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4 April 2014 - Mod MMG on Myths and Misconceptions


Leik

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http://services.runescape.com/m=news/mod-mmg-on-myths-and-misconceptions

 

 

Hi Everyone,

I have been reading a lot of messages from players on my Twitter account and there seems to be a few misconceptions out there about the composition of our community, the effect of bots on player concurrency and what apparently constitutes the average player. I thought I would address all of these for the benefit of everyone in this dev blog.

Our community is composed of 84% Men and 16% Women players and 90% play RuneScape in English. So what does the ‘average’ RuneScape Player look like?

  • Created their account in 2009
  • Has total level 1614
  • Is highest in woodcutting and strength
  • Is lowest in farming and divination
And despite rumours that everyone in RuneScape is very rich, the truth is only 1% of players have over 1 Billion GP in total wealth.

 

 

 

 

Bots & Goldfarmers

  • Pre-bot nuke, we had 200k dodgy accounts getting into the game every day and botting until banned, at the time it would take several weeks and multiple player reports before being banned.
  • We absolutely smashed that with bot nuke in 2011 – 95% disappeared overnight. Bot developers adapted though and within a year they were back up to their old volumes.
  • These new accounts found themselves in a much harsher environment though, battling our latest in-game tech which was banning them ever-quicker than before.
  • Since 2013 we brought a range of next generation anti-botting technology allowing us to detect all bots within hours with 100% certainty. We ban bots at random intervals a few days after first detection so that they never know exactly how they were detected. A side effect of this is that we see many players who had botted prior, try to appeal their bans as they incorrectly believe they were unfairly banned because they are often playing normally when the ban is applied and therefore think we’ve made a mistake and somehow they managed to get away with historic botting. Bots cannot adapt to this new technology leaving them flawed and at a completely manageable trickle.
  • Finally in September 2013 we began focusing on wiping out Gold Farmers, by introducing Bonds. This, along with constant updating of BotWatch, has kept ‘dodgy activity’ at record low levels, in fact rock bottom in the main game.
  • Happily, the volume of bots and gold farmers is lower than ever however we are not complacent and with the success on the main game we are now working on extending our focus to Old School RuneScape.

     

“Players Online Now”
  • Gold farmers typically run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
  • To put that into perspective, our most fanatical top three players on the high scores #1 ‘S U O M I’ plays an average of 07:27.00 hours a day, #2 ‘Drumgun’ plays on average 13:06.00 and lastly #3 ‘Jake’ plays an average of 12:48.00 per day.
  • The average player however only plays just on 2 hours a day in the week and an additional 32 minutes on average on the weekend.
So, with this in mind a single goldfarmer bot used on a weekday would represent the equivalent of 12 ‘real’ players on the “players online now” count and therefore for the first time in a decade our active players represents our true “Players Online Now” numbers.

 

We also recognise the transition to Evolution of Combat was too big a change for some, and we sadly lost some of our community with the update. However, we are making huge strides to now give players the choice as to which combat system they would prefer with the introduction of Revolution and the work currently being undertaken on ‘Legacy Mode’, which will bring back the much of the old combat gameplay and interfaces, in the main game alongside Evolution of Combat.

 

Net result? Concurrent players is as high over recent months as it was a year prior, with more players returning to RuneScape and thousands of new players joining our amazing community than at any time in the last year. We’ve even seen counter seasonal positive growth the past quarter.

 

RuneScape is a game and a social network, for me it’s always been about hanging out friends, old and new. If you have old friends who may have left this is a great year for them to come back.

 

Join the conversation on twitter: @RuneScape

Thanks,

 

Mod MMG @Mark__Gerhard.

Some more stats as requested below for the lovers of data:

runescape_players_regions_breakdown.jpg

 

runescape_players_age_breakdown.jpg

 

runescape_players_account_age_level_brea

 

Figured this could spark an interesting discussion.


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LIVERPOOL WILL WIN THE PREMIER LEAGUE THIS SEASON.
[01:24:34] CJ Hunnicutt: it takes skill to be that [bleep]ing stupid

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Some interesting stats in thoose charts imo.

 

Quite surprised by how small 13-16 is, thought it'd be a bit bigger.

The country map is quite interesting too, I'm guess the darkness of the blue is something to do with the percentages within the continent areas.

 

Edit cause I realised I totally derped on intepretting the last chart, too tired.

