Arcadia Expo Statistics

Here are some statistics from Danger Zone, running across the entire Expo. I hope some of you might find this interesting, and I encourage the other developers to post their statistics to this thread.

Total Games Played: 1425
From the start of the Expo to the last day, there were 1425 games of Danger Zone played. That works out to over 27 games per day, or 1.14 games/hour!

Games by Number of Players

Danger Zone is a multiplayer game. It takes at least three people to play, and up to eight can play at once in one game. Most of the games were 3-player, although I personally think it's a lot more fun with 6 or 7. It can be hard getting that many people together, though.

Times people paid for a game of Danger Zone: 5637
Just multiplying the number of games times the number of people in each game. Originally Danger Zone cost 10L to play. I bumped that up to 20L, and then set different limits on each of the four tables: 20, 40, 100, and 1000L (with proportionately scaled payouts). That seemed to work the best.

Danger Zone is not a pot-based game. People pay a fixed amount to play, and the amount they win is based on how many gems the collect, not on how much is paid in to a pot. Sometimes the winner just wins back his entry fee; sometimes he can win a lot more than what the players paid in. I adjusted the payouts so that, on average, it ran a very slight (3%) profit for me.

I originally made Danger Zone run this way because it seemed to make sense to me, and I wanted to be different. It also avoids the problem of having to cajole winners to contribute their winnings back into the next pot. Games seem to run more smoothly, and there's never any hard feelings about people leaving.

Games played by week:

Traffic was mostly driven by the number of events I ran. And the grid attacks hurt a lot, of course.

Games played by time of day (LST/PST):

I don't think there's any surprises there. The dead zone of 4AM translates to prime evening time for India and China, but Second Life doesn't have a large Asian population yet.

Games played per person:


There were 422 unique visitors to Danger Zone. Of those, 242 (57%) decided to try it at least twice, and 167 (39%) played it several times.

My gameboards keep track of how many people completed a game.
A game of 5 vs 5 will add 10 to the counter.

During the expo, my game had over 15,000 plays logged!

Dwell on my parcel was never below 4000, usually around 8000 and at times reached 12,000.

I sold several games at 10 - 12,500 each which helped my score alot.

I do think that rating games on income alone may miss some important points.
In the future I think that perhaps things like uniqe visitors, dwell and repeated plays should have some weight. There is too much room for people to bloat the numbers.
Say you ask a friend to pay your game 100,000 and pay that person back after the expo is over. There is just no way to regulate things like that. I am wondering if some games that deserved to win did not because of this.

I believe that I choose a winning payment scheme. People could place large amounts of money into the game pot with a chance of winning it back. I took 5% of the winnings.
The problem is that this is not practical for something like a RPG. So perhaps if dwell had weight it would offset this. Darklife had good dwell compared to most other games.

I am very happy with the results of the expo because I won but I know there are some other teams that are not very happy with it for good reasons.

Here is a graph of the known income data:



what you'd expect (exept in the beginning) is straight lines.
Tech warfare: straight line.
Danger Zone: straight line.
Collective: straight line.
Boogie Board: Somehow in the very last period their income has almost doubled and it seemed to have gotten them in the first four places. 47% of their income was generated in the LAST 2 weeks...
Castle wars: didn't seem to go very good, however between 12 april and 29 april they somehow increased their income from about 40,000 to 114,000. 55% of total income was made in 2 weeks... after that they continued earning as much as they did before the two GOOD weeks.
DarkLife: straight line.
BloxSL: straight line.
SLictionary: straight line.

The collective, Tech Warfare and Danger Zone, congrats on your (fair) victory!!!

ROFL.. Dude!

Nothing to do with my position was unfair. I began selling copies of the game (just like many other competitors at the expo) just before the end of the competition [2 weeks]. Since the cost of a unit far outways the L$10 per game I was charging before that, it shot me up quick...

The game was not ready for public release until the end of the competition, otherwise I would have likely been higher in the standings earlier in the competition.

Please don't judge before you get the facts.

Selling copies of the game??? I thought people were supposed to pay you for PLAYING the game, not owning it???
I didn't state anything but facts
Also I have my doubts about huge 'prizes' you could win at some games (like 25.000 L$ I saw)
Ofcourse you can argue it's a good thing to use the money you earn as prize money. However what does that tell you about the game? are you trying to create a good game or are you running a casino in disguise???

It's true you did mention only facts except the indication that you thought Boogie's position was not fair.

