Battleground Blitz Week Three: Stark Foundation ends the drama (but did they need to?)
DNA3000
Member, Guardian Guardian › Posts: 19,803 Guardian
First things first: here we are:
If there was any doubt about us hitting the one billion milestone, the Stark Foundation ended that with another donation, this time about 70 million points. When all is said and done, we are likely to hit at least 1.1 billion, maybe more. Hello Titan crystal.
The more interesting question, though, is what we would have gotten without the Stark donations. If we subtract them out of our points, we get this:
I’ve removed the data point blobs to make it easier to see. At first glance, it looks like we would have fallen short without at least one donation. However, that’s actually not necessarily true. It’s a lot closer than that, because in fact our points appear to be accelerating again in the last ten days. You can kind of see that in the trend upwards pinching the lines closer together near the end.
This is our estimated points per day. It appeared, early in the week, that our points were decelerating. It now appears like this was a bit of an illusion: what we actually saw was the end of a big burst of points in week two, which dropped our points a bit at the start of week three, but the overall trend has been upward again, and especially in the past couple of days. Days seven through eleven now appear to be anomalies in the overall scoring trend.
Could that be the Stark Foundation sneakily dropping in some additional points? I don’t think so:
It seems to be player activity is just trending upward. Just a reminder that Stark donations tend to be a lot more obvious because they happen all at once, so while they might not change total points by a lot, they do change hourly estimates by a ton, with one data point jumping upward surrounded by far lower data points. The actual hourly data shows more consistent upward and downward movements. Stark donations, on the other hand, show as single point spikes upward:
So where would we have landed without any Stark donations? Well, the numbers are so close they don’t really show up well in charts, so here’s just the numbers:
If we just estimate by linear extrapolation, we get a final score of about 950 million. However, that averages out all three weeks, and at the moment our scoring rate is significantly higher than it was in week one. If we just look at the last seven days of scoring and extrapolate that, we get about 980 million. And if we just look at the last 72 hours of scoring, we end up extrapolating a final score of just over one billion points.
Reminder: this is without *any* of the Stark donations, which amount to 170 million points. The one billion milestone is now well within the margin of error for any estimate of our final score. It is going to come down to the wire on whether we hit one billion all by ourselves.
It has been interesting to continue to read the narratives floating around about this event. First the one billion points was wildly unreasonable. Then in week two when it seemed better scoring might place it in reach it was just so high it was discouraging. And during week three it was so obvious that burn out was causing players to stop playing when scores temporarily dropped. What the data seems to be showing is that there is an overall *increase* in participation throughout the season, which is consistent with more players playing during the later parts of the season when VT tiers are much more sorted. Superimposed on that is a big burst of activity in week two that might be due to a large number of players trying to burn through the marks being earned by milestones. Much of that burned off by week three and scores returned to more normal, but still increasing levels, and now in the final stretch we might be seeing the start of the mad dash for GC and final VT placement that often happens at the end of the BG season.
Individual players will have their own individual experiences. I’m sure there are players burned out on BG, and some that just decided to stop playing because they don’t like BG in general or are frustrated with some of the problems with the game at the moment. But the data seems to show these are not the experiences of the majority. Taken as a whole, we seem to have a lot of participation in general (scoring is high), and increasing participation overall towards the end of the season, not less. It is impossible to say with certainty is that is due to more players playing, fewer players playing more matches, or a lot of grinding in GC, but it has to be at least one of those, if not all of those. The pessimists saying that players are giving up in general, quitting in GC, and just doing the minimum can’t be completely right, and are more likely completely wrong.
The Realm events are a Rorschach test. Players see what they want to see in them, and look for the data to confirm their own narratives, instead of asking what the data actually says. The events are teaching us a lot about the game, but they are also teaching us a lot about the players who comment on the game.
My best prediction now is that we land somewhere around milestone 24 (1.15B), with a shot at milestone 25 (1.2B). That would be between 3k and 4k Titan shards, on top of the Titan crystal. If you can, drive for 5k points to qualify for all the rewards, it looks certain you will need all 5k to qualify for the milestones we’re going to unlock.