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Operation Gold Sparkles :: Chompy Kills ::  Full Profound :: Champions :: Barbarian Notes :: Champions Tackle Box :: MA Rewards

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I think you just read the chart wrong Sy. That means how many players who created their account in that year have that level now. So as you can see between 2004 and 2008 the vast majority of RS accounts were created, and few of those players still have very low totals.

Asmodean <3

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Some of the statistics don't add up. I'm pretty sure the Male to Female ratio is slightly lower more ilke 80/20 As for the average hours a day, I prolly play 8 hours average.. Way above the average

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180th to 99 Divination + 1st W36er

 

Rambo, cannot pk call your friends bro :). Wait nevermind none of SAPK/PKS can. Kappa.

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Some of the statistics don't add up. I'm pretty sure the Male to Female ratio is slightly lower more ilke 80/20 As for the average hours a day, I prolly play 8 hours average.. Way above the average

I'm guessing the way they calculated it is they divided your total game time by the amount of days since you created your account. I would imagine you didn't play 8 hours a day from the day you started playing RS.

 

Same applies to Drumgun, and SUOMI for that matter. We all know they play way above that average nowadays, but they most likely didn't in the early days of their playing "career".

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LIVERPOOL WILL WIN THE PREMIER LEAGUE THIS SEASON.
[01:24:34] CJ Hunnicutt: it takes skill to be that [bleep]ing stupid

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Some of the statistics don't add up. I'm pretty sure the Male to Female ratio is slightly lower more ilke 80/20 As for the average hours a day, I prolly play 8 hours average.. Way above the average

I'm guessing the way they calculated it is they divided your total game time by the amount of days since you created your account. I would imagine you didn't play 8 hours a day from the day you started playing RS.

 

Same applies to Drumgun, and SUOMI for that matter. We all know they play way above that average nowadays, but they most likely didn't in the early days of their playing "career".

 

 

Yeah I'd guess they simply took total player hours logged and divided that down to give the average hours per day and then divided that between the number of accounts and for all of us who do player longer there are plenty more who play way less. And nobody really keeps a consistent average sometimes I'll play 30 mins a day at best for a month or 2 then turn out 8 hours a day for a month or 2.

 

Just because you personally don't fit the 'average' doesn't make it wrong an average by its very nature is unlikely to be anywhere close to the each individual, and that just becomes more and more true as the sample size grows.

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Operation Gold Sparkles :: Chompy Kills ::  Full Profound :: Champions :: Barbarian Notes :: Champions Tackle Box :: MA Rewards

Dragonkin Journals :: Ports Stories :: Elder Chronicles :: Boss Slayer :: Penance King :: Kal'gerion Titles :: Gold Statue

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Considering SUOMI now plays 0 hours a day, I'd say you're right to think it's an account long average looking at played hours since creation. I guess they could have also reduced the days to ones in which you logged on. So skipping a day wouldn't impact your average, but logging in for 1 minute each day (say, for spins) would drag it down.

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Some of the statistics don't add up. I'm pretty sure the Male to Female ratio is slightly lower more ilke 80/20 As for the average hours a day, I prolly play 8 hours average.. Way above the average

 

wait, where is the gender ratio listed in here?

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That female ratio is surprisingly low. Even in the most male-biased gaming genres, it tends to be around 80:20, and edges towards parity in other areas. A lot of the obstacles which have traditionally been seen as preventing women from joining the gaming community don't really exist in RuneScape. The game isn't particularly tilted towards glamorization of physical strength, and you can make a female avatar with absolutely no disadvantages in real terms towards gameplay. The community, whilst it has its flaws, is generally moderated quite well and I certainly wouldn't describe it as being inherently misogynistic.

 

I can't really think of an obvious explanation for why that figure is so low, relative to other RPGs.

 

Don't get me wrong: misogyny is still rife in gaming culture. Here is, quite simply, an hilarious example. I've just never seen that much of it in RuneScape to make me think it would put off female gamers from this game in particular.

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Some of the statistics don't add up. I'm pretty sure the Male to Female ratio is slightly lower more ilke 80/20 As for the average hours a day, I prolly play 8 hours average.. Way above the average

 

wait, where is the gender ratio listed in here?

 

 

Says the community is 86% guys and 14% females. Not sure if that's based upon character avatars or what as the details seem to be a little of how they came up with this. Because on account creation it just used to say Age bracket/Country. And the only other reasonable opinion for it is based on avatars, which seems stupid as any guy can make a female avatar. And any poll or small survey would only indicate a small or biased % of the true statistic.

