Introduction

New Year's traditional masquerade of colors and ranks is going to end pretty soon, and before it goes away, I decided to download a snapshot of everyone's true ratings and current handle colors to see how everyone's using the feature. I regret that I only have one snapshot; I only managed to push myself to finish this today. It would have been really cool to see how people's usage of the feature has evolved — perhaps an initial surge of masquerading as a nutella, then slowly coming to one's senses and opting for something milder?

Data was collected on January 9th, at about 01:00 UTC. I collected the data by scraping the pages of the "rating" tab (sorry for making a lot of requests!) — the table contains people's actual ratings, and by looking at the title-text of people's handles, I could also get their possibly-magicked ranks. I only included the active people because it was already taking a lot of time, and I believe we got most of the interesting parts anyway. Sadly this excludes magic-using unrated and inactive users, but I think they won't affect the statistics much.

The data

First, let's look at the basic data: how many people of a given rank are masquerading as another given rank?

Now that we have the data, it's time to analyze it! $$$~$$$

This confirms some common patterns: the most common ranks to masquerade as are grey and nutella, with Div. 2 preferring nutella and Div. 1 preferring grey, although the second preference isn't very strong. It's also interesting that no nutella user has chosen to become a normal red and remove that black first letter, although the sample space is small here.

Special shoutouts to the 7 masters pretending to be an IM, one IM masquerading as master and 6 grandmasters pretending to be IGMs. Didn't think anyone would notice? :)

A heatmap

To make the previous table a bit easier to comprehend, let's filter out everyone that's not participating in magic, and for each true rank, look at the percentage of people of that rank that are masquerading as another given rank. To make the table easier to read, I've colored the backgrounds of the cells in varying shades of green.

The percentage of fake nutellas goes down so smoothly as the true rank increases, it's very satisfying to watch. Meanwhile, the popularity of grey is almost constantly 20% among all participants. Cyan is more popular than its neighbors (I noticed this last year too); in particular there is a spike among IGMs. Masquerading as one color below your own is universally unpopular.

Since the two yellow ranks are largely interchangeable, and so are the two red ranks, I decided to make a variant of this table that consolidates these same-color ranks. Note that in this table we don't consider masters masquerading as IMs and other such combinations as magic participants.

Percentage of participants

Finally, it's interesting to see which ranks feel the largest need to pretend to be someone else.

The popularity of magic increases as rating increases. This is perhaps not so surprising, considering that Div. 1 are the more active part of the community (although Div. 2 people are dominant in discussions, there is an even larger silent majority).

Thanks for reading! I still have the raw data, so what else would be interesting to see?