Renault on 30/12/2015 at 16:43
It depends what you want to count. Missions vs. releases. There's a million ways to argue it - I mean sure, DCE is going to be 10 missions, but a single mission like Mission X or Ominous Bequest is probably as big as 10 smaller contest missions, so how do you count that? I think it's easier to just count a release as one, no matter how many missions it contains. It's the same story just broken up into smaller parts, right? At least that's the way I look at it.
Ricebug on 30/12/2015 at 21:40
Agree. After all, the chart's purpose is to show how active the Thief/Dromed society has been for a given year. I suppose I can make a notation on the chart.
R Soul on 30/12/2015 at 22:30
I have an idea. For each FM, work out a typical playing time (not including CamVators, movies, and people who are rubbish). A year with lots of small missions could look like a year with several big ones, so you can solve that by showing the average playing time per month along with the standard deviation.
Too complex? Well it'll give you something to do while you wait for the next FM to be released.
Melan on 30/12/2015 at 22:35
The real goal is to use a consistent method to monitor how things change in FMland. If you have a method that works, it is best to stick to it to get a nice, long, unbroken time series.
Yandros on 31/12/2015 at 01:03
I agree with consistency, and you should keep doing this the way you've been doing it for years now, and just clearly document what it shows. If in the past it measured releases of new (previously unreleased) content, regardless of the number of missions in the release, then keep doing it that way. If DCE and RotB2 both happen to get released next year, then most people here will know there were two large campaigns released with 22+ missions even if your chart only shows two releases for those two campaigns. I agree it's a can of worms that really just makes things too tricky, I was just reiterating what I thought we had discussed before.
Just taking DCE for example, 1 mission is only camvator sequences, another is mostly camvators but then includes a short in-game section, and a third is all in-game but can be finished in under 10 minutes. Do any of those count the same as the other 7 missions, which average 1-3 hours playing time each? It all gets too arbitrary and subjective.
Springheel on 2/1/2016 at 00:51
Quote:
One change: I decided to delete the T3 data. For obvious reasons.
Where there any released, or is that the obvious reason?
redleaf on 16/1/2016 at 06:57
So are we dying? I wonder if the proliferation of types of missions, engines, etc has actually had a bad effect, rather than a good one. Do we have info on how many folks have been playing these missions?
