You forgot to mention we engineers’ number 1 complaint is our Hobosack!
Haha, yes! I did read one quite humorous hobosack complaint. In comparison to some of the other classes complaints though – you engineers got off lightly!
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It would have been interesting if you did one for 2013 as well, and all the hate threads/OP’s about Scarlet and the LS. I’d like to see how those numbers changed.
Yeah I know! I’m gutted I missed out on a whole year. But I was living in Hawaii at the time and I had rather a lot of other interesting things to do
Hopefully I can keep doing them more regularly from here on, and include the LS updates.
Hello, folks,
I would have put in that disclaimer but it wouldn’t fit. So here you are:
DISCLAIMER
I know that forums aren’t a good representation of the game community as a whole, because people often use them to vent their frustrations and shout out their views, etc, etc. Much of my results ARE NOT TO BE TAKEN TOO SERIOUSLY. I try to joke around with how I write so that people get the idea that it’s not a fully fledged statistical research investigation – it’s just something that I sometimes do in my spare time
Although you have my apologies, I know sample sizes and all that jazz are important when making inferences about the population, so I should not have worded some things that way. I am aware that 30 posts are not many when there are hundreds, maybe thousands being posted every day. I could sample more, but it would take a lot of time. As it is, over my past 4 studies I have read and scored approximately 2,150 posts on the forums. Wow, I hadn’t realized it was that much. Geez, I should do something else in my spare time.
But again, I am just trying to make something that is light, interesting, and enjoyable to read.
I’ll write my method in more detail on the next post…
Okay as requested I will do one for sPvP and WvW! Actually in my research in September and December 2012, I did sample THE WHOLE forum! But in the comments people only talked about the professions, haha. Taking 25 samples from about 35 forums means reading 875 posts – which I’m sure you can understand is quite a lot! But yes I will do sPvP and WvW and get back to you guys
And yes if Arenanet would give me all their deleted posts I would love to analyse that data!
Hello, folks!
In 2012 I did some forum research into happiness in GW2. So now it is 2014… how have things changed? I sampled 30 posts in each profession sub-forum and judged the happiness of the OP on a scale of 1-5 (1 being very unhappy, 3 neutral, 5 very happy). This was done in March and May of this year. The ranking system was quite subjective and used a lot of my own discretion, so take the results with a grain of salt!
OVERALL
The overall forum happiness in March and May is 3.1: slightly happy! Although we are not flying colours here, at least the happiness is above neutral: which was not the case in 2012 (2.9 in September and December). The Profession Balance Forum was the unhappier than all the individual professions, with a happiness of 2.6.
Congratulations Engineers! You are the happiest profession in Mar2014!
RANKING (rounded to 1 dp):
1. Engineers _______________________3.5
2. Warriors & Guardians______________3.3
3. Elementalists & Thieves_____________3.1
4. Rangers, Mesmers & Necromancers____2.9
_________________Professions Overall: 3.1
5. Profession Balance ________________2.6
2014 SUCCESS STORIES
Overall, happiness on the forums have increased 23% since 2012. Either the angry ones have left, or the people still here are getting happier, or both!
Engineers are the happiest profession not only in May 2014, but also in December 2012 AND overall! The reason they scored so high was their absence of complaints, combined with many OP’s saying things like “my engineer is my favourite to play”, and “best profession in the game”. Engineers clearly take the cake in May. Congratulations Engineers!
Warriors made a huge bound to success, increasing in happiness by 46% since 2012 to take out second place equal. I can’t remember why they were so unhappy in release year, but there you go. Good on ya, Warriors.
2014 is also a much better year for Rangers, Mesmers, and Necromancers, who are all about 40% happier. If anyone remembers release year, I remember the forums at that time were flooded in a plethora of bug complaints regarding pets, clones, and minions. So it seems like that problem has at least improved.
Guardians and Engineers happiness have increased about 10%, but don’t let this deceive you because these two classes have been happy since the beginning.
NOT-SUCCESS STORIES
Thieves have increased slightly in 2014 (3%) but they were considerably happier in release year. They haven’t taken their nerfs lightly. Although I must add that most of the complaints in the thief forum are other classes complaining about them being too strong (similar case for Necromancers this month).
