Statistics and Takeaways from March: New Players and Voting

[Nyr]

We're coming up on the end of the month (only two days left of voting) and we have enough data now that I can post with certainty about the effects of this month's focus on voting for the game.  I need to preface the following information by saying that the numbers aren't as accurate as they could be with regards to the Where Survey.  We lost any data between 1/23 and yesterday on where people found out about the MUD.  That sucks, but I've been closely watching this almost every weekday and crunching numbers, and I have accurate numbers on who we got from TMS and TMC as of Thursday.  All we're missing is a really good grasp of TMS/TMC newcomers between Thursday morning and Friday morning. More on that when we get there.

With that said, let's look at how we are doing for new accounts for the month of March. I know for a fact there are two duplicate accounts (people that made two accounts on accident, or people that made two accounts on purpose).  Those are not included.  Note also that numbers on new accounts on Weekly Updates for this week and previous weeks are inaccurate as the info is not there (at least, not now).  Again, the only reason we have this is that I've been watching these numbers, commenting on them to other staff, and those logs (via chats or local log files) are separate from the stuff that was lost.

For the sake of comparison, I'm including the numbers from February first.



February 1 - February 28 (at 11:50 PM Server Time)
123 new accounts
15 players found us from TMS
31 players found us from TMC
1250 votes over 28 days on TMS, average of (approximately) 44 votes per day
370 clickthroughs on TMS



March 1 - March 30 (10:00 AM Server Time)
227 new accounts, an increase of 84.6% over the last month
69 players found us from TMS, an increase of 360% over the last month
37 players found us from TMC, an increase of 19.4% over the last month
1935 votes over 29.5 days on TMS, average of (approximately) 65 votes per day, with more at the outset to maintain a lead
(discounting the 3 extra days we get this month, that'd still put us at a 46.9% increase in voting over the last month)
861 clickthroughs on TMS, a traffic increase of 132.7% over the last month



Some trivia:

--  This is the second highest amount of new players we've gotten in a month (we do not have Where Survey data that goes back farther than the last week of December, 2008).  We've broken 200 before (December 2010) and there's one month doing better than this (November 2010 at 266 new accounts), but there's nothing else that comes close.

--  What happened the last two times we broke 200?  Here's November 2010.

November 2010
266 new accounts
34 players found us from TMS
51 players found us from TMC

December 2010
201 new accounts
33 players found us from TMS
37 players found us from TMC

Interesting, eh?  It's almost like there's a correlation between how many new accounts we get and how well we represent ourselves in voting! 

--  Even if we only got players from voting on TMS and TMC and no one else stumbled across us from friends, family, Google, etc., we would have 106 new accounts (so far) this month.  Why is that an interesting bit of trivia?  January's total new accounts:  83.  December's total new accounts:  118.  November's total new accounts:  99.  October's total new accounts:  110.  You get the picture.

--  Per the runlogs, I mentioned to another staffer that one week in particular looked damned good:  66 new accounts in one week alone (based on the timing of the runlog, I assume the first week).  I had to go back to November 21 - November 27 2010 to find a week that beat those numbers.  (This raised some interesting questions about why we had so many new accounts for the last two weeks of November, 2010; it didn't match other Novembers.  That's where the voting data pans out in the where survey stuff above.)



I apologize but we can't really look into who's still here and playing that tried the game out for the first time this month.  The DB backup problem means that the account information stored in the Where Surveys (even though I have the numbers from other logs) just isn't available.  If we assume the same retention rate that Calavera and I investigated last month, we can assume that around 12% of these accounts are still actively playing.  If you could see some of the wish and send interactions for the past month or the overall amount of apps that we've actually approved, you might think it is higher than that.

Bottom line:

The higher our position on TMS and TMC, the more new players attempt to try our game.  The more new players that attempt to try our game, the more that will stick to the game.  The more that stick to the game, the larger our playerbase grows.

