Guild Wars 2

Hickeroar.9734:

ravinhood.3981:

Looks like the positives are CLEARLY defeating the negatives and in the 80’s average just like on Metacritic.com Games a SUCCESS.

FYI, for all the 10/10 and 1/10 voters: In statistics (if this really is a statistics problem) the high and low outliers are usually removed from the stat calculations.

Hi Metacritic, outliers in statistics really have to be outliers. I mean, like CRAZY big x/y values (large enough to be a mistake).
1’s and 10’s, although unusual, are not mistakes. People are allowed to have opinions that are very high and very low.
I would consider an outlier to be that person who said 100/10.

Although in saying that, I will ask my Statistics lecturer about it tomorrow. If he agrees, then yes I will remove 1’s and 10’s

Keep it rolling

Thanks guys! Have to say you people on the forums are the happiest yet! :P

I’m gathering data for another little statistical project and I need as much data as I can get!

All I need is your level, class, and just generally how happy you are right now on a scale of 1-10.

Much appreciated!

Fair enough guys. I would love to have had more data, but as it was taking 25 samples from each of the 30 sections amounted to 750 observations! So considering that I think I did quite well :P

And yes perhaps I should have removed the bugs forum etc. It probably didn’t have very much influence in the grand scheme of things though.

Haha! Definitely a 5 rating for that post Vorch

Yeah, something that I noticed was that although the first post was more-often-than-not positive (and I only sampled the first post leading to what you think is a lenient scale perhaps), the thread tend to deteriorate as it went on. Might be cause for another investigation in future…

Yes I was surprised with ranger too! But the majority of the unhappy posts there came from people complaining about pet mechanics/AI.

And yes, Pandemoniac I agree with that. It’s just a little project I undertook… and by no means should be relied on! If I had a stats and psychology team with me it would be awesome ;-)

DATA FROM SUPPORT FORUMS

Support Forums included: Account Issues, Tech Support, Mac Support, Game Bugs, Forum Web Bugs, Suggestions, Players Helping Players and Discussion.

Overall Mean Happiness Score: 2.82
Forum Ranking (Happiest to Unhappiest):
1. Mac Support: 3.26
2. Forum Web Bugs: 3.04
3. Suggestions: 2.83
4. Tech Support: 2.83
5. Game Bugs: 2.73
6. Players Helping Players: 2.69
7. General Discussion: 2.65
8. Account Issues: 2.56

Statistically significant evidence:
1. We have strong evidence to believe that there are differences in HS in the Support Forums (p-value=0.022).
2. We have strong evidence to believe that Mac Support has a higher HS than Account Issues (p-value=0.020).
Mac Support has a mean HS between 0.06 and 1.33 higher than the Account Issues forum.

DATA FROM FEATURES FORUMS

Features forums included: Crafting, Dynamic Events, Lore, Personal Story, Dungeons, Audio, and the Black Lion Trading Post.

Overall Mean Happiness Score: 2.64
Forum Ranking (happiest to unhappiest)
1. Lore: 3.16
2. Audio: 3.12
3. Crafting: 2.95
4. Dynamic Events: 2.45
5. Dungeons: 2.42
6. Black Lion Trading Post: 2.12
7. Personal Story 2.12

Statistically significant evidence:
1. We have very strong evidence that differences exist in the features forums happiness scores (p-value?0).
2. We have evidence to believe that Audio has a higher mean HS than the Black Lion Trading Post (p-value =0.028).
We estimated that Audio has a HS between 0.05 and 1.70 higher than the Black Lion Trading Post.
3. We have strong evidence to believe that the Audio forum has a higher mean HS than the Personal Story forum (p-value=0.006).
We estimate that Audio has a HS between 0.18 and 1.82 HS higher than the Personal Story forum.
4. We have evidence that the Lore forum has a higher HS than the Black Lion Trading Post forum (p-value=0.018).
We estimate that the Lore forum has a HS between 0.09 and 1.73 higher than the Black Lion Trading Post forum.
5. We have evidence to believe that the Crafting forum has a higher HS than the Personal Story forum (p-value=0.044).
We estimate that the Crafting forum has a HS between 0.01 and 1.65 higher than the Personal Story forum.
6. We have strong evidence that the Lore form has a higher HS than the Personal Story Forum (p-value=0.004).
We estimate that the Lore forum has a HS between 0.22 and 1.86 higher than the Personal Story Forum.

DATA FROM PVP FORUMS

These forums contained the Structured PvP and WvW sub-sections.

Overall Mean Happiness Score: 2.72
Forum Ranking:
1. WvW: 2.79
2. SPvP: 2.67

(I didn’t even bother running a model as it was obvious there wouldn’t be anything going on here).

DATA FROM RACE FORUMS

These forums contained the Asura, Human, Charr, Sylvari and Norn.