Elementalists are the only profession to be unhappier in 2014 than they were in 2012, having decreased 9%. The most common complaints I observed in the forum are about them feeling underpowered, i.e. being too squishy and not dealing enough damage, and feeling weak in PvP.
_Rangers, Mesmers and Necromancers are the unhappiest professions in May 2014, being the only professions to sit below the equality line. Most common complaints were regarding PvP imbalance.
PvP REQUEST: @Zuik.7158 and @Skan.5301
Here is my analysis of the sPVP and WvW sub-forums.
sPVP: 2.2
WvW: 2.9
I had lots of fun reading the sPVP forums, but they do seem rather unhappy. With a score of 2.2, this is one of the lowest scores I have EVER had over my four studies including about 100 forums. The only one that tops it is Personal Story (2.1) in September 2012, because it was not working. An interesting aside: at 2.3, even the BLTP forum was happier that sPVP, and it was completely down at the time. So there are some very unhappy sPVP’ers out there!
In fact, sPVP has had negative happiness in every study that I have run (2.7, 2.7, 2.6, 2.2).
WvW was also unhappy, but they were unhappier two months ago when they had a score of 2.5. The majority of the complaints here were concerning EoTM.
sPVP is 12% more unhappy than it was in release year. WvW is 10% more unhappy than it was in release year.
HATE POSTS
sPVP is the most hated forum, with 23% of posts expressing their rage.
In comparison, Profession Balance (which was also quite an unhappy forum) only had 10% hate posts.
LOVE POSTS
Warriors and Engineers enjoyed the most love, with 13% being love posts.
Guardians are the most undecided, and did not have any love nor any hate.
Hope you found this interesting!
TL;DR:
The forum is happier than it is in 2012. Profession Balance is rather unhappy. In May 2014, Engineers are the happiest profession. Rangers, Mesmers and Necromancers are the unhappiest. Elementalists are the only profession who is unhappier in 2014 than they were in release year.
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(edited by Karina.9871)
Thanks for putting this together – it was very interesting. I imagine getting rid of the self selection issue was a LOT of work.
The only thing I really noticed missing from the survey was WvW and PvP. The folks that are doing that for end game might be a more difficult population to sample because they tend to get cranky if you hang out in the PvP areas and don’t help out with the war effort
Yah, actually my first plan WAS to survey people from Heart of the Mists and in WvW. But then when I thought about it, I thought that I didn’t want to be singly going to those places and specifically asking those people… for the same reason I didn’t want to go to different zones and specifically ask people either! (And it would be very hard to get data, as everyone in HoTM looks level 80 and it would require self selection on their part to do the survey, and in WvW HoD is getting thrashed so no one is there)
Sorry Jski I have a bit of trouble understanding your sentences but… it’s probably not that good of an idea to sample people twice, is it? Unless you sampled everyone twice and then did a test on the differences I suppose, but that’s pretty hard to orchestrate.
No they were not doing events in LA but the question was about their overall event experience so it shouldn’t matter that they weren’t doing events at the time.
Mostly sampled in my own world (Henge of Denravi) but some in Overflow as well. I picked LA because it’s kind of a big melting pot where everyone goes at some point, so I hoped it would give sample of a wider range of people (rather than sampling people just in WvW or just in certain zones).
Thanks
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I’ve gotten to 230% personally, as part of an investigation I did into the subject. Found no significant differences in drops compared to 0% MF, but maybe I’m unlucky
Okay, that does sound like it would work, and probably an easier measure that comparing groups of drops. But I’ll probably measure both, because although vendor value does provide a means of measuring drop quality, it doesn’t show anything about the proportions of goods that lead to that increased quality (i.e. is it that you got more rares? more greens? more blues? all three? and by how much?)
Thanks for the great idea though
MF has always been a long term investment in just about every game that has it. A sample size of 1000 is hardly enough to see a noticeable change in revenue. If you were to run as maxed as possible, gaining 1 exotic for 4 hours worth of play time as opposed to half (say 1 every 8hrs.) that would seem to be a more likely way to gauge MF and that’s basically what i’m seeing for the most part. We are talking very small percentages here, doubling or even tripling those numbers only adds up over time. Playing diversely in this game is where it’s at, not sticking to an area running the same things over and over.