However, we also have to consider the new player and find ways to help the new player adjust to this kind of game.  Adhira will be approaching some of that on behalf of the Producers.  The rest can be assisted by the playerbase.  Be nice to newbies in the newbie forum area.  If you notice a newbie in-game, try to help (but don't go overboard; i.e., if it's not really IC to be nice to that elf, be nice in an "IC" way, or direct your help via OOC, or ask a staffer to assist, or direct them to a helper).



Kudos to you guys.  Without you, this wouldn't have been possible!

[Dakota]

I gotta post it again...

[Is Friday]

[Barzalene]

As you continue to monitor could you keep an eye on the potential impact of new TMC reviews?

[Nyr]

We can try.  If people mention they came because of a TMC review, we can definitely isolate that from TMC votes, sure.

I'll crunch some more numbers on TMC voting in general to see what we need to do to take #1.
#1 on TMS is probably out of the question, but I am pretty sure we can maintain #2 on TMS provided we remember to vote (and get that early lead).

[ShaLeah]

[Jenred]

Is there enough information to correlate how long players play for? Or how many accounts essentially are lost in the same period? (I.e. no logins in a sizeable enough period to indicate likely inactivity?)

[Barsook]

I was thinking the same thing here.  We need more stats.

[Morrolan]

More...data...


Oh, did Gimf take a leave or leave forever?

[Nyr]

Is there enough information to correlate how long players play for? Or how many accounts essentially are lost in the same period? (I.e. no logins in a sizeable enough period to indicate likely inactivity?)

It's not a matter of enough information, it's a matter of not having the information.

I apologize but we can't really look into who's still here and playing that tried the game out for the first time this month.  The DB backup problem means that the account information stored in the Where Surveys (even though I have the numbers from other logs) just isn't available.

If the information in the database between January 23 and yesterday had not been lost, we could do more digging like we did here, here, here, and here.  And even all of that was manually done and took a good deal of time to investigate (a couple of hours at most).  I was looking at new accounts for January (83); Calavera was looking at the last 100 new accounts at the time.  We have 227 accounts (228 now, just got another one from TMS) so far for the month of March.  That's 145 more than what I reviewed and 128 more than what Calavera reviewed; suffice it to say that it would take longer to get more specific data out of these new accounts.  We do need some better tools to review these new accounts so that we don't have to worry about handling it manually, but for now, I think it's safe to say that widening the funnel is a good thing.  More new accounts is good.

So anyway, without being able to look at any data more than what I'd collected so far (which was just overall numbers for the categories I wanted to keep track of), I made the assumptions I made:

If we assume the same retention rate that Calavera and I investigated last month, we can assume that around 12% of these accounts are still actively playing.

However, we can't has more stats and data because we don't has any stats and data for that period of time. If I hadn't made notes on this stuff on a regular basis this month, we wouldn't even have this much; I'd just be saying "oh hey voting is good."  I had to pull information from recovered logs in various places. 

We can delve deeper next month, though!

[LauraMars]

[Marauder Moe]

[Rhyden]

[Fredd]

I have been noticing a fair amount of brand new players that are at least sticking around a couple rl weeks (there pc's could easilly be dying, and I hope so, since statistically that means they stay more!) But, and this is awesome, I'm noticing many, many more players online after normal peek hours. at like 2 am est I remember seeing 66 people on, and no known RPT's that I saw posted on the forums, or that I knew of ICly.



WINNING!

[Maso]

[Kismetic]

[IntuitiveApathy]

[DustMight]

FYI:

If you view Top Mud Sites' database of information for Armageddon, the webpage address is broken (http://www.armageddon.org/intro/adpage.html).

I got there from clicking on the quotes on Arm's main page, viewing the quoted review and then clicking the "Search MUD database for Armageddon MUD" link at the bottom of the review.

[Nyr]

FYI:

If you view Top Mud Sites' database of information for Armageddon, the webpage address is broken (http://www.armageddon.org/intro/adpage.html).

I got there from clicking on the quotes on Arm's main page, viewing the quoted review and then clicking the "Search MUD database for Armageddon MUD" link at the bottom of the review.

I'm not even sure how we get to that page.  It isn't something that we can edit.  Looks like it is part of the old MUD database on TMS.  I'll check into it.

[Morgenes]

I've got that page properly redirecting to the front page.