Would like to use PS2 data for a class assignment; need help

For a final project in one of my classes I'm supposed to get some data of my choice and do some simple visualizations of the data using MATLAB.

What I was hoping to do was get data by outfit and compare different outfits in terms of how likely they are within a given period of time to pull certain vehicles, play particular classes, or use specific weapons. For example, I'd like to know how many Sunderers were pulled in a specified period of time by outfit X versus outfit Y.

The problem I'm having is I'm not really a computer guy (I'm a mechanical engineering student) and have never worked with an API or anything similar before. I've already signed up for a service ID and have gone through the basic examples but I'm having a tough time figuring out how to make more complex requests.

To further clarify, what I'm hoping is possible is to send a single request that will return the following data for all the players within the specified outfit on a per player basis:

Kills per weapon (vehicle and infantry weapons); number of times each type of vehicle has been pulled; and amount of time spent playing class type; all within a given period of time (I'll probably just analyze January 2014-March 2014).

Basically if I had as much time as I wanted to figure this out I'd take the trial by fire approach, but I'm a bit short on time and I have other finals to study for so any help figuring out how to request exactly what I'm looking for would be much appreciated.

 

Unfortunately, I think a lot of the information that you would need for that is not available through the API. There's no record of vehicles being pulled, for instance. There is only the amount of time that a particular player has spent inside a vehicle (or as a certain class) since the character was created.

You'll also likely need to write a script to collect the data as you'll first have to get the list of members in the outfit, then step through the list and get the more specific character data. It might be possible to do a single query with multiple joins, but that would likely take a long time depending on the number of people in the outfit.

As an example, here is my character data joined with the "weapon stat by faction" which contains how many kills per faction I've earned with each weapon (as well as vehicle kills, headshots and other things) and also joined with the "item" (and vehicle) so that we can get the weapon name (rather than just the id):

http://census.daybreakgames.com/get/ps2:v2/ch...me.en,vehicle^inject_at:vehicle^show:name.en)

You could potentially start with the outfit member list and then join on the other tables
outfit_member -> character -> characters_weapon_stat_by_faction -> item/vehicle

Also, for reference here is another query that starts with a character and joins on all of the relevant tables (except event) that I use just for exploring things. This only does the initial joins, so it doesn't resolve the item/vehicle/skill ids:
<span style="text-decoration: underline"><span style="color: #1155cc"><span style="font-size: 15px">http://census.daybreakgames.com/get/ps2:v2/character/5428010618015204433?c:join=outfit_member_extended^inject_atutfit,characters_skill^list:1^inject_at:skills,characters_stat^list:1^inject_at:stats,characters_stat_history^list:1^inject_at:stats_history,characters_stat_by_faction^list:1^inject_at:stats_by_faction,characters_weapon_stat^list:1^inject_at:weapon_stats,characters_weapon_stat_by_faction^list:1^inject_at:weapon_stats_by_faction,characters_world^inject_at:world,characters_item^list:1^inject_at:items,characters_achievement^list:1^inject_at:achievements

I recommend using something like the JSONView Firefox plugin for viewing these since it will parse the JSON and show a collapsible tree.