Informal Market Project/Survey

I disagree. I think the majority of players have a single account. That's probably a discussion for another thread, but still...

Nice to see it compiled, this is a great thread.

So, what's going on with Category E?

Well, I'd prefer more data (8 obs is a miniscule sample), but I feel reasonably
comfortable that there are two key factors, one data related, and another player
related that are leading to this.

Again, caveat this with "small sample size" - this is very preliminary guesswork
at the moment.

While I disagree with your second point, I think you're right about point #1.
That's to say, the old market forum phrase "Your first billion is the hardest"
seems to be true.

Basically, I think it's relatively hard to hit 1B through a simple lucky drop or two.

From a player perspective, by 1B, I think they've probably passed the basic
market learning curve, at least to the point where they know they can actually
make inf using the market (even if only to sell), and they're willing to proactively
do so. Possibly, they've also gained enough confidence to begin to dabble with
some of the safer strategies and/or cashing in merits through the market.

At that point, the difference between 1B and 2B is fairly small, and mostly just
a matter of time. There may also be some additional motivation at that stage
to actually try to inf-cap a toon, again shortening time between 1B & 2B.


From a data perspective, excluding the endpoints, the categories are a factor
of 10 higher than the previous one. This was intentional on my part.

There are two exceptions; category B, which was a simple nod to the way inf
is estimated for a category in the spreadsheet. The intent was to lessen over-estimating
inf in the largest categories.

The other is Category E. I specifically wanted to see if there was anything
interesting around the 1B mark (in the other thread, it's in the 100M+ category).

Consequently, the comparative range of E is very, very small, and the fact that
there is a distinct (so far) notch there, implies to me that it behaves like it should
probably be folded into Category D (keeping the 10X ratios ie. 1B - 9.9B).

Also, glancing at categories C & F show similar magnitudes to each other (again,
so far) which also lends some support to the idea that there appears to be nothing
special about 1B vs 2B.


As said, I'd really like to see more data and see if those trends hold up.



Regards,
4

Absolutely!

Thanks for chiming in. The more the merrier and all the more interesting.


Cheers,
4

I got the total by installing Titan Sentinel and creating an account on the City Info Tracker site. All you need to do is log in with each character while Sentinel is running and the web site will provide summaries for character information, including inf totals.

I agree, with point 2 what I meant was that many that have already responded to this thread have a second account, I thought that was obvious when I posted it, but now that I reread it I can see that I didn't make that clear.

Definitely not.

Basically, that would skew the statistics with more (needless) variation.
The smallest logical unit (that could hold inf) is the account, and that's the
granularity you'd want for this.

Your proprosal could tally inf/person, which might be interesting, but it adds another
(unhelpful) source of variation that we cannot guage - # of accts. What percentage
of the population only has 1? 2? 3? Does only one person use it/them, or do
other people (family?) use them. In short, it adds no additional info value for us,
(although NCsoft Marketing might be more interested in that than me), but throws
a *lot* more uncertainty into any numbers we'd get.

Additionally, anyone can mail inf to anyone, so while I'd agree that multi-account
holders may well consolidate their holdings, that's much less of a concern if we're
tallying at the account level rather than the person level.

Unfortunately, it looks like interest in this thread has waned (since it was on pg 2),
and 123 accts isn't even representative of the forum population, let alone the
game's population.

In terms of total inf in-game, there's not enough data here to even guessimate
a value any at accuracy better than "orders of magnitude"

In any case, thanks to the folks that *did* contribute, as I do think there are
some points of interest in the data.

I'd certainly welcome more data, and I'll continue to update the thread to reflect
any more that comes in.


Regards,
4


PS> Shadow Ravenwolf - did you mean you have two accounts (both C), or
a total of C if you add together (which, due to the discussion above, I would
only count as a single C)?

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk