Given the participants rates your voice appears lost in the noise. Compare Wotan and Kurage and proportionally representation from YJ is up.
I actually did a count a week ago, there were 465 commanders who had reported at least 1 battle, and of those YJ represented 9.6% of the field. What were the numbers in comparison with Wotan? As for a local impact I can guarantee you it's had an effect. If I'm not organising stuff it tends to not happen. There were 3 tournaments for backdoor, because I ran them all. I've taken no interest in this and locally the participation rate for the entire campaign has been 0 so far.
Yeah, I took a look at the actual data. The answer is ambiguous but it's certain that losing JSA has taken a chunk out of raw YJ numbers. However, I'm not sure that has negatively impacted YJ motivation, in fact I'm inclined to the opposite view. I'm not comparing apples and apples because there's been significant changes in how the campaign functions and I'm comparing numbers from mid-way through the Kurage campaign with numbers at the conclusion of the Wotan campaign. Number of individual commanders: Only Ariadna and Nomads have actually increased participation rates relative to Wotan. Although I'd argue that Nomads and Haqq are actually stable (the change is less an 1%). Yu Jing has the largest drop (most likely the result of JSA players leaving) followed by PanO and CA (CA is the interesting one, because they're a main player from a fluff POV). Even if you look at the number of matches, this basically aligns with the number of commanders. BUT if you look at Proportional Faction Wins compared to Proportional Faction Games (ie in Wotan YJ played 14.4% of Games but only won 12.5% of Wins, a deficit of 1.9%) it's more interesting. What I think is going on here is that since people mainly report victories* a lot of the data being reported in the Commanders and number of games played graphs actually reports of passive participants (ie people who's opponents have reported the game). Whereas if we only consider Victories we get a better proxy for 'the change in the active participation rate'. This explanation maps well to what I think is happening to Nomads: Nomads is still a populous faction, which means a lot of games get played against them (a fact that is largely unchanged from Wotan) BUT there's been a sudden shift in their performance. To my mind the best explanation for this is a lack of motivation brought on by a combination of a toxic experience in Wotan, losing Wotan and a perception that they're 'set up as the target'. It also maps well to Ariadna. In Ariadna their performance increase significantly exceeds their participation increase. This points to a significant increase in Ariadna's ACTIVE population, not just a general increase in the number of Ariadna players. Basically, my very low confidence conclusion is that there are less YJ players overall but the active participation rate of YJ players has increased for this campaign. If someone knows how to pull the data for 'Number of Commanders who have reported a game' vs 'Number of Commanders who have participated in a game' then you'd be able to measure the Active participation vs Passive participation more directly.
@inane.imp I don't think counting victories is a good way to try and figure out how many active participants there are, as you could have 10 victories registered between 10 players with 1 victory each. That doesn't mean there are another 10 *active* but passive players out there who didn't write a report because they lost, 6 of those guys could be from the same group and played the same guy from their community, beat him, and reported it. Personally I just see all of the inactive but registered accounts and write them off as people who either flaked out and don't actually have the time or willpower to schedule matches, because I know these people exist they do alot of talking and promising and planning but unless I show up and push things along nothing happens because it's apparently too hard to commit to. And people who signed up just so they could read the campaign fluff as you can't access that stuff without creating an account and logging in. There is also the point in the year's growth between Wotan and Kurage, the number of YJ players should've risen to at least somewhat offset the amount of JSA players leaving. Still having significant negative player growth for the faction isn't a good sign of player engagement.
NA-2 is now the second largest faction, Ariadna the largest. There's also something funky going on with Ariadna win-loss records that wasn't there previous seasons. Either a good number of really competent players are playing Ariadna or there's a temporary coincidence whereby Ariadna has experienced well above average win rates against Nomads and Haqq. I mean, it could be that Tunguska isn't naturally performing so well against Ariadna and that could well account for significant bad luck until they figure it out - not to mention that Nomads win-loss percentage currently mimics Yu Jing's uniquely poor performance from last time.
