amount of hype and discussion about machine learning in Terminal, for which things to the tune of those “tens of thousands of replay files” you mentioned would be relevant. Some hype about ML, with some description of approaches that analyze very large numbers of replays:

The Ultimate Copy-Cat - ML Implementations

I haven’t had a lot of time lately to continue work on this, but I have done a little bit: I have begun some preliminary work (honestly, mostly done - it went way faster than I expected) regarding classification of algos. What I mean by this is taking a current snapshot of the board (looking at one side, or algo) and attempting to identify what sort of strategy it is using. The obvious hiccup is that for a ML approach you’d typically have labels to tell it what is right/wrong. But, if you had …

Edit: Removed unverified statements

[Isaac]

I can respond to this since I’ve done some work with it. When I first discovered the terminal API I discovered a way (as I assume you and many others have) to download replays in their raw JSON format. I contacted (privately) @RegularRyan about this about a month ago and this was the response at the time:

This information is public and free for players to use! We are considering distributing it in a more convenient way at some point, but for now feel free to get an early advantage by using it.

Ultimately Terminal is meant to test all of your software engineering skills and being able to mine data like this and use it in creative ways is a skill that we want to reward.

I have since been scraping replays and have around 12,000 replays downloaded, as I talk about in the post @KauffK references for ML. Of course, C1 can change this policy any time they wish and I’m sure they’ll either confirm or refute what I’ve said above soon.

[RegularRyan]

Replays are public, you can scrape them