Deadpool Oversaturated Solo Event Analysis
DNA3000
Member, Guardian Guardian › Posts: 19,668 Guardian
For those interested in such things, I went through the scoring data for the Deadpool Oversaturated Solo Event to see what an analysis of that data could yield. I looked at the leaderboard, plus any other anecdotal data that I could find that was consistent with verifiable data. Here's all of that data:
Most of the data is, of course, between rank 1 and 200 from the leaderboard, but I do have some data points beyond that. This is similar to how arena effort tends to do, at least it did back when we had higher density data for arena scoring. I was interested to see if there were similar "plateaus" in the data that would signify consensus estimates for what the top 1000 cutoff requirement would be, but there are not very strong signals there, implying there was no strong consensus: basically, everyone was guessing different values. There are "soft" plateaus around 2500 points, 2000 points, 1500 points, and 1200 points, but the strongest of them was, or probably would have been, at 1200 points but that's impossible to verify as it extends beyond the end of the top leaderboard data.
The actual top 1000 cutoff appears to have been around 280, and by the time you get to rank 1300 you're in the 11-20% bracket. This implies the top 10% cutoff was between rank 1000 and rank 1300, and this implies that between 10k and 13k players participated, which also means approximately that many players bought entry (it isn't exact because some people who bought entry might not have scored points, conversely my understanding is that the few players who possessed 4* Deadpool before the event gained entry without having to purchase).
To put that number into context, let's assume that MCOC has about a million players (here I'm going to use "players" and "accounts" synonymously). That's based on a number of things, including dated information we had on active accounts from the Rocket button, and estimates derived from AQ and AQ ranking data. Let's also assume MCOC has about a 3%-5% conversion rate (this is the percentage of players of a free to play game that ends up spending cash on offers). That means there are about 30k to 50k spenders in MCOC at any particular moment in time. This would imply that something between 20% and 30% of all spenders bought entry into the Deadpool event. Those numbers have large error bars, but that seems to be a reasonable percentage of players.
As it turns out, the number of players who were pushing very hard for him was somewhere around 350 or so. Below that rank the scores drop off faster. There's a second group between rank 350 and about rank 600, and then scores trail off slowly. Interestingly (at least for me) if you project the effort curve from rank 1 to rank 350, you end up with an estimated cut off score of about 700. 700 is about the cutoff I estimated if a large population of players pursued Deadpool reasonably hard. What actually happened was that the game simply "ran out" of such players, and a second group with a lower effort curve took over between rank 350 and 600, and then *they* were exhausted and a third group charted an even lower effort curve for the remaining players (at least so far as I could see).
It may seem blatantly obvious to state that how many people push for the top ranks determines what the cutoff scores will be, but there is more subtlety to it than that: The players are not a blurry group of people putting in different effort, the players are actually a number of different blurry groups of people putting in different relative effort, and how many of each group decide to compete determine the shape of the cutoff scores. In retrospect, the players predicting super-high cutoff scores were not accounting for this effect. There were a lot of players willing to put in over a thousand points of effort. But you can't extrapolate from them, because there is no large group of players willing to put in slightly less than them. Once they run out, their impact on the cutoff score actually vanishes completely: they don't matter at all. As it turned out, it was the effort that the last group of players, the ones willing to put in a few hundred points of effort but no more, that ended up dictating the cutoff score
That's always going to be the wildcard in competitions like this: how desirable are the rank rewards to different populations of players, and how many rank rewards are being given out. That's part of the fun of competitions like this: the grind is the grind, but trying to psychoanalyze the competition will always be 30% science and 70% art. Personally, when I tried to guess where the cutoff would land I came up with two different numbers: roughly 300 or roughly 700, depending on how desirable Deadpool would be. I didn't want to put up 700, so I aimed for 300 (I ended up scoring 321) and hoped for the best. This time I got lucky.
Most of the data is, of course, between rank 1 and 200 from the leaderboard, but I do have some data points beyond that. This is similar to how arena effort tends to do, at least it did back when we had higher density data for arena scoring. I was interested to see if there were similar "plateaus" in the data that would signify consensus estimates for what the top 1000 cutoff requirement would be, but there are not very strong signals there, implying there was no strong consensus: basically, everyone was guessing different values. There are "soft" plateaus around 2500 points, 2000 points, 1500 points, and 1200 points, but the strongest of them was, or probably would have been, at 1200 points but that's impossible to verify as it extends beyond the end of the top leaderboard data.
The actual top 1000 cutoff appears to have been around 280, and by the time you get to rank 1300 you're in the 11-20% bracket. This implies the top 10% cutoff was between rank 1000 and rank 1300, and this implies that between 10k and 13k players participated, which also means approximately that many players bought entry (it isn't exact because some people who bought entry might not have scored points, conversely my understanding is that the few players who possessed 4* Deadpool before the event gained entry without having to purchase).
