NESing by the Numbers

Less Neses, posts and updates does not mean we have become more "quality" oriented. It means there are less Neses, less updates and probably less Nesers.

I wonder if the Average of updates and the Median of updates have changed through the times. If it increased than I am wrong, if it didn't...

see this post. There has not been been statistically significant decrease in the number of NESs a year. I should rerun the numbers using the average updates a year as a large sample renders them a normal distribution. Then we fan determine if any of them falls outside of 2 std of the average. Those years could then be considered statistically significant.

Edit:
That average is 4.934 and the std is 1.308. None of the yearly averages fall outside 2 deviations, though a couple fall outside of 1. Overall, I'd have to say no significant significance.
 
:w00t:

Proof he did some good around here :)

He did do quite a bit good and brought NESing many new members, myself included. True, he was a bit rash and chaotic and annoying, but he always focused on new NESes (and gave feedback in New NESes thread) and was awesome with his activity (many of the threads were created by him). One can't deny that. One can blame him of rashness and being annoying (esp. in certain persons opinion), I can't deny that, but that's who he is/was. And now we don't have one who bought many members to here (sadly only a fraction of them stayed).

Point of this post is not to discuss Abaddon (and his ban) but to point out that his method did work and maybe someone could do another light NES in forum games to bring people here? Just a random idea.
 
Number of updates does not make a NES higher quality in of itself, if that's what you're implying.

I have to disagree with you, on this, assuming that the definition of quality is based upon player enjoyment. While quantity does not provide quality all on its own, the number (and frequency) of updates DO affect the investment the players of an NES gain with their nation. Yes, you can have a single, beautifully rendered update which trasncends art and literature itself, but it's still a single update. If someone else puts out four or more modest updates in the game amount of time, that's significantly more input that the player has upon the NES. NESers like to have input on the progression of events, and that's the whole basis of NESing. The more input (and the more often they do it) that they have on the events of the NES, the better quality experience they have. Therefore yes, more updates DO make an NES better for the player in my opinion.
 
Number of updates does not make a NES higher quality in of itself, if that's what you're implying.
In a way, it is. A super quality Nes with 1 update is less than a bad Nes with 10 updates.

I think updates=quality, since without updates, there is no Nes.
 
Proactively, I think we can all agree to disagree on the quality vs. quantity of updates argument, as it has already occurred several times. No need to contaminate this great thread with any bickering. :)

The rise of While We Wait, Groups, and dedicated multi-threaded NESes (or at least the BirdNESes) certainly has contributed to decrease in posts in the main threads of NESes over the years.
 
To ignore Matt's heavy-handed attempt to quash debate:

In a way, it is. A super quality Nes with 1 update is less than a bad Nes with 10 updates.

But a super quality NES with 9 updates is clearly better than a bad NES with 10. What about 7 updates? 5 updates? Where we draw the line is a matter of personal debate.

The modern, sophisticated player is balancing a lot of time commitments as the NESer population as a whole matures. This is driving a push towards high-quality updates delivered at a reasonable (that is to say, non-breakneck, non-glacial) pace. To be slightly more specific, the weekly update used to be the gold standard back in, say, 2005. Today, we are moving towards the monthly, or at best, bi-monthly, update as the standard to shoot for. For the most part, updates have gotten longer, better-researched, and better written by basic writing standards, so this isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Rushing an update out the door can result in problems, like accusations of mod bias, historical inaccuracy, and illogical, terse, or vapid prose in the update itself. Regularity of updates is a better arbiter of fun than raw quantity, and by stressing regularity, quantity will come in time.

In sum: Good players gain more enjoyment from good updates than fast updates.

Yes, you can have a single, beautifully rendered update which trasncends art and literature itself, but it's still a single update. If someone else puts out four or more modest updates in the game amount of time, that's significantly more input that the player has upon the NES. NESers like to have input on the progression of events, and that's the whole basis of NESing. The more input (and the more often they do it) that they have on the events of the NES, the better quality experience they have.

Just because a mod is updating more often doesn't mean he's taking his players' orders into account, that's a fallacy. Or that he's taking all players' orders into account equally.

A mod could update twice a week and consistently misinterpret his players' orders. If they're stupid enough, of course, to tolerate this behavior, that's just as much a criticism of the playerbase as the slovenly mod.

Furthermore, a mod who's personal friends with certain members of his playerbase could run a NES indefinitely for the benefit of those people, and it would be easier for him to update faster because the outcome had been predetermined. Oblivious players who weren't part of the inner circle could be cycled through like cogs in the machine, leaving only when they realize that the mod is hopelessly corrupt and has rigged his own game.

This is all entirely hypothetical, of course.
 
I've plotted the data NES lifetimes relative to updates on a boxplot, and got some interesting results.