Thievingcapesigcopy.png

Jeffery.png

180th to 99 Divination + 1st W36er

 

Rambo, cannot pk call your friends bro :). Wait nevermind none of SAPK/PKS can. Kappa.

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Personaly I think its a lie that he has said more people are playing now and the games growing. Just before FTP highscores were added it dropped 20-40k and was slowly declining again (this is after the mass spams of 1p membership) So they are not reliable steady statistics.

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Says the community is 86% guys and 14% females.

It was 84% and 16%, just for clarity.

 

Not sure if that's based upon character avatars or what as the details seem to be a little of how they came up with this. Because on account creation it just used to say Age bracket/Country. And the only other reasonable opinion for it is based on avatars, which seems stupid as any guy can make a female avatar. And any poll or small survey would only indicate a small or biased % of the true statistic.

I'd be interested to know how they got the statistics too. Certainly, there's no description of methodology, so it's very, very difficult to draw any real conclusions from this. If their methodology was literally picking avatars, it's deeply flawed.

 

Bias doesn't necessarily invalidate results though. What matters is how likely it is that sheer probability or bias produced the results. A big enough survey would still be valid, in that regard, it's just that without any simple numbers (not percentages or ratios) or method described, it's impossible to judge.

 

EDIT: Just noticed this:

  • To put that into perspective, our most fanatical top three players on the high scores #1 ‘S U O M I’ plays an average of 07:27.00 hours a day, #2 ‘Drumgun’ plays on average 13:06.00 and lastly #3 ‘Jake’ plays an average of 12:48.00 per day.
Not too bothered about gold farming but, those figures really get you thinking... Edited by Ginger_Warrior
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Personaly I think its a lie that he has said more people are playing now and the games growing. 

Where does he say that?

 

EDIT: oh, you mean: 

We’ve even seen counter seasonal positive growth the past quarter

 

Looking at this graph... if I was a business, I would call that "seeing growth", even if it tails off at the end. Misleading, yes. But they did see growth in that quarter.

syWht8e.jpg

Graph from: http://www.reddit.com/user/Azu99

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Says the community is 86% guys and 14% females.

It was 84% and 16%, just for clarity.

 

Not sure if that's based upon character avatars or what as the details seem to be a little of how they came up with this. Because on account creation it just used to say Age bracket/Country. And the only other reasonable opinion for it is based on avatars, which seems stupid as any guy can make a female avatar. And any poll or small survey would only indicate a small or biased % of the true statistic.

I'd be interested to know how they got the statistics too. Certainly, there's no description of methodology, so it's very, very difficult to draw any real conclusions from this. If their methodology was literally picking avatars, it's deeply flawed.

 

Bias doesn't necessarily invalidate results though. What matters is how likely it is that sheer probability or bias produced the results. A big enough survey would still be valid, in that regard, it's just that without any simple numbers (not percentages or ratios) or method described, it's impossible to judge.

 

EDIT: Just noticed this:

  • To put that into perspective, our most fanatical top three players on the high scores #1 ‘S U O M I’ plays an average of 07:27.00 hours a day, #2 ‘Drumgun’ plays on average 13:06.00 and lastly #3 ‘Jake’ plays an average of 12:48.00 per day.
Not too bothered about gold farming but, those figures really get you thinking...

 

Drum is complaining on the hlf atm how his average is closer to 17 hours, not 13 L

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Personaly I think its a lie that he has said more people are playing now and the games growing. 

Where does he say that?

 

EDIT: oh, you mean: 

We’ve even seen counter seasonal positive growth the past quarter

 

Looking at this graph... if I was a business, I would call that "seeing growth", even if it tails off at the end. Misleading, yes. But they did see growth in that quarter.

syWht8e.jpg

Graph from: http://www.reddit.com/user/Azu99

 

Was it actually growth though, concidering the emails were to old players rather than new ones. They like to use sly wording to manipulate data in their favour.

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Was it actually growth though, concidering the emails were to old players rather than new ones. They like to use sly wording to manipulate data in their favour.

Err, what. The emails were just to ask players why they buy game cards. It has nothing to do with the graph.

6Ij0n.jpg

In real life MMO you don't get 99 smithing by making endless bronze daggers.

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Was it actually growth though, concidering the emails were to old players rather than new ones. They like to use sly wording to manipulate data in their favour.

Err, what. The emails were just to ask players why they buy game cards. It has nothing to do with the graph.

He's talking about a different email. A few months ago they sent emails to a number of former players offering a month membership for a penny.

http://runescape.wikia.com/wiki/Penny_membership

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