If there was any doubt about us hitting the one billion milestone, the Stark Foundation ended that with another donation, this time about 70 million points. When all is said and done, we are likely to hit at least 1.1 billion, maybe more. Hello Titan crystal.
The more interesting question, though, is what we would have gotten without the Stark donations. If we subtract them out of our points, we get this:
I’ve removed the data point blobs to make it easier to see. At first glance, it looks like we would have fallen short without at least one donation. However, that’s actually not necessarily true. It’s a lot closer than that, because in fact our points appear to be accelerating again in the last ten days. You can kind of see that in the trend upwards pinching the lines closer together near the end.
This is our estimated points per day. It appeared, early in the week, that our points were decelerating. It now appears like this was a bit of an illusion: what we actually saw was the end of a big burst of points in week two, which dropped our points a bit at the start of week three, but the overall trend has been upward again, and especially in the past couple of days. Days seven through eleven now appear to be anomalies in the overall scoring trend.
Could that be the Stark Foundation sneakily dropping in some additional points? I don’t think so:
It seems to be player activity is just trending upward. Just a reminder that Stark donations tend to be a lot more obvious because they happen all at once, so while they might not change total points by a lot, they do change hourly estimates by a ton, with one data point jumping upward surrounded by far lower data points. The actual hourly data shows more consistent upward and downward movements. Stark donations, on the other hand, show as single point spikes upward:
So where would we have landed without any Stark donations? Well, the numbers are so close they don’t really show up well in charts, so here’s just the numbers:
If we just estimate by linear extrapolation, we get a final score of about 950 million. However, that averages out all three weeks, and at the moment our scoring rate is significantly higher than it was in week one. If we just look at the last seven days of scoring and extrapolate that, we get about 980 million. And if we just look at the last 72 hours of scoring, we end up extrapolating a final score of just over one billion points.
Reminder: this is without *any* of the Stark donations, which amount to 170 million points. The one billion milestone is now well within the margin of error for any estimate of our final score. It is going to come down to the wire on whether we hit one billion all by ourselves.
It has been interesting to continue to read the narratives floating around about this event. First the one billion points was wildly unreasonable. Then in week two when it seemed better scoring might place it in reach it was just so high it was discouraging. And during week three it was so obvious that burn out was causing players to stop playing when scores temporarily dropped. What the data seems to be showing is that there is an overall *increase* in participation throughout the season, which is consistent with more players playing during the later parts of the season when VT tiers are much more sorted. Superimposed on that is a big burst of activity in week two that might be due to a large number of players trying to burn through the marks being earned by milestones. Much of that burned off by week three and scores returned to more normal, but still increasing levels, and now in the final stretch we might be seeing the start of the mad dash for GC and final VT placement that often happens at the end of the BG season.
Individual players will have their own individual experiences. I’m sure there are players burned out on BG, and some that just decided to stop playing because they don’t like BG in general or are frustrated with some of the problems with the game at the moment. But the data seems to show these are not the experiences of the majority. Taken as a whole, we seem to have a lot of participation in general (scoring is high), and increasing participation overall towards the end of the season, not less. It is impossible to say with certainty is that is due to more players playing, fewer players playing more matches, or a lot of grinding in GC, but it has to be at least one of those, if not all of those. The pessimists saying that players are giving up in general, quitting in GC, and just doing the minimum can’t be completely right, and are more likely completely wrong.
The Realm events are a Rorschach test. Players see what they want to see in them, and look for the data to confirm their own narratives, instead of asking what the data actually says. The events are teaching us a lot about the game, but they are also teaching us a lot about the players who comment on the game.
My best prediction now is that we land somewhere around milestone 24 (1.15B), with a shot at milestone 25 (1.2B). That would be between 3k and 4k Titan shards, on top of the Titan crystal. If you can, drive for 5k points to qualify for all the rewards, it looks certain you will need all 5k to qualify for the milestones we’re going to unlock.
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