The first boxplot was easy enough to plot, thanks to EQ's research. The graph is easy enough to understand, but the message it sends is a tad bit disappointing; that is, even reaching update two is a significant challenge, let alone reaching the upper quartile at six. The remarkable thing about this plot is the sheer amount of low-life NESes there are; the lower quartile and the low extrema are the same value! (Predictably, zero.) The outliers start at approximately fifteen, which is to be expected; if you have a NES lasting for more than fifteen updates, you're doing something right.

Spoiler :


Because the above graph is so heavily influenced by the dead-on-arrival NESes (those with zero updates), I painstakingly removed all the zeros from the research and constructed a new boxplot containing NESes with at least one update.

As you can see, there is a more conventional inter-quartile range in this boxplot. Without the zeros, the median shifts to four updates, with the inter-quartile range slightly smaller than the plot with zeros included. The outliers on this chart begin at fourteen-and-a-half, which, again, is an understandable figure.

Spoiler :
 

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To ignore Matt's heavy-handed attempt to quash debate:



But a super quality NES with 9 updates is clearly better than a bad NES with 10. What about 7 updates? 5 updates? Where we draw the line is a matter of personal debate.

The modern, sophisticated player is balancing a lot of time commitments as the NESer population as a whole matures. This is driving a push towards high-quality updates delivered at a reasonable (that is to say, non-breakneck, non-glacial) pace. To be slightly more specific, the weekly update used to be the gold standard back in, say, 2005. Today, we are moving towards the monthly, or at best, bi-monthly, update as the standard to shoot for. For the most part, updates have gotten longer, better-researched, and better written by basic writing standards, so this isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Rushing an update out the door can result in problems, like accusations of mod bias, historical inaccuracy, and illogical, terse, or vapid prose in the update itself. Regularity of updates is a better arbiter of fun than raw quantity, and by stressing regularity, quantity will come in time.

In sum: Good players gain more enjoyment from good updates than fast updates.

But any update is better than no update. Always.

A ten updates NES by my account is a bad NES to begin with...

And I never said anything about fast updates. Only the mere existence of updates.
 
In my opinion, it is merely a reflection of the indolence of almost everyone that we can't have several excellent and high-quality NESes running beyond ten updates, and all running at the same time. It's not actually all that difficult to get your orders in on time on most occasions, or as a mod to write two pages or so of sensible (or even elegant) prose describing plausible events, and I am genuinely surprised a lot of the time by quite how idle everyone is.
 
A boxplot isn't particularly useful to show a single vector of data dreadnaught, its more for comparing boxplots to other ones. A better way of showing the data is to have the number of updates against the frequency or log frequency of that number like so.



It's not a classical power law relationship but close, the red line is a highly smoothed loess predictor I fitted to the data that can give the relationship quite well.
 
^^^
Boxplot & Graph

:run:

Ok, you guys are officially crazy people.

Man, so much data!
 
Just because a mod is updating more often doesn't mean he's taking his players' orders into account, that's a fallacy. Or that he's taking all players' orders into account equally.

A mod could update twice a week and consistently misinterpret his players' orders. If they're stupid enough, of course, to tolerate this behavior, that's just as much a criticism of the playerbase as the slovenly mod.

Furthermore, a mod who's personal friends with certain members of his playerbase could run a NES indefinitely for the benefit of those people, and it would be easier for him to update faster because the outcome had been predetermined. Oblivious players who weren't part of the inner circle could be cycled through like cogs in the machine, leaving only when they realize that the mod is hopelessly corrupt and has rigged his own game.

This is all entirely hypothetical, of course.

Speed is not always key, as erez said, but the important part is the actual existence of the updates. 50 updates could take over two years or less than a month to actually arrive, but the point is that they actually arrive. The worst NES with 10 updates and the potential to continue is always going to be inherently better than the best NES that stops forever at 2 updates.

On the basis of such a purely hypothetical quandry that you proposed above, you could also argue that perhaps moderators do change over time, but that's been done to death. Purely hypothetically, we could also say that people refuse to believe such statements, regardless how much its said or how they've failed to even try out the moderator's style on their own. Of course such a person would be a hypocritical coward, so it's a good thing this is all hypothetical.
 
In my opinion, it is merely a reflection of the indolence of almost everyone that we can't have several excellent and high-quality NESes running beyond ten updates, and all running at the same time. It's not actually all that difficult to get your orders in on time on most occasions, or as a mod to write two pages or so of sensible (or even elegant) prose describing plausible events, and I am genuinely surprised a lot of the time by quite how idle everyone is.

And with this note, I am officially going to watch your NES carefully.
Spoiler :
I agree that we should be able to achieve such a goal, and that getting some kind of orders in on time is easy, and that writing a page or two of update within a short time frame is very plausable.

Reality check- My NES is rather skimpy, but already I have put over 6 pages of update in over the course of 3 afternoons and nearly my entire Sunday, not including stats, research, cartography, and thought. The problem isn't that most orders don't get in on time, but the few important ones which didn't make it. The problem isn't that we can't run those NESes at high quality, it is that NES is but one facet of life, although one which I am willing to devote significant time to.