The problem with playing the game diversely to collect data is that you suddenly get a lot more noise affecting your results. Maybe some areas drop different loot than others? Some parts of the game drop different loot than others? The reason for sticking to one place and running the same things is for the sake of the experiment; to reduce the amount of other variables influencing the outcome
Magic find improves the drop quality, not rate. With around 150% in myself, i find when farming orr my loots changing from lots of whites to have a minimum of blue. Also, before MF i almost never found a yellow by killing mobs. With the MF each event in orr generally gives me one.
That’s my experience though.
Thing is, my data seemed to show that MF affected neither! (you can see by graph 6 I think it is). But if you want to challenge it, feel free to collect some data and compare
That is how it is with experiments, isn’t it? You start out thinking you’re going to do one thing, and you often end up changing the plan quite a bit. But there’s always something you can salvage.
Apologies if I do sound too much like your lecturer (I guess they’re doing things correctly then!), you seemed earnest enough to take a sincere criticism well.
What I was saying about the order of collection is that you should either alternate or randomly “plan” when you’ll use MF and when you won’t. That’ll help even out some of those factors outside your control, especially since you’re kind of your own test subject here.
Yes that’s exactly how these things tend to go! It’s never a dull moment with Statistics And no worries about the lecturer thing! I meant it in good spirits. Constructive criticism is most welcome!
And I will take that on board, some times I will use 0% MF and sometimes I will use 222%, but not all in one big block.
By the way if you’d like to help me collect data you’re welcome to! :P
Magic Find affects this:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Crafting_material#Rare_crafting_materials
you get more of these.
(Of course since this is forums, this is an entirely baseless statement without any sort of backing with numbers. Someone is going to test it while farming destroyers and will back it with numbers for us in the near future)
Thing is I did measure those (it’s under T5 and T6 crafting materials) and the proportions of them I received while using 0% MF was not really any different from when I had 200% MF!
“I don’t know. What test did you use to determine the significance of the data? My statistics are a wee bit rusty mind you, but I don’t think it’s a problem with your study persay, you just might need more data to be able to figure it out.”
Thanks Endless! And I actually used logistic regression to test for significance; since I had a continuous explanatory variable (magic find) and a discrete response variable (rank drop with 5 levels) I used logistic regression to find the odds of getting different drop ranks with changing levels of magic find (if that makes sense). The p-value was about 0.25 from memory.
I also tried other ways, like simple linear regression using the drop rank as a continuous variable (1-5) and testing against the hypothesis of no slope. P-value there was like 0.93 haha.
And your point about needing more data… the thing about p-values is that they only measure if there is a difference from 0 and the more data you have (as p-values are a function of how much data you have) once you get into the thousands you’re almost guaranteed to get significant p-values! This is a trick with statistics! A difference of 0.1 is different from zero. 0.00001 is different from zero also. So getting “significance” by getting more data isn’t always the answer… if that makes sense! :P
Actually it does. Like I said, I’m a little more than a wee bit rusty. :P I’m mostly familiar with the basics of t-tests and such that you use in Biology.
But don’t p-values of .25 or .9 something seem a bit…. I dunno, too different? Though I mean, depending on the type of test you can get different results. I guess the thing would be finding the perfect type of test for the data.
Actually, wait, better question: What was your null hypothesis? Was it that Magic Find did make a difference or that it didn’t?
Sorry, attempting to try and remember what I can about stats, but it’s been a few years. XD
Haha no worries! Well for the two tests I mentioned (linear regression and logistic regression) they would have different null hypothesis. So the linear regression null hypothesis is that beta nought (the gradient of the line)=0.
The null hypothesis for logistic regression is that the odds of each the drops occurring (with different groups of MF) are all equal. So yah the p-values are quite different but they’re testing quite different things
I’d love to see a test using only MF boost foods, to see if there really is a disparity between food and item based MF.
Haha I can do this study for you if you like! Feel free to help me collect data
Haha that’s a shame! Don’t worry – you’ll have more than your share of blues and greens at level 80!
