The purpose of ball chasing is to give insights for specific games of Rocket League. The visualization was made for Rocket League players, either in a team environment or as individuals to reflect on their gameplay.Â
All of the data collected by the site is user submitted. Players collect replay files of games that they play and upload them to the website for free by connecting their in-game account to the site. This replay is processed behind the scenes to generate all of the visualizations that can be seen on the site.
The questions that players may ask about their games often depends on whether they are viewing as a single player or as a team. As a player viewing their online games, the user would want to ask questions about their solo performance.
How often are they scoring/setting up teammates to score?
Are they playing effective defense?
While a team viewing the visualizations together may ask those questions, they would also care about how their team compares to the other team.
How often was the ball on the other team's side of the arena?
Are we playing close enough to each other to make plays?
The first step for players finding answers is for them to find out which category of statistics that they want to view. These are easily broken down by a sidebar on the site. The main type of visualization on ballchasing.com is bar charts. These either show differences for statistics like shots, assists, and saves for each player or between teams. Each of these bar charts can be filtered based on which players or teams you care about. The bar charts also include tooltips that show the value of the bar charts. I feel these are unnecessary because of the data labels.
Among the less common visualizations there are some top-down map views that include heatmaps for the ball and specific players, and there is a set of maps that show where a player collected the most boosts. I especially like the player heatmap because it shows the sections of the map that the player spent the most time (clearly frikk was playing a goalie role).
The final and most interesting visualization is the 3D replay viewer. This feature allows the user to watch the whole map at once. The replay viewer gives a new perspective of the game without nearly as much visual clutter. The user can toggle on and off features like ball trail, car trails, and active boosts.
I think that the wide selection of visualizations are broken down in a usable way. Instead of going for a dashboard feel, the site is scrollable to allow each visualization to be readable on the page.. Additionally the sidebar separates each set of statistics in an easy to understand way.
As for limitations I wish there was more interactivity with the visualizations. While you can filter each bar chart individually, I would have loved some way to filter in bulk because it was very tedious to filter multiple charts. In some situations like the chart on the lower left, the scrollable layout choice can cause the charts to get stretched much more than is needed.
A design choice that I found ineffective was the positioning tab (shown on left). Both of the visualizations on this page lack critical information that would make them helpful. The bar chart shows the average distance of a player from their teammates, but it doesn't give any units for distance and all of the bars are very similar. There are also visualizations that just include dots with the players names next to them. I have no idea what they mean.