Hello! I recently conducted a survey across many Valorant related subreddits with the goal of analyzing a possible relationship between rank, sensitivity (eDPI), and mouse pad size. Below I have detailed a basic preliminary analysis of the results of my survey as well as posted a link to an imgur post with all referenced graphs. By no means is this a definitive conclusion to the study this is merely an observation of the results I received. We can interpret correlation based on attached graphs to a certain degree, but without running tests and establishing confidence intervals nothing is certain. Regardless I thought you all would be interested to see this.

https://imgur.com/a/du0c3D6

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Introduction

The goal of my study is to compare the eDPI (sensitivity of the camera) a person uses in Valorant to both that person’s skill level in the game and the size of mousepad that they use. The population of interest is people who play Valorant.

Research Questions

Q1 - How does effective DPI change as a person’s skill level increases in Valorant?

Q2 - Does the width of a person’s mousepad impact the effective DPI they use in Valorant?

Summary of Data Collection Plan and Its Limitations

I collected my data through a survey that I posted in several social media servers and across a total of 18 different subreddits related to Valorant. In this case, a sampling unit for my data would be a person who plays Valorant and frequents the subreddits and social media servers related to Valorant. My sample is an okay representation of my population of interest (which is all people who play Valorant at a nonprofessional level); one slight problem with my sample is that those who came across my survey in online Valorant communities probably play Valorant more competitively than average and thus have a higher skill level than average. This would skew the distribution of my rank related data towards higher skill levels. My survey concluded with a sample size of 525. I had to remove several entries for various reasons including missing fields in survey, incorrectly formatted answers to questions like responding with a sentence to a question asking for a numeric answer, obvious mistakes that could not be interpreted, and obvious nonsensical joke data such as reporting DPI and in-game sensitivity as 0.

Variables

Response variable - eDPI

Explanatory Variable #1 – Rank

Explanatory Variable #2 – Mouse Pad Width

Hypotheses

I. Q1

a. H₀ (null Hypothesis) – there is no significant correlation between a decrease in eDPI and increase in Rank

b. Hₐ (alternative Hypothesis) – There is a significant correlation between a decrease in eDPI and increase in Rank

II. Q2

a. H₀ (null Hypothesis) – there is no significant correlation between a decrease in eDPI and increase in Mouse Pad width

b. Hₐ (alternative Hypothesis) – There is a significant correlation between a decrease in eDPI and increase in Mouse Pad Width

Analysis of Variables

I. Response Variable

a. Testing for Normality including outliers not including outliers

i. see Imgur Link for Graph (graph #1)

II. Explanatory Variable #1

a. Testing for normality

i. see Imgur Link for Graph (graph #2)

III. Explanatory Variable #2

a. Testing for Normality

i. see Imgur Link for Graph (graph #4)

ii. Note: this graph does not exhibit normality. However, this does not mean we can’t use this variable. It just means we have an additional limitation in our final analysis

IV. Bivariate (two variable) graphs

a. Boxplot comparing Rank and eDPI (not including data points with outlying eDPIs)

i. see Imgur Link for Graph (graph #3)

b. Boxplot comparing Mouse Pad width and eDPI

i. see Imgur Link for Graph (graph #5)

Conclusion

This is a preliminary analysis; thus, no result seen or interpreted here can be truly verified. I have not run any mathematical tests to calculate the confidence interval of any of these results, and I cannot reject any null hypotheses for these tests. That being said it visually appears that for Rank and eDPI there is a correlation between increase in skill level (Rank in this case) and a decrease in eDPI. As for Mouse Pad Width and eDPI, as expected there appears to be a correlation between an increase in Mouse Pad width and a decrease in eDPI