Is HeroStats accurate?

In my semi-regular browsing of the official forums for HeroStats questions, I came across a discussion about whether HeroStats tracking is really accurately recording what's actually going on in the game. I want to clear up some misconceptions that I've seen in some of the posts. First of all, the many people that have pointed out that the data recorded by HeroStats is not 100% accurate are absolutely correct. Leaving aside the philosophical discussion on whether any non-finite activity can be 100% accurate, I can point out that there are three main reasons for inaccuracies:

1. There are some powers that do not have combat log messages reflecting the actual behavior of the powers. I've documented these to the best of my knowledge on the Power Notes page of the HeroStats website. If anyone sees something incorrect or missing in that list, by all means report it.

2. The way HeroStats receives its information is passive - the scanning engine has read-only access to the information available to the game client, specifically the combat log. Because of this, HeroStats has no control over what is being done by the game client. This was a conscious design decision to avoid any possibility that HeroStats could directly influence gameplay (which is a EULA violation). What this means is that the game client could change the information being read in the middle of the scanner processing. When this happens, it's possible to miss information. I've got safeguards in place to minimize this, so it's rare, but it can happen and nothing short of violating the EULA by modifying the game client will prevent it. It's worth noting that this behavior is very dependent on the performance of your machine - fast machines with lots of RAM will see very few missed messages, while slower/older machines may see more.

3. We who work with HeroStats are only human. (Really.) We can and do make mistakes. Fortunately we have lots of people who are very willing to point these out to us, and whenever possible we fix the problems ASAP. In the cases where we can't fix something, we document it in either the Power Notes or Known Issues.

Having said all that - I believe HeroStats is a useful statistical tool, even without 100% accuracy. I can't give you any kind of numerical value representing how accurate it is for you, because that will vary based on the performance of your own particular setup (#2 above) and the combat log messages available for your powersets (#1 above). But I firmly believe that HeroStats captures the vast majority of information available in CoX correctly, and those tests that I've run on my own setup have confirmed that to my satisfaction. (Specifically, I tested my Fire tanker running Blazing Aura against several mobs and counted the ticks. This is the worst-case scenario for HeroStats, with multiple identical combat log messages being processed at once. Over 98% of the 2000+ ticks were properly recorded. In the vast majority of real play situations, the percentage of missed messages should be much lower, since we can do some error correction when the messages aren't identical.)

If you choose to believe that HeroStats isn't doing a good job of capturing statistics, that's your prerogative. But please, don't knock those that do use it unless you're willing to show some proof that it fails in a particular way. And by all means, report those issues that you do find, so we can correct them!