Post by mdz8 on May 23, 2010 13:03:21 GMT
Looks like after a rather intense week, I finally have some spare time.
About two weeks ago, I started thinking a bit on the state of this community and how it relates to the OpenTyrian efforts, which seems to have slowed down lately.
I always felt this forum a bit slow-moving despite its relatively high user count. That's not such a bad deal to me as I don't have much spare time for my hobbies. Unfortunately, the same pace seems to have somehow expanded to the OpenTyrian project. The number of contributors is small, there have been a few initiatives to gear up.
I found Operation: bribery to be somewhat interesting.
Yuriks himself noted multiple times that the project would need a few more brains and how moving around the current mass is somewhat troublesome given the real world issues.
To better understand the situation, I considered forum's user data. On 14th May 2010, I have partially collected the available data on 322 users.
While I am at it,
my welcome to jardraj, adiazreb and arnold
who hopefully will prove my concerns just wrong.
The result is somewhat surprising, and worse than expected:
Uploaded with ImageShack.us
A whopping 1/5th of user forums have signed just to be silent. Maybe this is a result of the forum moving several years ago? I cannot quite tell why this happened. This does not make sense even for spammers.
It seems reasonable to speculate that those users are inactive. Yes, I know that the assumption that no post --> inactive user is a bit too much, even in the last 24 hours, a few users login without a contribution. It's fine to a certain degree I suppose, but I don't think I can stretch it so far.
Over half the total users have posted less than 10 times. Nearly all the scrutinized users (randomly chosen) are inactive (in the sense of not having contributed a single message for several weeks), a behavior I cannot quite match with Tyrian's long-lasting fame (more on that later). I still want to be very optimistic saying only 100 of those users are inactive (about half).
I had high hopes in the 10-49 range. Living there, I thought it was quite possible this range coupled well with long-standing but real-life involved users. This doesn't seem to be the case. Although finding them in the list is somewhat difficult, some if not most of them seem to be inactive as well.
I was positively impressed by the long-time users, who seem to be mostly active. Too bad there are only 10 ranking up to this name.
I originally intended to include an "hall of fame" and an "hall of shame", but I'll just thank, in no particular order those 10 users:
bb1, death, Gamera, Hurleybird, Metalfro, Mindless, Sharp, Shawn, Tempest and Yuriks - thank you for your dedication!
Now, what this data tells me?
First, let's estimate the true size of the community. I want to be very optimistic.
322: total user count at the time of "survey"
69: silent, presumed dead users.
100: silent users in the 1-9 posts range (seems optimistic)
17: supposedly silent users, 10-49 range (seems optimistic)
136: optimistically estimated size of active community
This is a true shock to me. The game is awesome and it resists the time truly well. I was expecting much more people. How is that possible?
This infortunatly means that we'll hardly have more brains working on OT considering the few we have now are a rather high percentage, which takes me to the next questions: how can we improve this situation? In a day were social networks seems to be taking the place of forums (a thing I don't truly understand since the forum model is very different), should the Tyrian community go viral?
I am somewhat surprised by the fact that there seems to be no tweets about Tyrian as well. Suddendly, I find out that this game is niche, it really doesn't sound as popular as I always believed.
About two weeks ago, I started thinking a bit on the state of this community and how it relates to the OpenTyrian efforts, which seems to have slowed down lately.
I always felt this forum a bit slow-moving despite its relatively high user count. That's not such a bad deal to me as I don't have much spare time for my hobbies. Unfortunately, the same pace seems to have somehow expanded to the OpenTyrian project. The number of contributors is small, there have been a few initiatives to gear up.
I found Operation: bribery to be somewhat interesting.
Yuriks himself noted multiple times that the project would need a few more brains and how moving around the current mass is somewhat troublesome given the real world issues.
To better understand the situation, I considered forum's user data. On 14th May 2010, I have partially collected the available data on 322 users.
While I am at it,
my welcome to jardraj, adiazreb and arnold
who hopefully will prove my concerns just wrong.
The result is somewhat surprising, and worse than expected:
Uploaded with ImageShack.us
A whopping 1/5th of user forums have signed just to be silent. Maybe this is a result of the forum moving several years ago? I cannot quite tell why this happened. This does not make sense even for spammers.
It seems reasonable to speculate that those users are inactive. Yes, I know that the assumption that no post --> inactive user is a bit too much, even in the last 24 hours, a few users login without a contribution. It's fine to a certain degree I suppose, but I don't think I can stretch it so far.
Over half the total users have posted less than 10 times. Nearly all the scrutinized users (randomly chosen) are inactive (in the sense of not having contributed a single message for several weeks), a behavior I cannot quite match with Tyrian's long-lasting fame (more on that later). I still want to be very optimistic saying only 100 of those users are inactive (about half).
I had high hopes in the 10-49 range. Living there, I thought it was quite possible this range coupled well with long-standing but real-life involved users. This doesn't seem to be the case. Although finding them in the list is somewhat difficult, some if not most of them seem to be inactive as well.
I was positively impressed by the long-time users, who seem to be mostly active. Too bad there are only 10 ranking up to this name.
I originally intended to include an "hall of fame" and an "hall of shame", but I'll just thank, in no particular order those 10 users:
bb1, death, Gamera, Hurleybird, Metalfro, Mindless, Sharp, Shawn, Tempest and Yuriks - thank you for your dedication!
Now, what this data tells me?
First, let's estimate the true size of the community. I want to be very optimistic.
322: total user count at the time of "survey"
69: silent, presumed dead users.
100: silent users in the 1-9 posts range (seems optimistic)
17: supposedly silent users, 10-49 range (seems optimistic)
136: optimistically estimated size of active community
This is a true shock to me. The game is awesome and it resists the time truly well. I was expecting much more people. How is that possible?
This infortunatly means that we'll hardly have more brains working on OT considering the few we have now are a rather high percentage, which takes me to the next questions: how can we improve this situation? In a day were social networks seems to be taking the place of forums (a thing I don't truly understand since the forum model is very different), should the Tyrian community go viral?
I am somewhat surprised by the fact that there seems to be no tweets about Tyrian as well. Suddendly, I find out that this game is niche, it really doesn't sound as popular as I always believed.
