Stories from RhyDin & The Rings

The thread on negative WoL got me thinking about this kind of thing, but please don't take any of this as an argument in support thereof. I can't possibly give you reasons for these numbers. It's just my launch point into becoming curious about it.

So, what I've done is this... I parsed all of the available xml DoS standings to see how many new people show up and how long they stay around. I used the stuff available from 2004 and 2005 as my baseline of "known duelists", so the total numbers here are from 2006 - today (where applicable). To qualify as a "New" person they have to show up for the first time as a commoner or swordsman and, obviously, can not have appeared in the baseline.

It's also worth noting that the total new number is likely higher than it should be. If someone appears with a typo in their name that later gets corrected, or something to that effect, they'll count even though they probably shouldn't. I don't control data integrity =) I made a second pass looking at the people who were around 3 months later and stayed around until the 6 or 12 month mark to account for this. My working theory is that if a name still exists on the standings after 3 months, it's much less likely to be a typo or misprint.

Ok.. .numbers

Total New Faces Jan. 2006 - March 2010: 559
Number that show up more than this one time on the standings: 315 (56.35%)
** in other words, 45.65% of characters show up one week and then never come back.
** Even considering data intergrity issues, that's awfully high
Number that show up at least 1 month later: 202 (30.43%) [this is out of 537 new rather than 559 since some are too recent to qualify]
Number that show up at least 3 months later: 138 (29.05%) [this is out of 475 new rather than 559 since some are too recent to qualify]
Number that show up at least 6 months later: 101 (23.06%) [this is out of 438 new rather than 559 since some are too recent to qualify]
Number that show up at least 1 year later: 63 (16.54%) [this is out of 381 new rather than 559 since some are too recent to qualify]

So, 84% of the new duelists found are gone within a year.
As an aside, the best of the years measured was 2007. Of 177 new duelists that year, 33 of them still showed up a year or more later. (18.64%)

As mentioned above, for the 2nd pass I tried to account for data integrity by scaling down the dataset to people who were already around for 3 months to begin with. Of the 138 people in that category, I also had to remove the ones who were too new to the standings to have been around for 6 months to a year.

Of 131 qualifying duelists to be around for 3 months, 101 of them (77.1%) were still around in 6 months. I think this is actually really good.
Of 109 qualifying duelists to be around for 3 months, 63 of them (57.8%) were still around after a year. This, perhaps, less good.

Sorry that I can't do this for DoF or DoM. The DoS xml standings format is what makes the effort possible for that sport and is why I can only go back to late 2004.

Take the numbers for what you will.

~Kal

It's entirely possible that some of those MIA "new" duelists are those throwaway characters advocated by some players to help build up the standings on their more well known characters.

Just a thought.

Maranya Valkonan wrote:It's entirely possible that some of those MIA "new" duelists are those throwaway characters advocated by some players to help build up the standings on their more well known characters.

Just a thought.

To correct this.

Throwaway characters are advocated to get practice dueling, learn strategies and learn the matrix. NOT to build up standings records for another character of the same player.

Building up standings by facing one's own character (or repeatedly facing only other duelers who throw duels for them) is cheating.

Maranya wasn't talking about cheating, she was talking about characters used to learn the game that are not intended for long-term play. At least that's my impression. In any case these may skew Kalamere's numbers.

I understood why Jaycy corrected the statement. It may not have been what Anya meant but if somebody read that statement without reference they could have taken it that way. Obviously, it would be a very dangerous thing to have floating around out there.

That being said, I'd really love to see those numbers compared to another period in time. Say pre-2004 to post-2004 for example since many of us believe that the measures that have been taken have helped retention.

There are a million and one reasons that a character may duel once and then not show up again on the standings. I actually have a character with one duel on the DoS standings. I realized that after I won one duel that it just didn't make sense for that character to be a good fighter and I didn't duel with that character again. Sometimes it's a throw-away character. Sometimes somebody tests a character out to see if that character will work for a SL or something and then realizes that they don't enjoy the character.

You know I love your stats, Kal, but I think that it's hard to make any conclusions off of those unless we can compare them to another time period or could survey the reasons why those characters haven't reappeared.

Marc Franco wrote:Sometimes somebody tests a character out to see if that character will work for a SL or something and then realizes that they don't enjoy the character.

Seconded.

I am always creating new characters, playing them for a little bit for one reason or another, and if I can't get a feel for them, of if their SL isn't going to pan out, or if I just didn't have fun playing the character, I'll move on to the next idea/character.

Jaycy Ashleana wrote:

Maranya Valkonan wrote:It's entirely possible that some of those MIA "new" duelists are those throwaway characters advocated by some players to help build up the standings on their more well known characters.

Just a thought.

To correct this.

Throwaway characters are advocated to get practice dueling, learn strategies and learn the matrix. NOT to build up standings records for another character of the same player.

Building up standings by facing one's own character (or repeatedly facing only other duelers who throw duels for them) is cheating.

To correct the misconception of what I meant, what I meant was the advocated by some duelers use of throwaway characters to learn the matrix and how other duelers fight. Then that information is used to then face those duelers on a more well known character. If this tactic is done properly, it will help build up the standing records of the well known character.

Getting back on topic, another reason why some duelers may give it one shot and then quit may be because they find it hard to break into and get accepted by the group of duelers out there.

