How effective was this at compressing the data?

[p810]

Prefacing this by saying that I've never looked into how this was implemented in Club Penguin's client, so any explanation of how and/or why it works would be appreciated. I was going down readme.md and had a moment of confusion. If you compare the first example with a JSON representation of the data, you'll get a reduction of about 300 bytes. I then came up with a fake XML schema representing the save data, and that ended up being about half the size of the compressed string. JSON and XML aren't compression algorithms, but if the purpose was to make the data lighter, either of those formats would have done better on their own. Especially if you factor in a more standard compression algorithm like gzip. What am I missing? Was this an attempt at obfuscation, or was there some other reason Club Penguin chose this over an alternative?

[AllinolCP]

Sorry for the VERY late response (almost 5 years!), but the reason Club Penguin used this algorithm was that because in ActionScript 2.0 it is very limited on what algorithm they can use, so this is the next best thing they can use.