To put that number into context, let's assume that MCOC has about a million players (here I'm going to use "players" and "accounts" synonymously). That's based on a number of things, including dated information we had on active accounts from the Rocket button, and estimates derived from AQ and AQ ranking data. Let's also assume MCOC has about a 3%-5% conversion rate (this is the percentage of players of a free to play game that ends up spending cash on offers). That means there are about 30k to 50k spenders in MCOC at any particular moment in time. This would imply that something between 20% and 30% of all spenders bought entry into the Deadpool event. Those numbers have large error bars, but that seems to be a reasonable percentage of players.
As it turns out, the number of players who were pushing very hard for him was somewhere around 350 or so. Below that rank the scores drop off faster. There's a second group between rank 350 and about rank 600, and then scores trail off slowly. Interestingly (at least for me) if you project the effort curve from rank 1 to rank 350, you end up with an estimated cut off score of about 700. 700 is about the cutoff I estimated if a large population of players pursued Deadpool reasonably hard. What actually happened was that the game simply "ran out" of such players, and a second group with a lower effort curve took over between rank 350 and 600, and then *they* were exhausted and a third group charted an even lower effort curve for the remaining players (at least so far as I could see).
It may seem blatantly obvious to state that how many people push for the top ranks determines what the cutoff scores will be, but there is more subtlety to it than that: The players are not a blurry group of people putting in different effort, the players are actually a number of different blurry groups of people putting in different relative effort, and how many of each group decide to compete determine the shape of the cutoff scores. In retrospect, the players predicting super-high cutoff scores were not accounting for this effect. There were a lot of players willing to put in over a thousand points of effort. But you can't extrapolate from them, because there is no large group of players willing to put in slightly less than them. Once they run out, their impact on the cutoff score actually vanishes completely: they don't matter at all. As it turned out, it was the effort that the last group of players, the ones willing to put in a few hundred points of effort but no more, that ended up dictating the cutoff score
That's always going to be the wildcard in competitions like this: how desirable are the rank rewards to different populations of players, and how many rank rewards are being given out. That's part of the fun of competitions like this: the grind is the grind, but trying to psychoanalyze the competition will always be 30% science and 70% art. Personally, when I tried to guess where the cutoff would land I came up with two different numbers: roughly 300 or roughly 700, depending on how desirable Deadpool would be. I didn't want to put up 700, so I aimed for 300 (I ended up scoring 321) and hoped for the best. This time I got lucky.
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Comments
I'm really kicking myself for not grinding the last day because I lost a lot of time between moving and work that I didn't bother much of a grind because I thought that I wouldn't stand a chance.
I think Oversaturated was a little of both. A lot of people were scared off hearing about the huge grind numbers being tossed around, but also there were a lot of people who just didn't want to throw hundreds of points into the grind without a guarantee. In fact, I suspect there were a lot of people who could have easily got him that chose to pass because they just didn't want to grind.
Events like this are curious things, because you need to be a spender to get in, but you need to be a grinder to score points. A lot of spenders don't like grinding, and in fact that's part of why they spend: to trade money for time. A 5* Deadpool was not enough to get them into the grind. And a lot of grinders grind because they don't want to spend. Spending for just a chance at a reward that was mostly a trophy might not have been appealing to them.
So that actually knocks out a lot of spenders and a lot of grinders. The target was the intersection of the two, and that intersection is a smaller group of people than either the whales or the grinders alone, and that combined with the large window of top rank prizes made it much easier to jump into the top 1000 than I think most people were predicting (although there were a couple people who shared guesses with me that were pretty close).
I believe a 6* Deadpool would have caught a lot more players.
If that HAD been possible, I definitely would have grinded more points for him.
Why did this event give me flashbacks to the REALLY OLD arena system?
FYI
I scored 291 pts in the event
I came in at rank 974
I scored I 5* Deadpool so I was happy…
Of course, it helps to have all those scoring champs. If you didn't have them all, things would have gone slower and taken more rounds, but even someone that was missing a few could still get to the cutoff without spending units on duel refreshes.
The goal is never to sell as much stuff as possible today. The goal is to preserve the value of the things in the game for tomorrow, while selling *enough* to keep the game going. Players collectively spend about $400 million USD on the game every year. I think they don't need help figuring out how to make money over the long haul.
Who's going to spend money on 6* Deadpool if they know that six months later, or a year later, everyone will be able to get him in an event where you just have to hit a reasonable milestone in an easy grind? A lot fewer probably. And that's what you do when you make it easy to get 5* Deadpool. You make 6* Deadpool worthless as a pursuit goal.