What I mean by that is this. Say Joe New Dueler comes in, and gives one or two matches a try. This is of course presuming that one of the regular duelers gives Joe New Dueler a try in the rings. He may like the experience and want to give it another go, so he comes back on another night, and finds that everyone present is locked in their usual groups and he doesn't have a chance to interact with anyone, even in duels. If that pattern of not being able to get any form of interaction, dueling or otherwise, happens consistently, Joe New Dueler may well give up on dueling entirely.

I'm not saying that these situations happen all the time, but it could happen and that could be a contributing factor why some duelers give up.

The numbers reflect both new players that leave and throwaway characters existing players create. Either way, the numbers aren't that great, and it tells me that we're a rather insular bunch and a few of you who've lasted awhile and have managed to gain rank are happy with the status quo. The rest leave out of frustration, or they're dumb like me and keep plugging away and digging that hole deeper.

There really aren't that many unique, consistent players here. There may be a lot of duels going on, but my guess is that more than a few are alts.

I know most of the alts of duelists, and using the recent Madness tournament as a basis, that tournament alone had more than 45 individual players in it. And it didn't include a good portion of casual duelists who show up every so often. 45 is generous, because I think it was closer to 50. 45 individual duelists compared to the previous madness where we had 35 characters with several players entering multiple characters, that's most likely well over a 50% increase in a years time.

I like that number.

Marc Franco wrote:You know I love your stats, Kal, but I think that it's hard to make any conclusions off of those unless we can compare them to another time period or could survey the reasons why those characters haven't reappeared.

Absolutely true. There are a wealth of reasons. Some have already been mentioned. Another very recent example was the Deathlord squire tournament, where one-shot characters were created just to be victimized by contestants.

I'm not trying to argue anything at all here.. but I had the numbers, thought they were interesting even if not meaningful and thought I would share. I actually have it broken down by month if you'd like to see it: http://www.acceptablelosses.org/madness ... report.php. It's not a very pretty display, sorry, I wrote it for my own use.

I know it kinda sucks to have numbers with no meaning... but I think you always have to start somewhere. We take this, digest it, figure out if it does mean, or at least hint, at anything, and then we figure out something else to look at. Is it possible to alter the collection or time spans to get something more meaningful out of it? I don't know. I'm open to suggestions.

One thing I found interesting if you look at the monthly breakdowns is that we've been at 20+ new faces in each of the last 3 months. That's never (at least since 2006) happened before. As a matter of fact there are only 2 months at all since 2006 that we broke 20. All the same caveats apply though right, I mean who knows why that would be and maybe we can blame Deathlord.. but it is kinda interesting none-the-less.

I'm all for retention of new duelists. We can't force them to like the duels, I can only hope they find that what we offer here to be something of interest.

And yeah, the numbers on that page gave me a headache to look at. lol

I'm one of those players who over the last 15 years or so has played many characters, some only for days, others for several months, some are still around after years. Not all of them duel. Some duel for a week, then not for a year, then duel again for a bit. But mostly those characters exist for a part in a story line. I'm sure several of those 500 or so "new" characters actually belong to people like me who've been around for a long time and every now and then want to play something other than the main character/s everyone knows.

The general rise in players entering one character per player tournaments is more indicative of healthy growth.

Napoleon Bonarat wrote:Either way, the numbers aren't that great, and it tells me that we're a rather insular bunch and a few of you who've lasted awhile and have managed to gain rank are happy with the status quo. The rest leave out of frustration, or they're dumb like me and keep plugging away and digging that hole deeper.

I find this statement upsetting.

You've already admitted that you haven't really thought about retention of the lower ranks until recently. The very same people you accuse of being happy with status quo have been thinking about it for years and have made huge strides to not only give the lower ranks more ways to be involved but to create a more inclusive environment. It's not that we don't care. We just didn't like one particular idea.

And as I've said before, unless you survey people leaving, you don't know if they're leaving or just don't like the character they created or don't like text based roleplay or only duel with that character once in a blue moon.

Topaz wrote:The general rise in players entering one character per player tournaments is more indicative of healthy growth.

One of the best statements in this thread.

Marc Franco wrote:And as I've said before, unless you survey people leaving, you don't know if they're leaving or just don't like the character they created or don't like text based roleplay or only duel with that character once in a blue moon.

Or because life gets in the way, or are west coast and can't get home in time to duel.

Marc Franco wrote:

Topaz wrote:The general rise in players entering one character per player tournaments is more indicative of healthy growth.

One of the best statements in this thread.

Yup!

Maranya Valkonan wrote:What I mean by that is this. Say Joe New Dueler comes in, and gives one or two matches a try. This is of course presuming that one of the regular duelers gives Joe New Dueler a try in the rings. He may like the experience and want to give it another go, so he comes back on another night, and finds that everyone present is locked in their usual groups and he doesn't have a chance to interact with anyone, even in duels. If that pattern of not being able to get any form of interaction, dueling or otherwise, happens consistently, Joe New Dueler may well give up on dueling entirely.

The situation you just described we actually had for a while. It's called clique-ism. It drove away a good number of players and last I checked has become severly frowned upon.

Besides I've actually been there. In the beginning when I was still learning the finesse involved with TRUE cooperative role-play, I made some mistakes and one of the players actually got me blacklisted from getting any duels in the sports and told me no one would duel me until I learned how to role play "properly". Apparently he'd IMed/e-mailed/PM'd people about several things I'd done in posted/room play rather than say a word to me.

The only way I got duels again was to post a mass apology on the boards, if it wasn't for Billy, the DoS Supervisor at the time who stepped up and defended me, I too would have left the game.