@Triumph: How do you explain the change in YJ performance? It makes sense to me that what we're seeing is a smaller but more motivated YJ player base in this campaign. And yeah, what I'd like is a way to compare "Active Commanders (reported at least 1 game)" vs "Passive Commanders (only had games reported against them)" that isn't massively handraulic. Because active participation is probably the best proxy for 'overall motivation' but - provided that my assumption that wins are overreported is correct - being winnier gives an indication. @Mahtamori: overreporting of wins and higher active participation rates would show what you're seeing. Now I just need better data so I can prove it :) (but I can't get it without hand sampling, I don't think).
I don't think you can accurately gauge performance against Wotan given that the game has changed over the last 12 months with new units, profiles, various buffs and nerfs across the entire game. Too many variables to point and say YJ is doing better because motivation, or any singular reason. Maybe they're doing better because there's a greater ISS to Vanilla ratio post Uprising, who knows, too much data and not enough tools to parse it.
On games played: 1. Nomads 2. Ariadna 3. NA-2 Nomads just are losing more. And yes it's rigged: NA-2 has plot armour, this has meant they've been left alone.
If it's rigged, then the 10-20 players rigging it is coordinating very well and showing remarkable restraint. At worst, it's like inane.imp suggests that people have saved a few reports and we've seen a small initial burst of favourable content. No, I'm more curious why and specifically why it's Nomads and Haqq who seem to bear the brunt of the losses thus far.
All games in the Japanese sectors need to have 1 JSA player. this makes it nearly impossible to take over those points. Even if one faction gets close (like YJ did). The JSA can easily find different factions to play against in that sector to get the needed points. YJ players need to find a JSA player to actually gain anything there. And even then they need to win more games against JSA then loose. I'm surprised they even got as much a foot in as they did. (hats off for YJ) Edited for clarification due to the post under me: This apparantly only applies to Tech Support Area
That is incorrect only games in the "technical support area" need to have one player playing as JSA. I know, I know it is written wrong on page 12 but it is announced correct on the video and the actual missions. @HellLois said in the OOC thread the correction.
That is actually a pretty big thing. I know at least 3 communities in different cities in germany that do not play it that way and stick to pdf. Not everyone who plays infinity hangs out on this forum.
I have my theories re: Nomads. Completely unrelated neither of my meta's main Nomad players are playing Nomads in this campaign /sarcasm I don't think it's 'saved reports' I think it's just people don't make the sams effort to report losses as they do for wins.
My initial assumption is that all the new stuff (especially Tunguska) has a bigger learning curve than usual. Though I admit this is without current statistical analysis to back it up, it's held pretty damn consistent since HSN2 dropped back in the day. It seems to take a good 50-100 games played to get used to how various units work best.
Yeah, it is actually a really big thing. Due to this realisation in fact, it's come down to a point where we are actually at a neck-to-neck fight with NA-2 to capture that area, surprisingly enough. And it's coming down to a case of either we lose by a couple of points, or we take it by a couple of points. ( Also, for those not keeping up and/or uninterested in the campaign, Zhan Huo firebase is basically guaranteed to be held for this phase now. Yay. )
In the end, we held the Zhan Huo Battery and took Kurage Underwater Sesoring by a surprisingly comfortable margin. If you want to try and pull a reckoning of YJ motivation from this campaign vs previous ones, I'd say it might be better to ignore player numbers or wins/losses, and look at the locations of battles. It is pretty easy to have a casual player throw a game in anywhere, maybe having registered maybe not, but when the faction has a battle plan, if you look at how many players are sticking to the plan you get an idea of who is paying attention, who is 'active' in that they're reading the faction forum or looking at the Theatre points graphs when deciding where to play. It may be conjecture at this point but I feel the faction has been much more focused, we have less games scattered across the map and more placed where they need to be placed for greatest impact. In part, I'd think you've got self-selection going on, where if you're playing YJ this campaign, in wake of Uprising, you're much more likely to feeling personal loyalty to Yu Jing and its success, you've got more focus which means your approach is less casual (plus it could be everyone else can SEE Uprising hit YJ hard, so your opponent is probably more likely to sympathize and let you choose the location you need for a game). The YJ base is smaller, but overall better, more cohesive. Its also undeniable that despite the fact the faction's high command is a shadowy secret committee of unknown membership, it has ALSO been much more consistent in messaging and running democratic polling to get player input on strategy. In times past, we had stronger individual personalities and a much more discordant command structure... it turns out, by what is totally a coincidence I'm sure, the defection of JSA commanders solved that issue instantly.
