RP Safari - Pacing Styles

Third Eye

@MisterBoring said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

I’d honestly be curious as to how many staff-folks try and track metrics for their games, and what, if any, tools they use to do so.

On Shattered I tried to pay attention to it, it’s one of the things I find useful about having all the scenes visible, but it defaults to ‘feels’ and ‘how easy is it personally to get X kind of RP’, we didn’t collect hard numbers even insofar as we could’ve manually. All events were live unless it was a player doing some personal thing themselves, though, that was just how we did things.

Faraday

@MisterBoring said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

I’d honestly be curious as to how many staff-folks try and track metrics for their games, and what, if any, tools they use to do so.

Ares has player activity metrics baked in, which you can see on any AresCentral game page.

You could also do some db-level queries to figure out scenes started per day easily enough.

Looking at the details of those scenes (private vs public, on-grid vs off-grid, scene pacing) is more problematic because those things can be edited, and for pacing may reflect a default value rather than an actual depiction of reality. So at that point I think it’s down to vibes.

KarmaBum

@Faraday Oh, most definitely, but I’m also operating on the assumption that most scenes played are shared. I didn’t get to the level of seeing if there were any scene gaps or comparing scene # to scene share date…

…cuz that’s my actual job and what I’m supposed to be doing now instead of posting here. But!

Given a small sample of publicly posted and ongoing scenes, more scenes carry-over at least one day than are posted same-day.

@MisterBoring I’ve always been into tracking metrics on games. At one point on GH, I coded a virus that you could pass from person-to-person as part of a plot (pre-COVID <.<), and it had background tracking so I could watch its transmission, see who infected the most people, etc.

One time, I went through and compiled all the old data about every hatching on every active Pern game in the early '00s, just to validate that it was statistically easier to get a Gold Dragon on PernWorld than any other open game - and I still remember that PW had over 1/10 PC Impressions as Gold vs 1/15 for NC.

Pre-Ares, there were tons of log and activity trackers on Wikidot. You can still see some in action on Harper’s Tale - http://harpers-tale.wikidot.com/sw-staff:activity-tracker I think they’ve revamped the page since I played there, but I helped build/maintain the log tracker for a while there.

A “totally useless data about scenes” page would be awesome: Avg words per scene, avg characters per scene, % of scenes shared (vs total), avg time between open-and-share date, % of scene types (Social/Event/Vignette/etc)…

And by awesome I obviously mean super nerdy.

Trashcan

If we have coder permissions and believe that when players set the pacing on a scene in Ares, they’re being honest, we can, in fact, produce stats on this.

ruby Scene.all.each.count {|s| s.scene_pacing == "Traditional"}
ruby Scene.all.each.count {|s| s.scene_pacing == "Asynchronous"}
ruby Scene.all.each.count {|s| s.scene_pacing == "Distracted"}

On Shattered, we had 3220 traditional scenes, 656 distracted ones, and 411 async scenes. These commands pull the ‘current’ pacing, and in my experience, trad/distracted scenes may become async in flight but not the other direction.

Even if we lump ‘distracted’ in as ‘non-live’, traditional outnumbers them 3 to 1.

bear_necessities

@Trashcan I would think that data is skewed because the play screen defaults to traditional pacing and people may or may not make a selection there when starting the scene. I think a more reliable source of data would be the avg time between when the scene opened and closed, or when the scene was opened and shared, to determine true pacing.

Yam

@Trashcan Damn! 75% of all scenes. I wish I could dig this data up on my old ares games.

Faraday

@bear_necessities said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

@Trashcan I would think that data is skewed because the play screen defaults to traditional pacing and people may or may not make a selection there when starting the scene. I think a more reliable source of data would be the avg time between when the scene opened and closed, or when the scene was opened and shared, to determine true pacing.

I agree that the data is skewed because of the default setting, but neither of those other ways really work well either. A scene can be started and left open because people forgot about it, can be started and stopped multiple times in multiple synchronous chunks… there are lots of different ways to play.

And at the day, the stats are kinda fun (from a data nerd perspective) but I’m not sure they mean much. Just because there’s live RP happening, if it’s happening in private scenes, or at a time incongruous with your work schedule, or whatever… YOU might not be able to find live RP. That’s ultimately what most people care about.

MisterBoring

@Faraday said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

Looking at the details of those scenes (private vs public, on-grid vs off-grid, scene pacing) is more problematic because those things can be edited, and for pacing may reflect a default value rather than an actual depiction of reality. So at that point I think it’s down to vibes.

Wouldn’t scene pacing be easy to capture if the game is capturing time / date stamps for all of the posing?

Faraday

@MisterBoring said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

Wouldn’t scene pacing be easy to capture if the game is capturing time / date stamps for all of the posing?

Once a scene has been shared, that data is no longer available.

Pavel

@Faraday said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

A scene can be started and left open because people forgot about it, can be started and stopped multiple times in multiple synchronous chunks… there are lots of different ways to play.

This is also the excuse I use when someone notices just how long I’ve spent playing Rimworld.

As an aside, however, I do become mildly concerned when metrics are discussed. While they’re fine in a vacuum, they can so often become targets or indicators of performance. Which, I think we can all agree, is something to be avoided.