The very games that you just congratulated for winning "fairly" are the ones that sold copies of their game and also provided the playing incentives (L$25,000 for example) far before I ever did anything similar [at a lower degree I might add].

hmm then obviously the winners had some very diffrent ideas about this competition then I did.

Compare it to an arcade hall: you can either place a game machine and charge 1$ for each game... or you can start selling the game machines for 5000$ each Obbiously that 5000$ the buyer spent will earn itself back (when 5000 people have played the game), so no wonder he doesn't mind paying the 5000$....
But that doesn't mean that the buyer thinks the game is good enough to play it 5000 times himself....

All by all I think the rules of this this competition.... (fill in yourself)

I think you have a valid point here, Mark. I was surprised to learn that we could sell our games and count that income as part of our score. It did put you at a serious disadvantage.

Using money as a method for keeping score isn't perfect. This is one of the problems with it. But I can't think of a better solution. Hamlet posted about this in his blog a week ago. Last year, the Expo games were simply judged -- and nobody played them. They're all forgotten now. This year, at least, the games all got played thousands of times. That's an improvement.

For the record, I haven't sold any copies of Danger Zone, and all of my score reflects money people paid to play the game.


Another good point, and one that I'd like to see discussed more.

I originally designed Danger Zone with no gambling element, and no payouts at all. But over and over again, people asked "What do I get if I win?" The gambling mindset is very prevalent in Second Life, and in order to build a community and get people playing, I felt I had to cater to it. And now I am running a casino, sort of. That's not something I ever set out to do. It bothers me, a little.

I'm not going to lie. I think Dark Life is a fantastic game, very artistic, very entertaining and very well done. I am quite dissappointed that it didn't get into the top 4.

The only reason it didn't make it is the (in my opinion bad) way the scoring was set up in the competition. I don't know if it was a good judge of time spent, enjoyment, or positive content.

Thanks. (I regret and am ashamed to say I didn't play the other games... I did intent to do it but every time I got online I was spammed with IM's, because the arcadia server crashed again and people lost EXP and gold)

And I AM glad to hear that BoogieBoard didn't go so high because of some bogus 'donation' which was my first thought (obviously I had no proof so didn't mention it)
But I'm glad that's not the case. So gongrats to boogie board as well for their victory

I still kinda disagree about selling copies of the games, but it's still a 100 times better to lose like that, then to lose because other games 'cheated' with donations (which again wouldn't even be against the rules I think).

And about judgement. What about AFTER the competition, or at the end, a voting board is opened and each resident get's to give out, let's say 2 or 3 votes' for their favorite game(s) in Arcadia. That way the games can be free of charge, and I think it's a much fairer way to judge the games.

Agreed.

That would force competitors to promote their games and maintain a quality product. It would also be a better representation of what kind of games are good for SL (entertainment wise).

From a player - non-developer's point of view, I hung out with people who were constantly looking for a game of Danger Zone or Boogie.

When Hox sold his game, it tooks hundreds of games away from Arcadia. I personally played Boogie in a dozen places. People who loved Boogie played it devotedly everywhere and didn't try to rig the system.

Danger Zones fans didn't play just to be in the 25k tournament, we played games at $20, $40, $100 or $1000 a game if we could get others to play. We had fun comparing our ongoing scores with each other knowing only one person would win the tourney.

BTW Rifkin I think I've played more 8 player games than you show in your totals, which makes me think many more games were played than your stats show.

I don't believe these guys "gamed" the system and any complaints should be aimed at the creator of the rules not the players.

This was my biggest problem, and an ongoing one. What's the best way to get a game going when you need at least three people to start playing?

I had the Danger Zone players' group, Adrenaline Junkies, from the start. I hoped people could just IM there when they were looking for a game. But many people can't join because their group slots are full (maybe this problem will be going away soon?). Some people don't join because they don't like IM spam. I'd guess less than a third of all DZ players are in the group.

The most effective method I found for getting games going was to personally IM everyone through calling cards. Now that the Expo is over I've stopped doing that. I had hoped there would be enough momentum to make my player community self-sustaining, but that doesn't seem to be happening. So I'm open to suggestions.

I want to finish some bugfixes to the game in the next couple weeks, and then I'll start promotiing some events again, hopefully bringing in some new players.

The statistics only cover the time period of the Expo and do not include the games you played in the Championship match (which was held on the Saturday after the Expo closed). 8-player games are awesome and I wish there were more of them. You were in 7 of those 21 games, Pippin.