As for the feeling of Indolence, I can share that feeling often takes over me. Should I reread that awesome story/update/diplomacy again? Should I surf the web until inspiration hits me? Should I just browse some of the newer NESes I don't participate in or other subforums when I should be updating and/or sending orders? The answer for me is Yes-to a point.
 
In my opinion, it is merely a reflection of the indolence of almost everyone that we can't have several excellent and high-quality NESes running beyond ten updates, and all running at the same time. It's not actually all that difficult to get your orders in on time on most occasions, or as a mod to write two pages or so of sensible (or even elegant) prose describing plausible events, and I am genuinely surprised a lot of the time by quite how idle everyone is.

...but my updates "require" more than 2 pages of prose. :(
 
Terrance: Mine has pretty much died already on account of the indolence of the players.

NK: Your NES doesn't count; it's kind of special. :)
 
Redacted for civility's sake.

I don't like being called a coward though, eq. I won't mod like you because I don't think your NESes are good, no matter how quickly you update. You're welcome to update faster than me, and I will update in my own way.
 
Awesome thing about neses is that you get to choose which ones you join; no one forces you to join a nes that updates too fast, too slow, has a mod you don't like, or any other reason.

I don't think one way is inherently better than another, the games you play in are up to your personal preferences and/or schedule.
 
@Thlayli: First, my apologies for snapping back so abruptly. I certainly don't want you, or anyone to mod exactly like me, and differences in moderating is what's important to a thriving community. Not to mention, I'd hardly call myself the best moderator, unless I have a had a few drinks, in which case, there's little to stop me from proclaiming myself Grand Holy Emperor of NESing. The best moderator cannot be measured by any statistic, but simply by the unquantifiable enjoyment of the players in their NES, no matter how few or many there may be. I have no desire to be further confrontational, and would prefer to carry on this conversation more privately, but I feel that I must respond at least once more and my biggest problem is that you say that you don't like my NESes, but I've never seen you in any of my recent ones even for a moment. If someone joins my NES, decides they don't like how I moderate, and then quit, well, I can respect that. If they don't like the setting of my NES or the fact that occasionally they die only after a few updates, and choose not to join, I can respect that too. I like to think that I'm a fairly open-minded person, and I choose to ignore most people when they come to me on AIM saying, "so-and-so says something bad about you." After all this isn't high school, and frankly, no form of entertainment should be devoid of actual, legitimate criticism. My own philosophy, and trust me, this is not a philosophy that came easy to me, is to take actual legitimate criticism and better myself with the result. Furthermore, I choose not to criticsize other moderators for their efforts unless I'm actually playing in their NES and have some sort of working knowledge of the NES and how they moderate it. In the past, last time I discussed this I challenged other NESers who have problems with my style to join my new NES, and determine whether or not it's an improvement over their preconceptions. You did not take this up, nor did any other alleged skeptic. Therefore, I feel that you have no valid platform on which to measure the quality of my NES, just as I have no valid platform to measure the quality of yours.
 
EQ's NPCs are incredibly annoying with their laconic and unrealistic completely binary yes/no responses to proposals. EQ habitually ignores orders when they have some form of nuance, or caution, in them. He also crystal-ball gazes quite willingly for his players, reputedly making miscellaneous predictions like "If anyone ever united Germany, they would be the most powerful nation on the planet," or "Such-and-such nation could never sustain themselves in a war with such-and-such nation," despite his apparent inability to give you a plain answer when you ask what the cost of something would be or give you an answer at all when you ask for a reasonable prediction of how much money it might make you. The entire premise of the NES is of course also a completely improbable world.

As a sceptic from the start of playing EQ's NES (Paris-Burgundy), I think I may say that I have certainly enjoyed it, and that it gains a lot from its apparent longevity, and even that it is a good deal better than anything I can find in looking at old EQ NESes, but nevertheless it is so much worse-quality in large numbers of ways, as discussed above, that the overall lack of quality can scarcely be in doubt if you compare it to something like PerfNES, or, say, the last ImmacuNES.
 
^Valid criticism because he's actually a player in the NES. As for an improbable world, if the theory of the infinite multiverse is absolute, ALL concepts for any NES ever have actually happened at some point in the multiverse. Overall can't argue with any of the other statements made, and because they were made, I'll do better to fix them. See how that works?


Anyways, we're departing from the purpose of the thread, and I want to continue to emphasize that I don't think the numbers we have actually mean a decline or even that a moderator is better/worse due to the numbers of updates or posts they have. I know as well as anyone that a person could put a dozen dead on arrival NESes, and then actually pull off a shockingly successful one. Regardless though, the statistics provided on moderators could be used to gauge the probability of an NES to reach a certain number of posts or updates. Whether this is good or bad in terms of the resulting numbers, would be up to each individual player to determine.
 
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