Saturday, July 04, 2015

[Meta] Player activity

Hi there,

I’m an old player just checking in to see how the nomic’s been doing lately. Out of personal interest I made this chart containing the number of active players per dynasty, and I thought perhaps some of you might be interested: http://i.imgur.com/JDp6P7G.png

The data comes from the individual dynasty pages.

The mean is 15.67.

Notes:

First, I make no real claims as to accuracy. I probably messed up the data entry at multiple points, though I did attempt to verify every few dynasties that I was in the right place.

The bigger problem is that the data was inconsistently recorded: even where player activity was noted, it was not always noted in the same manner. Some dynasties had separate beginning/end stats, some had generic “active player” stats, etc. I was as liberal as possible—I included everyone who was recorded as being active at some point during a dynasty.

Further, the data weren’t recorded in every dynasty. Some of these (particularly the ones before approximately dynasty 68) were reconstructed after the fact. From around 68-80, player activity was noted at the beginning and end of each dynasty. You’ll note this coincides with the peak period of activity, which is probably not coincidental. After that point, player activity was noted towards the end. Out of the 129 dynasties, only 85 have values here.

In dynasties 90 and 91, I included the “notably active” players in the counts. For several dynasties around 98, I ignored the “among others” disclaimers and pretended the records were accurate.

The raw data is here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/hgv0oxabc0ebdj8/activeplayers.xlsx?dl=0

If you think this will be useful in the future, back it up somewhere (*cough Kevan*). That’s my personal dropbox folder and it’s likely going to be reorganised in the next few weeks, so the link will probably break. Alternatively, PM me. I’ll probably keep this file forever unless I accidentally lose it.

Do not use this in for any reputable social science research purposes. Seriously. The data are freaking terrible.

Comments

redtara: they/them

04-07-2015 05:22:08 UTC

Also, I may unidle in the near future. Or maybe not. We’ll see.

redtara: they/them

04-07-2015 05:24:44 UTC

And oh yeah, that huuuuge spike was the <a href = “http://wiki.blognomic.com/index.php?title=The_Sixth_Dynasty_of_Kevan”>Sixth Dynasty of Kevan</a>, which I remember as being super fun. I see he’s had a few more since then.

redtara: they/them

04-07-2015 05:25:05 UTC

Uh…. well, you guys know how URLs work

Tantusar: he/they

04-07-2015 05:34:58 UTC

From a new player to an old one, you are always welcome!

Josh: Observer he/they

04-07-2015 07:30:03 UTC

That is really interesting. It’s a shame that the dynastic histories obscure some interesting stuff - like when the player numbers briefly got into the fifties during the Agora invasion, or the spike at the beginning of Dynasty 100.

redtara: they/them

04-07-2015 07:34:35 UTC

Yeah, I did this in about the laziest possible way—just going through and counting the numbers. I bet if someone did it properly and applied their human intelligence to it they’d find some really interesting trends. I’d also love to see this data coded by player. How long do players tend to stick around for? How many players leave and then return? That kind of thing.

We have most of the data still (excepting the pre-switch post replies) but trawling through would be a PITA.

Kevan: he/him

04-07-2015 08:22:50 UTC

Aha. I had a go at documenting a history of active players by month back in 2012 (counting “active in a month” as “made at least one blog post”), and came up with this graph, which caught the spike of Dynasty 94.

Brendan: he/him

04-07-2015 14:04:44 UTC

for

redtara: they/them

04-07-2015 16:17:33 UTC

Very interesting Kevan. Funny how much higher some of these values are than the ones on the wiki.

Kevan: he/him

05-07-2015 08:48:47 UTC

Yes, if the wiki only counts players who were active at the very start and end of a dynasty, it misses out everyone who joined and left in between - which must be a significant chunk of players.