New Accounts and Losing Veterans Over Time.

Bitter has already shown us that it suggests a gradual UPgrade curve. This is actually pretty significant, compared to the mudding world in general. The mud genre is fairly static, on a very gradual downgrade curve. Lots more muds, but not lots more players. The existing players are more spread out than they used to be. When the newer muds die, their players either revert to their previous muds, look for new ones, or stop mudding altogether. Arm actually attracts new players, albeit at a painfully low rate.

I posted late last night so I kept it short for coherency.

The reason I think Arm keeping the numbers pretty even is good has already been stated. The state of online gaming has changed so dramatically since the 90s, that's pretty obvious. I'm thinking at this point the whole Mu* community is cannibalizing itself. That is, players from a mush might try arm for a while, then move on back to mushing or a player from Arm might stop playing for a while and try mushing then come back to Arm. That's what I mean by a revolving door.

Now here's where it gets scary. I think the reason Arm has been able to stay consistent +\- a few people is it's the same damned game it was when I stopped playing six or seven years ago. So minus a few changes and relearning a few obscure syntaxes and burning through a couple of throwaway characters it's like I never stopped playing.

That's still not the really scary thing. The really scary thing is, outside of the core group of players ie the players that can spend 8 hours a day playing or have the luxury of being able to log in for an hour or two then log off a few times a day; most people that are playing are like me, can log in for a couple of hours a week, might be gone for a few months or years then come back. So the same thing that's keeping the numbers consistent is the thing that's keeping the numbers from growing.

If I were really a new player and I had to learn how to gain skills, how stats work, how to emote, how to way, how to hunt, craft, fight , etc. Two characters tops and I would've been out. Why? Because ain't nobody got time for that. Here is where Arm 2 should've come in, it should've been a more streamlined game that is easy to pick up and play. Instead we're stuck with a game where people shit test other people on how much they know about the game or how many posts you have on the GDB, or who you played before when we all played before and nobody is really "new".

So yeah the game is kinda on an even keel, but how do we break it out? Something has to happen to break it out.

Exactly what I'm getting at. The rate of new players to old with total account logins, and the number of new accounts that we keep, both. It's just fairly obvious if you can understand what it's saying. You went from around 240 players staying on regularly and a dozen or two new accounts except right before hrpts, to about 180-204 accounts that stay on in addition to the new accounts, and a net gain of roughly seven players from the new accounts over that period.

It's also important to know what defines a "veteran" for the same reason. And, judging by the posts from /actual/ veteran players posting on the GDB, it looks like some veterans are returning to the game, thus skewing the numbers of "new" accounts to "dead" accounts.

I'm not defining it. Armageddon is defining it as a new account created during that 7 day period. I thought it was pretty clear cut?

You're both welcome. i needed a project to get back into practice with PHP anyhow. Besides i so rarely get to do data analysis these days.

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It was a joint effort anyhow. @anaiah did the research. i saw it and decided to do the data entry. Then I wrote a couple scripts to do all the output you saw. We've had enough dataless pissing contests on this site. it's nice to be able to have data interpretation pissing contests instead.

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jkarr mentioned the population hit already. No need to reshash that. And arm's currently at a net gain (unless a bunch of those new accounts are multis/ban dodges but it's unreasonable to pretend we could derive that from these numbers). but what this does demonstrate is Arm's churn rate.



Over a 4.5 year period Arm has retained 77 accounts out of 9871. In that time 9794 other accounts were created that Ive estimated are "dead". that is a very worrisome number,. thats less than 1% survival rate which IIRC puts their churn rate at juuuuuuust under 100%. Specifically it's 99.22% churn and 0.78% survival which I miswrote as 0.0078% in a previous post but corrected while writing this post.

And that's being nice to arm. Since churn rate is actually calculated by year Arms most likely somewhere around 5200% churn rate. But I don't have time at the moment to write a script to calculate the churn rate by week and average it out. maybe later. Im not terribly motivated because there's no data about the lifespan of these accounts. Thus there is no accurate way to get the churn rate at this time. Just know it's somewhere between just under 100% and slightly under 5200%. And tht higher numbers are worse.

Moving on. If you make a game where less than 1 person in 100 is willing to keep playing despite the fact they're almosy certainly your target audience your game has a problem. People dont just stumble onto a MUD. It's a niche gaming market. One thing I won't rag on Arm for is bugs. Compared to other MUDs it is pretty solid. i say that as someone who can remember the occasional multi-day downtimes after a crash. But these numbers come years after that level of instability. So that points to the staff, the playerbase, and the GDB as more likely causes of the poor retention.

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Actually people like you help to conceal the amount of loss. I estimated the "dead" accounts as follows:

(Current month unique logins + Current month new accounts) - Previous month's logins = Dead Accounts

In the event i didn't have the previous month's numbers I make no attempt to make this estimate. I erred on the side of making no statement or making Arm look better to avoid any appearance of impropriety.

Anyhow the point is if you logged in it would make it appear there was one less inactive account than there actually was. Because that's literally what happened. What it would conceal how quickly someone with a new account throws their hands up and says 'fuck this game forever' in under a week.