Visualization

<img src=”/8holic/projectfiles/gachavisuals/visualization.png”

 alt="Visualization"

 class="blog-image">

Inspiration

I kept hearing people mention stats like a certain character having the longest wait, and I got curious. I decided to look into it myself and put some of the things I learnt last semester to use.

What I did

I scraped data from the game’s site to build a visualization of every character’s stats.

  • Checked robots.txt first; since it blocks AI agents and some spiders, I used Selenium with a 1-second delay on every request to avoid accidentally DDOS-ing the server
  • Navigation challenges: character IDs increment by 2, so I ran two loops (inner loop for internal IDs, outer loop to switch characters); older IDs had inconsistent formats so I used either/or XPath fallbacks and fuzzy searching for skills
  • Handled CJK characters — Excel choked on Korean/Japanese/Chinese, so I installed the language pack; grabbed element affiliations from image filenames
  • Cleaned and visualized in Google Data Studio: fixed date-format parsing, worked around the X-axis only accepting metrics, converted character names to numbers for the Y-axis
  • Published the result to the community on Reddit

What I’m proud of

  • Working out creative workarounds for each obstacle (fuzzy matching, filename scraping, metric-based axes)
  • Being deliberate about respecting the site — the polite request delay
  • Actually publishing the work online, which I found intimidating

What can be further improved

  • The legend ordering issue went unresolved — sorting was neither numerical nor alphabetical and I couldn’t pin down the cause
  • Data collection relied on scraping; a cleaner API or more standardized source would have been more robust