PaperBeetle
Emperor
Once upon a thread, I promised another poster that I would try to do some analysis on the shape of the Global Player Rankings. The GOTM staff have already created some interesting charts here which look at submissions and Jason scores on a game-by-game basis, but I wanted to concentrate on the GPR, and how it reflects the population of GOTM players. So I copied down some numbers which looked interesting, and here are the graphs they turned into...
Rank By Score
When I first submitted in GOTM 39, a GPR score of 69 got me rank 220 - not even on this graph. Nowadays, that would be just enough to make it into the top 100. So here is a graph which shows what rank certain GPR scores would get.
When the graphs are high, as they are now, and during the period GOTMs 25 - 31 (just before the introduction of C3C), it is relatively easy to climb the rankings. Similarly, competition was as its most fierce in GOTM 36 (and COTM 06).
As we would expect, the width of the various bands depends on their position; the higher scoring the band, the narrower it is. For example, there are fewer players getting between 300 and 400 GPR points than there are players getting 200 - 300, and so on. But this last observation does not hold any more; over the last couple of months, we see more players in the 300 - 400 band than the 200 - 300 band. Maybe that suggests that slightly more of the people who have stuck with Civ3 GOTM, since the release of Civ4, are those who are solid 60-80% performers. Or that some of the players who have remained with Civ3 are improving their game, or submitting more regularly, but are still not quite able to reach the lofty heights of our top scorers.
Score by Rank
In some ways the inverse of the graph above, here is a graph of GPR scores, banded by the ranks which they earned.
Again we can look at both the absolute height of the graph, and the widths of the bands. When the top band is high, as it is now, I think we have a dominant reigning champion (or small set of top players) who is winning medals very consistently. The all-time high was hendrikszoon's 493, but klarius's current score is only just short at 491. The width of that top band can be read as a measure of how far ahead of the pack the top players are. Cartouche Bee's scores were pretty astronomical compared to the competition, but during Dynamic's reign, there were many more players getting high Jason scores, so even players outside the top 10 had very high GPR scores.
Trends for the Future
I'm not sure what the GPR will look like when all the retired players have dropped off the end of the ageing process, but I expect the continuation of the very high score at the top end of the GPR, and maybe a bit of a drop off in the scores of the next 10-20 ranks, particularly with more and more players chasing eptathlons, and so scoring a little less than they are capable of.
Overall submission numbers seem pretty steady at about 40 players per game. I assume this will degrade slowly, unless a lot of players retire as soon as they acheive eptathlon. But long live 3OTM I say!
Rank By Score
When I first submitted in GOTM 39, a GPR score of 69 got me rank 220 - not even on this graph. Nowadays, that would be just enough to make it into the top 100. So here is a graph which shows what rank certain GPR scores would get.
When the graphs are high, as they are now, and during the period GOTMs 25 - 31 (just before the introduction of C3C), it is relatively easy to climb the rankings. Similarly, competition was as its most fierce in GOTM 36 (and COTM 06).
As we would expect, the width of the various bands depends on their position; the higher scoring the band, the narrower it is. For example, there are fewer players getting between 300 and 400 GPR points than there are players getting 200 - 300, and so on. But this last observation does not hold any more; over the last couple of months, we see more players in the 300 - 400 band than the 200 - 300 band. Maybe that suggests that slightly more of the people who have stuck with Civ3 GOTM, since the release of Civ4, are those who are solid 60-80% performers. Or that some of the players who have remained with Civ3 are improving their game, or submitting more regularly, but are still not quite able to reach the lofty heights of our top scorers.
Score by Rank
In some ways the inverse of the graph above, here is a graph of GPR scores, banded by the ranks which they earned.
Again we can look at both the absolute height of the graph, and the widths of the bands. When the top band is high, as it is now, I think we have a dominant reigning champion (or small set of top players) who is winning medals very consistently. The all-time high was hendrikszoon's 493, but klarius's current score is only just short at 491. The width of that top band can be read as a measure of how far ahead of the pack the top players are. Cartouche Bee's scores were pretty astronomical compared to the competition, but during Dynamic's reign, there were many more players getting high Jason scores, so even players outside the top 10 had very high GPR scores.
Trends for the Future
I'm not sure what the GPR will look like when all the retired players have dropped off the end of the ageing process, but I expect the continuation of the very high score at the top end of the GPR, and maybe a bit of a drop off in the scores of the next 10-20 ranks, particularly with more and more players chasing eptathlons, and so scoring a little less than they are capable of.
Overall submission numbers seem pretty steady at about 40 players per game. I assume this will degrade slowly, unless a lot of players retire as soon as they acheive eptathlon. But long live 3OTM I say!
