Player Slot and Game Census

[zoraster]

maybe, although that didn't seem to be the case very often just as a first impression going through them.

And yes, Team Mafia may have drained the Mini Themes queue disproportionately. I'll probably want to run this again in a few months to see if that's brough it back to previous levels, but I suspect it'll still show something similar.

[zoraster]

Spoiler: Silly rant

By the way, let me reiterate how annoying it is when people don't number their alive/deads. Doing the following is NOT a good alternative (I'm not entirely sure why they bother):

Alive:
1. Zoraster
2. quadz08
4. Vi
7. Faraday

Dead:
3. Percy
5. Tina
6. Archibald

The

1. function is a great tool for those that don't know. Just use
2. where you'd normally put a number. Tada! Insant changing numbers.
   ---
   
   Or even MORE annoying: not updating your game after it ends. And just downright puzzling is <CENSORED MOD WHO SHOULD KNOW BETTER> not updating their alive/dead on the front page even once even though it's about to be Day 3.
   
   --

A special shoutout to mods who put the number alive at the top of their counts. e.g "Alive (9/13)

[Vi]

Obviously we're still recovering from the crash, especially in the case of large normals (although % of slots playing large themes is actually up).

But a couple of things that REALLY stand out: Opens are way, way up (in fact the only category that has more slots now than in October). I attribute this to the far better game selection and Hoopla's influence there. The other is that Mini-Themes are way, way down. I don't know how to account for this. It's been enough months that nearly all mini-themes should be post-crash.

So I'm not sure what's causing this except maybe a shift in tastes, possibly brought on by well known mods running fewer mini-themes and more large themes, and a better selection of interesting open games as an alternative to minis.

My occasionally-correct rumor mill says that the Mini Themes these days have been kind of lame.

Also renumbering players as they die is horrible because each number is supposed to represent a player slot (e.g. "Slot 4 is being played by Vi"). Alive/Dead counts at the top are fine but not really relevant over the course of the game as you should be mentioning how many players are alive in each vote count.

[zoraster]

"supposed" to vi? Why? Who refers to slots by their numbers? I've literally never heard someone say "oh well the 7 slot is really scummy."

Far more useful to all involved is knowing how many players are alive because that's relevant for figuring out where you stand in terms of lylo, mylo, etc.

[Faraday]

But it's in the votecounts. Like literally every votecount <_<

[Mr. Flay]

I'm guessing Vi is referring to 'supposed to' in the mod spreadsheet, but yeah I've never seen that confusion in practice.

[gorckat]

Is the 'always display post 0' option buried somewhere or did it get dropped with the forum conversion?

An updated first post with most recent vote count and flips was awesome, although not every mod did it that way.

[Mr. Flay]

It didn't follow us with the transition. Doing it in some manner may be possible, but there's disagreement about what it would look like.

[saulres]

Is the 'always display post 0' option buried somewhere or did it get dropped with the forum conversion?

I thought this feature existed, but now they call it "tabs" and put it in the browsers.

[kuribo]

It's way more annoying when mods don't update the original post with who replaced who.

[Ythan]

I never realized there was a body of mafia queue knowledge out there.

[zoraster]

There's this too from last year (and a link to the year before): http://forum.mafiascum.net/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=18784

[Ythan]

Thank you zor.

[zoraster]

no problemo.

[Mastermind of Sin]

All this data does is make me sad that we're still ~20 games short of "recovering" from the crash. >.>

[zoraster]

Games aren't quite as concerning to me as slots. It's perfectly possible that tastes shift toward larger games,* and that's not a terrible thing. But player slots indicates that we have fewer players playing fewer games, and that is -- if it's sustained -- a bit of a problem.

That said, the game side is still relatively healthy. The lack of interest or quality (or perceived quality) in Mini-Themes is concerning to me, but the increase in interest in Open Games is quite heartening as that can probably be directly traced back to Hoopla and the way that queue is being run now.

The decrease in sheer number of Newbies is also very concerning since theoretically the crash should have little impact on newbie players.

* The increased players alive per game indicates this

may

be the case, though with a small sample size, especially for larges, this may just be a quirk. And truthfully it may reflect that moderators are favoring bigger games in the large context, or it could possible indicate that mods are running longer, slower games now than a year ago.

[AGar]

I think it'd be more accurate a picture if we knew how many slots were filled by unique players (not alts/hydras) rather than just the general amount. [Deleted the next part because I can't fucking add/subtract]

[zoraster]

It'd probably have some use, but it wouldn't be more useful.

[gorckat]

From census to census, we could see how many active players there are.

[chamber]

June of last year we had about 800 unique posters, June of this year we had about 700, June of last year we had about 85 thousand posts, June of this year we had about 70 thousand posts.

While our numbers are down from '11 they are still up from '10.
edit: thats all site wide.

[zoraster]

can you isolate numbers for just mafia games, chamber?

[chamber]

For mafia forums:
52 thousand posts in June '11 to 42 thousand in June '12
650 unique posters in June '11 to 500 in June '12

[zoraster]

thanks!

[zoraster]

12/8/12

Newbie Games:

91 slots out of 12 games (7.6 p/g) 16.82%

Open Games:

82 slots out of 10 games (8.2 p/g) 15.16%

Mini-Normal Games:

64 slots out of 6 games (10.7 p/g) 11.83%

Mini-Theme Games:

87 slots out of 9 games (10.9 p/g) 16.08%

Large Normal Games:

10 slots out of 1 game (10.0 p/g) 1.85%

Large Theme Games:

117 slots out of 10 games (11.7 p/g) 21.63%

Micros:

90 slots out of 13 games (6.9 p/g) 16.64%

Overall:

541 slots out of 61 games (8.87 p/g)

Comparison to the previous:
Game Type, June 26th total

Slot adjustment

|

Percent of total slots adjustment

Newbie Games:

91

-7

|

+1.42%[/b]

Open Games:

82

-53

|

-6.0%

Mini-Normal Games:

64

-4

|

+1.1%

Mini-Theme Games:

87

-8

|

+1.2%

Large Normal Games:

10

-3

|

-0.2%

Large Theme Games:

117

-112

|

-14.3%

Micro Games:

90

+90

|

+16.64%

[zoraster]

Obviously throwing micros in puts in a new wrinkle, but nothing can hide the fact that fewer player slots are filled these days. Micros are devoured, but they only fill 90 player slots at the moment. Despite the supposed unpopularity of Mini Themes these days , Mini Themes actually have about as many people playing in them as Micros at the given moment.

Really, all that's happened is pretty much everything is less popular. We are down 278 player spots from when I first started recording this. That's a 34% drop in the span of a year and a half.

Yes, time of year has something to do with this. But the numbers were not rosy this past summer. Maybe that was residual from the Tiger attack, but we can keep making excuses or we can recognize that the game has become less popular.

Open games are understandably down as the Micro queue runs a lot of open games. But the most remarkable number is the Large Themes. In all my previous versions, the Large Theme games were the most resilient to fall off. 230, 265, 229. So the reduction to 117 is notable. It may just be that Larges are in particular susceptible to the time of year (larges may be better suited for summer time for whatever reason).