The most average Minecraft name is "Saaeee"
Hey everyone, today I am back with a short blog post about Minecraft names.
A side effect of the crawling done by the KittyScan project is that, over time, we see lots of individual players through the "player sample" component of the Status Response given by the game servers. Even though this the curve of new players is slowing down a total of 2.68M players have been accumulated.
In truth I have many more player entries in my database. A total of 34M as of writing this. However, we cannot assume all of these entries to be actual players. For example some servers use these samples to display some flavour text and servers in offline mode do of course also not return valid players.
This means that I have to validate these players before counting them towards the player statistics. This can be done with the official Mojang API. By giving it a list of UUIDs we get the corresponding username which we can compare to the values we got from the game servers. If these match, the entry can be seen as valid.
The Mojang API has strict rate limits, so it is of benefit to filter the implausible entries out beforehand. By validating whether the names follow the required rules for Usernames and checking if an entry contains an offline user we reduce the amount of requests necessary by a lot.
I will write about the privacy issues that arise from this player sample at a later point.
As a fun experiment I retrieved all currently validated player names and counted the characters in each of the 16 possible positions. Afterwards I just took the most used character for the positions and the result was that the average name is 6 characters long and is "Saaeee". Of course this is not a real name but it shows us that players like to start their names with a big "S" followed by the vowels "a" 0r "e" in some positions. With this methodology the most "uncommon" name is the 16 characters long "8QQQQQQQQQQQQQQQ", showing that names rarely begin with numbers and are unlikely to contain a capital "Q".
If we ignore the case most average name is still "saaeee" but the most uncommon one transforms into "868qqqqqqqqqqqqq".
At the moment these are over all names. The following table shows these averages just for the names with exactly the given length.
| len | count | average | average (low) | not-average | not-average (low) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3 | 3152 | 1e5 | mUM | 1ei | h2m |
| 4 | 35917 | _oa_ | soa_ | UUUU | 8686 |
| 5 | 90554 | Saae_ | saae_ | 8QQQQ | 8688j |
| 6 | 204693 | Saaie_ | saaae_ | 8QQQQF | 8568qj |
| 7 | 304730 | Sanaie_ | sanaie_ | 8QQQQQQ | 8888qqj |
| 8 | 354992 | Sanaaaee | sanaaaee | 8QQQQQQQ | 8568qqqq |
| 9 | 347220 | Saneeaaee | saneeaaee | 8Q8QQQQQQ | 85868qqqq |
| 10 | 320424 | Saneeaaaee | saneeaaaee | 9Q66QQQQQQ | 966668qqqq |
| 11 | 271994 | Saaeeeaaaee | saaeeeaaaee | 7Q868QQQQQQ | 7686888qqqq |
| 12 | 236612 | Saaeeeaaeaee | saaeeeaaeaee | 9QQ86QQQQQQQ | 95986888qqqq |
| 13 | 174282 | Saaeeeaeeeiee | saaeeeaeeeiee | 9Q6687QQXQQQQ | 986687888qqqq |
| 14 | 136544 | Saeeeeeeeeeiee | saeeeeaeeeeiee | 9Q9788QXQXQQqQ | 9597887888qqqq |
| 15 | 125986 | Saeeeeeeeeeeiee | saeeeeaeeeeeiee | 8Q59857QXQZQQQQ | 885985788qqqqqq |
| 16 | 71753 | Taeeeeeeeeeeeiee | saeeeeaeeeeeeiee | 8QQQQXXQQQQZQQQQ | 858688888888qqqq |
There is no real conclusion to this post. I just wanted to share this as a fun side-note. Have a nice day!