Stop! STATISTICS TIME!

[paradisamods]

STATISTICS TIME!

If you didn't join us last time, we looked at intro posts and who comments on them, and how often.

Cool, right? Well, tonight's post is only tangentially related to that, but it is hopefully just as interesting and light-shining on Paradisa's IC make-up and the "average resident." We did this thing where we tracked every character in the game's intro month. We found out some pretty cool stuff! It is updated as of all our new characters (intro'd or not) as of tonight.

Let's take a look!

Wanna see how many characters fall into each year?
(all percentages rounded, based on a total of 352 characters)

	CHARACTERS	PERCENTAGE
2006 - 2008	20	5%
2009	32	9%
2010	138	40%
2011	162	46%

Or, just in case you don't learn-by-numbers and can't imagine what that looks like, it looks like this:


(click to enlarge)

And if you still can't really imagine it, how about this:


(click to enlarge)

How about some quick facts?

• 46% of the castle didn't see Christmas 2010... which means almost half of the game has been here for less than FOUR months.
• Only 35 characters -- roughly 10% of the game -- experienced Wild Wild West in June '09, which kicked off World Plot.
• Just shy of 60% of the castle has been here for six months or less.
• Our median character has been there for five months.
• The most common date-of-arrival is April 2011, with 66. That's 18% of the game.
• The average duration of a resident's stay, using this chart as a "photograph" of a moment in time, is nine months -- August 2010.
• See that long "shelf" for January 2010? That's after we closed apps for a month in December 2009.
• It looks like we get around 470 new characters a year. That's 40 approved applications a month.
• In the 48 hours between making this chart (Monday night) and updating it to post (Wednesday night), we have lost six characters and gained eight. One from 2009, three from 2010, and two from 2011. We don't know if that's a tonight thing or a typical thing, but it's easy to see how the castle "picks people off" IC from that.

Haven't had enough? Want to take a closer look?
Download the full-size .pdf chart here.

Now, realistically speaking, we can't really gather too much from this comparatively because we have never done this before. We don't know what the slope looked like a year ago, or two years ago, or three years ago. But it is interesting to note now, especially because we could return to this a year from now and see what it looks like.

We are also, as far as we're aware, the first game to do this! Jenn will be approaching mods in other games (both large and small, old and new) to try and see how Paradisa compares to other games. Are we the average, or are we anomalies in the RP community? Do we have an excessively high turnover compared to other games, and if so, what are games with lower turnovers doing that we aren't? Is that preferable, or do players like the constant come and go? What do other games look like in this format, and is there anything we can learn from them, or anything they can learn from us?

Thoughts?