It's come to my attention that some people want to discuss AP. As a result, I made this thread for general discussion relating to it. In another place, a discussion was brought up dealing with how AP might increase activity right now.
If you don't know what AP was, it was a reward system. Quests replaced AP a while back. AP rewarded users according to how much activity they provided.
Actually, something just came to mind. Well, two things.
1. I am posting way too much on this thread.
2. The date matters. While going through pages 100-110, I noticed that the threads generally had less posts but the dates were closer together. If the dates are closer together, then more people are posting at a faster rate. That's logical sense. But the problem is that I don't know how to pull any usable stats from it. I suppose we could average posts/thread and then factor in the date gap. Or we could even come up with an "Activity Number" that's found by an equation like this:
Total posts ÷ total threads = Average posts per thread (A)
Latest date - earliest date = Difference of dates (D)
Right now we're just getting stats. We're describing how activity has changed, if at all. From there we're going to make a guess at why this happened.
Not to be a buzz kill or anything, dear Sal, but perhaps you should create a whole different thread for activity statistics? It'd make it easier to organize, as well as preventing the topic of AP's goods and bads from deviating from its original purpose. I do understand that this is an attempt to allow for more concise and meaningful debates and discussions, but perhaps it should be kept separate from this thread so that one may be able to link what they're arguing at or for in an independent thread.
Unless, everybody is fine with the particular location of where this will be set? I dunno, just a suggestion.
Anyways, to get on track, AP? I was there when it was there. Did I care much about it? Not really. Motivation to post didn't come from a superficial urge to get to a Gold King. Sure, I was amazed with firetail's immense AP, but it wasn't something that I believed was a commensurate reason for my posting.
And besides, I mostly posted in the Forum Games at the time it was implemented, anyways.
However, this standpoint of mine doesn't mean I don't desire its return. As said previously, it improved activity. By how much? I don't know, but let's leave it to Salvidian's attempt to gather activity statistics. I'll revitalize my argument when the process is complete, but for now, I'll just leave it at that. Was there spamming due to it? Of course, but every system has imperfections. That doesn't mean that we can't strive for perfection, however, and I believed that AP could've been regulated. And besides, at the end of the day, it was just an empty achievement of self recognition for meaningless ranks of activity.
Just my one cent, because I don't know where the other penny went.
Right now we're just getting stats. We're describing how activity has changed, if at all. From there we're going to make a guess at why this happened. As this is all correlation, and causation isn't implied by correlation, we can't completely prove anything. But because this is merely a game forum I doubt it matters much. We're just speculation anyway.
Sal, I hope you recall the results of my previous attempt at this. Good luck.
If you weren't an eighter, you would never realize that the original Tavern also included Forum Games which inflated its activity, but the Tavern was still the most active forum after Forum Games. You need to take that into account.
And Sal, one thing. Though you are calculating posts and stuff you must remember and see this.
If you actually go through the threads with the tons of activity that get the numbers up, you will see that every single time it's the same 10-15 people everywhere... Honestly, I think most of the forums are being held up by a few users. When AP was still around I remember at least double the regulars and random people popping in now and then.