Please note that my conclusions are a result of my data, which may not be representative of the underlying trend. However, based on the data I have I conclude that:
I have NO significant evidence that Magic Find has any influence on the drop rate (the probability of a monster dropping loot of any description) or drop quality (the quality of the item being dropped) for environmental monsters in The Cursed Shore or Frostgorge Sound.
I also have NO significant evidence that magic find increases the probability of receiving gems from mining or woodcutting. (Note that I only have about 100 observations here so take this with a grain of salt).
But how could this be?
Perhaps magic find applies to boss drops, or chest drops instead. Or perhaps I missed some key element of the diminishing returns system that messed with my data. Perhaps 1,109 observations aren’t enough. If anyone knows something I missed I would love to know!
METHOD
Over the course of several weeks I collected 1,109 observations while ranging from 0% to 222% magic find. These were collected mostly in the Cursed Shore (level 80 zone in Orr), but also some in Malchor’s Leap and Frostgorge Sound. I did not farm monsters for more than an hour at a time, and if I did, I would change to a different zone before doing so. While I was in a zone I would run around more or less randomly; killing whatever mobs I came across. I used the same character (a level 80 Thief) to collect data. I would not gather data from events where it was difficult to keep track of what I had killed and what had dropped, etc.
As part of my analysis, I also assigned a “drop rank” to each item, to value them in worth. (You may disagree with the order but in the grand scheme of things it would not make much difference).
But the ranking I ended up using for the graphs is (1 – lowest, 5 – highest):
0. No drop
1. Grey items
2. White items (included armour, weapons, salvage items, T1 crafting materials*)
3. Blue items (Black Lion Chests, armour, weapons, T5 crafting materials*)
4. Unidentified Dyes and T6 crafting materials*
5. Green items
I did not receive any rare (yellow) or exotic (orange) items.
The Graphs:
First off, zooming in might help. Sorry I had do bunch everything up into one picture; I can only attach one image to the forum post. :P
1. This is a pie chart of all the types of drops I received. As you can see, “Nothing” has by far the largest proportion.
2. Scatter plot of MF along the x-axis and Drop Rank (see above) on the y-axis. If magic find did increase the quality of drops, one would expect to see an increasing trend through the data. But the trend can probably be represented by a straight line: this means that there is no relationship between MF and Drop Quality.
3. A pie chart of the percentages of rare crafting materials dropping. My data suggests that there is an 18% chance of getting 1 gem and a 6% chance of getting 2 gems.
4. This is a box plot of the rare crafting material drops against magic find. The first box corresponds to getting no gems, the second box to one gem and the third box to 2 gems. Again if MF did increase the chance of getting gems, the second and third box plots would be positioned higher than the first one. But they are all at about the same height which suggests that there is no relationship.
5. This graph shows the distribution of drop ranks for groups of magic find. Along the left hand side you can see 50, 100, 150, 200 and 250. These correspond to the magic find groups (“50” includes all observations less than or equal to 50, “100” includes all observations from 51 to 100, etc). Along the row you can see the distribution of drop ranks that magic find bracket produces, where “0” is no drop, “1” is grey drops, etc. (see above). These graphs all look pretty much the same, which further establishes the idea that MF does not influence these drops.
6. This is the same as Graph 5 except it has removed the “0” category (no drops) so that you can better see the variations in quality of drop from monsters that did actually drop loot. But again, they all look pretty equal to each other.
So yeah, I hope you found it interesting!
P.S. I am happy to share my data with any other fellows out there who are doing/going to do other investigations where it would be useful!
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So they other day I ran AC, but after downing the final boss my bags were full (as they often are after doing a dungeon or two). So a window pops up with the tokens and there are two options: “Delete All” and “Take All”.
Unfortunately I accidentally clicked “Delete All” and poof! My tokens were gone. It was a complete mistake, and I can’t see why many people want really want to delete their dungeon tokens in the first place… so I’d love to see a little “Are you sure you want to delete this item?” window pop up to save more accidents like mine occurring in future
Hi everyone!
