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NOTE: This may have been suggested, but I assuming not in this manner or depth. This is an interesting read nonetheless, so if it's already been suggested, please just move it to a different sub-forum if possible, because this was a significant amount of work... ------------------------------ DISCLAIMER: Consider this a Little Big Planet Central Case Study. I've just gathered a little data and everything I say is based on what I found and what I think. I am not saying a change absolutely must be made whatsoever, I just believe it could be improved through the presented method. Additionally, I recognize that there would be many challenges implementing this, both from the website code and the community culture points of view, and any action is entirely unlikely. Frankly, I did this for fun and I think that if you enjoy numbers, trends, and LBPC you should give this a read! I don't need harsh criticism about this-and-that about my process. I know very little about data analytics. Just read, ponder, and discuss. ------------------------------ Introduction Hey, all. Earlier, I was looking through the Level Showcase and subsequently Cool Levels, and like many others, I noticed the lack of levels making it into our respected Cool Levels thread, and I found that interesting. Cool Levels should be the place where the best levels are harbored, but due to the lower level of activity on this site recently (and the site outage, which will skew my data) there have been very few levels gaining the necessary 20 replies. I don't believe that the quality of levels has been lacking in the Level Showcase, nor do I believe that great levels shouldn't be pinned to the board simply due to lack of activity. That's why I propose a temporary alteration to the current system. Ideally, levels would move to the Cool Levels page based on a system that would cross-examine both the words used in the replies within a thread, number or replies, and recent activity level of the site to determine the levels that go to the Cool Levels page. That seems a little complex though, doesn't it? Instead, the more feasible option is to adjust the number of replies based on the current activity level. Here, I attempted to do so. Data First, I grabbed data from 7 pages (#140) of levels in the Level Showcase. For the 2014 data, I simply started with the most recent post, and then worked my way backwards. For the comparison data, I chose a set of semi-random, contiguous 7 pages. I decided to choose a time when this site was active and decided upon mid-June 2011, a few months following the release of LBP2. Players had had nearly 5 months to play with LBP2's tools and I figured level quality was fairly high and somewhat equivalent to what is being produced as of late. This is purely conjecture, but it did give me data to run off of. I could have done another set of data, but for now, this will do. The data is shown below. *Excuse the small font. http://i62.tinypic.com/dy4zup.png Calculations As you can see, the time ranges are quite different. Currently, the last 140 replied-to threads have been spread out over a time of 118 days, compared to 15 days in 2011. This demonstrates the disparity between the activity levels of the two time periods.* The following calculations were mostly percentages, so this difference is not as significant. However, this still makes the samples more concentrated and less likely to pick up on general trends. *Don't fret though, activity will certainly pick up in November! Next, I calculated the average replies per thread and the percentage of posts greater than or equal to certain benchmarks (5, 10, 15, 16, 17, 18). The data is shown below. *The question marks represent greater-than-or-equal-to symbols. Excel to picture issues ** Left: 2014 || Left: 2011 http://i57.tinypic.com/153odo3.png Before I go any further, I must mention an assumption I had to make. For this analysis, I assumed that any given post was made the same day as its last reply. In doing so, I may have some areas near the back-ends of my data set, in which levels should or should not count given the range. I acknowledge that there could be discrepancies here, but for the sake of what I'm doing, bear with me. I'm not exactly the most experienced or most capable analyst, so I wanted to keep things a little simpler. Anyway, back to the numbers. Looking at the data calculations, it's obvious that each individual post is getting more replies, more feedback, and generally more input from the community. If you put up a level of good quality, you could expect to get somewhere around 7 replies, compared to the 3 replies back in the days when your level would be off page 1 of the Level Showcase in a few hours. Based on the previous table, it appears as though a higher percentage of levels would be making it to the Cool Levels page now compared to 2011. Yet, that's incorrect. Over the time period of 19 June - 21 February 2014 (118 days), only 7 levels had garnered 20 replies. In the 15 days in 2011, 16 levels had reached 20 replies. The percentage of total levels posted in the time period (those on Cool Levels plus those in the Level Showcase) that made it to the cool levels page is shown in the table