RP Safari - Pacing Styles

Jumpscare

@bear_necessities said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

@Jumpscare said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

Ah, Gemstone IV, where people would abruptly leave the scene when their RPXP ran out.

Was that the one on AOL along with Modeus Operandi that went pay-to-play? Modeus Operandi was my first game, I miss it

I’m afraid I don’t know. A few years ago, a friend who is into MUDs told me to check it out for inspiration. It was so very strange and not in a fun way, haha.

Imagine you’re sitting down to dinner at a restaurant and having a great conversation with someone. You’re engaged and chatting for a good 30 minutes. But then he finishes his meal, says, “My time is up,” and immediately leaves in the middle of the discussion. Then someone else comes in, gets a meal, sits down in front of you, and expects you to start a new conversation from the beginning.

KarmaBum

@Superbia said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

Aegis Company runner here, just want to belatedly chime in to say our scenes, especially events, do skew live.

Please note that this isn’t a value judgment. I personally don’t care about the live/async split. But I’m a data analyst, and confirmation bias is one of my biggest peeves. So just to give you a very small sample set:

As of 3/18 -
Scenes already shared with the dates posted - 9 live

3/17 - 2 scenes
3/16 - 0 scenes
3/15 - 4 scenes
3/14 - 3 scenes

Scenes started yesterday+ with those dates - 12 async

3/17 - 7
3/16 - 0
3/15 - 2
3/14 - 3

Looking at those four days, 43%* of your scenes are live.

*Ares doesn’t have a publicly available ‘scene shared date’, so I’m assuming that scenes posted on those days were also played those days (credit for “live” scenes).

Just for the sake of conversation, the other two games mentioned as having a live component - Empty Night and Keys - have even less, with no scenes posted on 3/16 or 3/17 for either game. So your game’s still ahead of the curve.

Faraday

@KarmaBum said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

*Ares doesn’t have a publicly available ‘scene shared date’, so I’m assuming that scenes posted on those days were also played those days (credit for “live” scenes).

To really do a data analysis you’d have to see scenes played, which is not directly connected to scenes posted, and have a way to tell whether those scenes were truly live or async (which may not always correspond to the option the person picked when they created the scene). Ares just doesn’t provide that data in form that you can easily query after the fact.

MisterBoring

@Faraday said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

Ares just doesn’t provide that data in form that you can easily query after the fact.

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.

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.

Third Eye

@Trashcan
You are a treasure, my friend, these numbers are really cool.

I’m not saying these numbers are wholly accurate. Shattered started as, I think, quite heavily real-time RP based and drifted toward more time-shifted stuff as it aged, which is both the nature of the activity bubble tapering off and an overall Ares trend I didn’t personally like. But we did try to prioritize Traditional pacing and playing there felt different than the Ares games I’ve tried since it closed (which isn’t a complete sample) .

When I venture into staff waters again there’ll probably be more conscious tracking of this stuff in real-time because it’s useful in creating the kind of environment you want.

Faraday

@Third-Eye said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

When I venture into staff waters again there’ll probably be more conscious tracking of this stuff in real-time because it’s useful in creating the kind of environment you want.

Would folks like to see scene metrics in AresCentral alongside the player login metrics? If so, which ones?

Tracking TRUE scene pacing is tough because there are so many variables, unfortunately.

KarmaBum

@Faraday I’d rather see it as a page on the individual game than on Ares Central. My thoughts went to a /scene-stats/ route that just populated a quick dashboard of metrics (avg scenes shared per day, avg characters per scene, avg words per scene, breakout of scene types, etc).

While I like the activity log on AresCentral, I am wary of standing up fuzzy data in what winds up looking like an official or comparative capacity. If there was just a /scene-stats/ route that could be turned on/off, that’d give game runners the chance to opt out.

$0.02

Edit to add - @Trashcan I just ran this for funsies on ODW. TY for sharing!

Trad - 224
Async - 399
Distracted - 73

Currently, 5/36 scenes are tagged “Traditional” but have been ongoing for more than 1 day, so 14% are currently mis-tagged. I imagine that varies wildly, but 10-20% mis-tagged sounds fair.

KDraygo

There are also many scenes, at least the ones I am part of, that goes from Live to Async and maybe even back to Live. Mainly because those in the scenes no longer have 4+ hours blocks of time free to just RP. RL interrupts, we need to pause, and the scene is going great to end soon. Does this scene still qualify as Live? Is it now ASync? Does any scene that need to pause at any time lose it’s Live status?

There are too many factors involved for accurate labeling and I believe that the only way for people to tell if the overall pacing of the game is right for them is to just try it out if the theme of the game interests you. Labels can be misleading at times, just because there are more ASync scenes than normal doesn’t mean that players in the game don’t also enjoy Live scenes, it’s just how the scheduling is sometimes. Also, if a player ends up leaving the game, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the player is bad or is at fault, nor does it mean the game is bad or the staff are at fault. Sometimes things just don’t link up, somewhat like potential relationships or jobs.

hellfrog

@KDraygo nah, those aren’t live scenes if they are going async or continuing for days with pause. .

But honestly, I immediately take a dim view of claims that specific choices are correct and protected due to having jobs and lives. Nearly all people have jobs and lives, and they choose what to do with their free time how they want. No one’s time is more sacred than anyone else’s.

bear_necessities

@hellfrog said in RP Safari - Pacing Styles:

view of claims that specific choices are correct and protected due to having jobs and lives

No one is doing that here. I think everyone in this thread has said that any and all play style is valid.