First off, just want to thank the several hundred people (most of whom were on the forums) for participating in the survey! I ended up getting 362 observations. Particularly thanks to those (sadly, few) kind Henge of Denravi folks that responded to my “Hi! Would you mind answering a quick survey? I’m collecting data!” requests
Secondly, I do want to apologize for my poor survey design. I know designing this stuff is PhD-level high quality stuff… and in in hindsight I could have improved it and possibly my results would be more conclusive. As it stands… basically none of my data is statistically significant (I know, I was let down too).
But was my survey? Well;
1. What level are you?
2. What class are you?
3. On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate your happiness right now?
METHOD
I started off running around zones in-game (Henge of Denravi server) and whispering pretty much everyone I saw if they wanted to do a survey. Some said no, some said yes, but most didn’t reply. Also a thanks to Thithiphis, Rizon Reav and Fratlogar for helping me survey people.
But I got tired of that and posted a data call on the General Discussion part of the forums. I was overwhelmed with data there! Although I am aware that the Forum may have given less reliable data (people messing around, not answering the question as intended) I hope that the sheer mass of responses balances this out.
Also, apologies to those forum posters that offered lots and lots of extra data that did not make it into the analysis. I enjoyed reading them though!
Statistics Bit
I have no evidence to doubt the normality and equality of variance assumptions for the tests I carried out. It is reasonable to assume that for asking people surveys in-game, the effect of one person’s response had no effect on another person’s response. However for forums, the effect of one person’s post may influence other people’s posts. Since most of my data came from the forums, the validity of the independence assumption may be in doubt.
STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT RESULTS
The only statistically significant result (and it wasn’t even really statistically significant: a weak p=0.054) was that Necromancers were unhappier than Warriors (if I had more Thief data it probably would show that Necromancers were unhappier than Thieves as well).
I have also attached the Happiness versus Level graph so you can see the relationship (or lack thereof) for yourselves.
INTERESTING RESULTS
The overall average happiness was 7.5/10.
I suppose that gives Guild Wars 2 about a B? Perhaps a B+?
Profession Composition
1. Ranger 19%
2. Warrior 17%
3. Elementalist 13%
4. Guardian 12%
5. Engineer, Mesmer and Thief 10%
6. Necromancer 9%
Interesting that Rangers were the most common profession, but also one of the most unhappy. If you Rangers are so unhappy, why are you playing so many of them? Haha.
44% of the overall responses came from level 80’s.
The average happiness of a level 80 was 7.4/10.
15% of the overall responses rated their happiness at 10.
Of those, the top professions were Warriors (21%) and Rangers (17%).
23% of the overall responses rated their happiness between 9 and 9.9.
Of those, the top professions were Warriors (19%) and Rangers (17%).
2 people (0.6%) rated their happiness at 1: a level 80 Necromancer and a level 80 Mesmer.
3 people (0.8%) rated their happiness at 0: a level 8 Necromancer, a level 75 Necromancer and a level 40 Elementalist.
AESTHETIC RESULTS
Profession Happiness Ranking (Happiest to Unhappiest)
1. Thief
2. Warrior
3. Mesmer
4. Guardian
5. Ranger
6. Elementalist
7. Necromancer
For those who saw my previous study, Thieves are once again on top! This encourages the belief that this class is the happiest.
Common complaints that held back other classes were:
1. The lack of effective ranged weapons/slow scepter attacks on a Guardian.
2. Not sure what the problem with Rangers are. They scored low on my previous study as well (to many people’s displeasure).
3. Elementalists being “under-powered”.
4. The many Necromancer bugs.
Level Bracket Happiness Rating (Happiest to Unhappiest)
1. 61-70
2. 51-60
3. 31-40
4. 21-30
5. 41-50
6. 11-20
7. 71-80
8. 1-10
It’s interesting that the first level bracket 1-10 and the last level bracket 71-80 are the unhappiest. I guess no one likes to start and no one wants to finish?
The most common level-bracket complaints were Orr-related (bugged skill points, Risen everywhere).
Hope you guys found this investigation interesting!
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Thanks for all the responses so far everyone! I have over 300 data points to use so far – which is awesome! I’ll probably start doing some analyses, maybe survey some more people from Orr as well. Results will hopefully be up soon!