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by sebosp 989 days ago
Is there a way to get a replay pack with order of millions of games (maybe more?) ? I'd like that to be able to create meaningful Stats, proper data analysis, training, etc... Wouldn't mind paying a bit for that... So far for the exploratory data analysis I've done I only have my own games and 2 or 3 replays I've been sent that don't work...
2 comments
ZephyrBlu 989 days ago
I have a dataset of ~20k (?) pro replays from 2017-2022 if you'd like that. I don't think a dataset of millions of pro games exists. If you asked breath (Owner of sc2replaystats) nicely he might give you a dump of ladder games though.
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reaperman 989 days ago
The only groups I know of with millions of games are sc2replaystats and Blizzard themselves.

SC2replaystats had 4,440,656 replays uploaded in 2020 and 3,390,117 in 2019 (the only years I can quickly find data for). Searching and downloading replays is now paywalled, probably to limit scraping.

> Wouldn't mind paying a bit for that...

Google probably paid Blizzard a good amount of money to help them develop AlphaStar and in the process got access to all the replays. But I doubt you'd be offering enough money to get executive-level attention for such a deal. Sc2replaystats might be more receptive to selling you a randomly selected subset of their total data, but you'd still have to offer enough cash to be clearly worth the time of going through the negotiation process. I doubt they'd sell you all of their replays, as that's essentially the business' moat.

Perhaps you could buy the sc2replaystats business though.

(Yes, I know none of these suggestions are practical for the vast majority of interested hackers)

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There are smaller free replay packs available with a quick Google search. I'm sure if you looked around or asked around either Harstem's SC2 discord server or the SC2AI discord server or SC2 subreddit, someone would be able to point you to a free vault offering on the order of 10,000's of replays.

However, the game is undergoing a period of large updates right now which are dramatically changing the details of the gameplay ... so really you'd want as many as possible starting from the most recent "balance patch" which went live just 6 days ago[0]. It will take the SC2 community quite a long time to establish known "best practices" for the current balance patch, and it's highly likely that it will be significantly modified again soon -- the most recent patch seems to be politically fragile at all levels of the game. Casual to professional players all have valid constructive criticism of it, so more changes soon are essentially inevitable.

0: https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/starcraft2/24009150/starcraf...

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