below. *Right: 2014 || Left: 2011 http://i57.tinypic.com/i4ogmp.png You may find these numbers surprising, or you may not. Remembering the culture of the Level Showcase back then, I found them a little less surprising. There was always this desire of the level creators to make it to the Cool Levels page, and sometimes a little "fluff" post was made by the creator to boost the reply count. Nowadays, either the general user base has become more honest, levels have just coincidentally ended at replies just under 20 at a higher rate, or Cool Levels just isn't the most desirable place for a level post to reside anymore. I think it's a little bit of all three. I won't comment on the first, but the second go hand-in-hand. If Cool Levels is functioning as it should and is the active, desirable harbor for great levels, then there should be this "reply canyon" somewhere up near 20. This shows that, in whatever way it happens, creators and their levels are really trying and desiring to be included on the Cool Levels page. Apparently, that's currently not the case. Scenarios I believe that if site activity remains the way it is, then the number of replies needed to reach Cool Levels should be lowered. Next, I created 4 new scenarios of lowering the number of necessary replies to 15, 16, 17, and 18. I just did rough quartile separations as well, all shown in the table below. *New = 18 || New V.2 = 17 || New V.3 = 16 || New V.4 = 15 http://i58.tinypic.com/2u8hxdt.png Then, I ran the 140 levels from the 2014 data set through each of the Cool Levels reply cut-offs. The quartile distribution may not be quite right, but the number of new Cool Levels is correct and that's what matters most. This is shown below. *New = 18 || New V.2 = 17 || New V.3 = 16 || New V.4 = 15 http://i61.tinypic.com/ff3ew3.png *The "Check" box totals do not include the 7 "Old Cool Levels." I just used them to make sure my quartile ranges checked out. Upon running each scenarios, I then calculated the percentage of current levels that would have made it onto the Cool Levels page with each set of conditions. The 2011 original data is shown on the right. Once again, this is shown below. *New = 18 || New V.2 = 17 || New V.3 = 16 || New V.4 = 15 **Left: 2014 || Right: 2011 http://i58.tinypic.com/346s369.png After examining the new percentages of level that would make it to the Cool Levels page, it is obvious that in lowering the number of required replies to either 15 or 16 would give a similar percentage of Cool Levels as back in 2011. Hence my suggestion. I believe somewhere around 10% of levels making it to the Cool Levels page seems a little more reasonable than the 4.76% that are making it right now. My reasoning is in the next section. Conclusion In the end, this has all been a long-winded, roundabout way to reach my simple conclusion of just temporarily lowering the number of posts needed to reach the Cool Levels page. My personal suggestion would be to lower the required number of posts to 15. In changing the number of posts to 15, Cool Levels would hopefully be slightly revitalized and once again become the active place where creators want their levels to be showcased. In lowering the number of replies to 15, effectively, a new level would make it to Cool Levels approximately once per week, compared to one making it there every 17 days or so. More levels would be showcased, the creators would gain more recognition for their extraordinary work, and there would be less high-quality work sliding down through the pages of the Level Showcase. I believe this would suffice until LBP3 rolls out in November, because then Cool Levels would undoubtedly become incredibly overpopulated within a few weeks. Counterargument Of course, there are reasons why this should not be implemented, and this study wouldn't be complete without recognizing them. 1. Implementation Most likely, this would be difficult to implement from the LBPC point of view. It would probably end up switching over old posts and it would just be a major hassle. I'm not certain, but I feel as though it would. 2. Insignificant Return The percentage increase is very nice, but I can't make promises as to how much activity this would actually bring to Cool Levels. Certainly it would help, but all users would have to be aware of the change and quality levels must continue to be posted for this to be most effective. Essentially, it increases the number of levels reaching Cool Levels by a factor of 2, which would be great, but with such a low rate as it is, the improvement is insignificant. 3. Temporary The change would only be temporary (although I still will argue beneficial) and would have to be switched off later. Therefore, any difficulties would have to be endured twice. 4. Change Departure from the norm doesn't always make people the happiest. You could certainly pick out flaws in my analysis, and provide more reasons as to why this would or wouldn't be a good idea. I'm certain of that. Either way, I hope any who have read this enjoyed it! Please share your thoughts and comments! Cheers!

2014-06-20 01:38:00 Author: piggabling Posts: 2979

Posts: 1077139    Threads: 69970    Members: 9661    Archive-Date: 2019-01-19

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