Overall Mean Happiness Score: 2.79
Forum Ranking:
1. Charr & Sylvari: 2.875
2. Norn & Asura: 2.75
3. Human: 2.71

(Again I didn’t bother testing out a model since it was apparent there would be no significant differences).

DATA FROM PROFESSION FORUMS

These forums were about the Elementalist, Engineer, Guardian, Mesmer, Necromancer, Ranger, Thief and Warrior.

Overall Mean Happiness Score: 2.85
Forum Ranking:
1. Thief: 3.29
2. Engineer: 3.12
3. Elementalist: 3.04
4. Guardian: 3.00
5. Warrior: 2.75
6. Mesmer: 2.66
7. Necromancer & Ranger: 2.50

Statistically Significant Evidence:
1. We have very strong evidence to believe there are differences in happiness score for the different professions (p-value=0.00).
2. We have strong evidence that Thieves have a higher mean HS than both Necromancers and Rangers (p-value=0.01).
We estimate that Thieves have a HS between 0.11 and 1.48 higher than Necromancers and Rangers.

Hope you found it as interesting as I did! :-)

STATISTICS MATTERS
Skip past this if you’re not interested ;-)

1. What is a p-value?
In our case, the p-value describes the probability of our mean happiness score data popping out, assuming that all the forums have the same happiness score. In order to have a statistically significant result, the p-value has to be equal to or less than 0.05, meaning that our data is only expected to pop out less than or equal to 5% of the time (therefore highly unlikely).

2. The Independence Assumption
The independence assumption is the big kahuna in linear models. It states that your observations cannot influence each other. In our case, it means that one forum post cannot influence other forum posts. As you can probably see, this may not be the case. A person might read a forum thread, and then under its influence decide to write a new forum thread. On top of this, forum threads are linked through time, and influenced by changing matters in the game, so a forum thread 10 pages ago might be under quite different influences that a forum thread on page 1. In fact, the more I think about the independence assumption the more worried I am about actually fitting a linear model, haha. I might be violating a vital law of Statistics here…
PLEASE DO NOT PUT ANY WEIGHT ON MY ANOVA RESULTS DUE TO MY DOUBT ABOUT THE INDEPENDENCE ASSUMPTION.

3. The Equality of Variance Assumption
This is the second-most important assumption. Remember those box-and-whisker plots you did back at school? Well, each forum section has a box and whisker plot associated with it, and you put all those plots side by side. The independence assumption basically requires that those plots aren’t too crazy; with some being way higher than the others, or some way wider than the others, etc. I did not have any problems with this assumption in any of my analyses.

4. The Normality Assumption
This assumption requires that your data fits the shape of a bell-curve reasonably well. Some of my data did not conform with this one very well, but it is the least important assumption, thanks to the wonderful thing called the Central Limit Theorem (which I won’t go into but just know that it’s wonderful).

I’ve noticed that there seems to be some forums that are unhappier than others, so I conducted an investigation to see whether or not this was true.

So, what did I find out? I’ll put a summary up first but there’s a lot more information below for those who are interested!
But please note that forums were ranked on a 1-5 scale, with 1 being rather unhappy and 5 being rather happy. So a score of 3.2 means that forum poster was slightly happier than neutral.

And by the way, I am just finishing my second year of a Statistics degree so I do (more-or-less) know what I’m doing :-)

SUMMARY

The overall forum happiness score is 2.76 (slightly unhappy).

The Profession forum was the happiest.
The Features forum was the unhappiest.

The happiest Profession was the Thief. The least happy profession were the Necromancers and Rangers.
The happiest Support forum was the Mac Support, the least happy was the Account Issues.
The happiest Races were the Charr and Sylvari. The least happy race was the Human.
WvW was slightly happier than SPvP.
The happiest Feature forum was the Lore, the least happy Feature forum was the Personal Story.

The happiest forum sub-section was: the Thief.
The unhappiest forum sub-section overall: tie on Personal Story and the Black Lion Trading Post.

METHOD

To collect my data I used a random number generator to randomly pick 25 samples from each Forum Sub-section. I only sampled the FIRST post in a thread, i.e. the person who created that thread. I would then judge the happiness of the creator of the thread and rank it on a scale from 1 to 5 (1 being rather unhappy, 3 neutral, and 5 being rather happy). This was largely done based on my judgement, so other people might have had different views.
To allocate the happiness score I would:
1. Consider the overall tone of the thread
2. Look for word indicators
3. Look for faces (happy, sad)

Forums that scored a 1: generally included words and phrases such as “hate” “really frustrating” kittenwtf” and “makes me want to quit right now”. Also included people that issued orders in an angry manner (“I demand it be fixed RIGHT NOW”).
Forums that scored a 2: these people were not angry, but were moderately upset. Word indicators such as “annoying” “it’s sad that…”, and sad faces indicated a 2 score.

Forums that scored a 3: these people were neutral, and their post had no words or tone indicating an emotional investment. These were generally simple questions (“how do I do this” or “what does this mean”). I also allocated 3’s to people who said “I like this…” but also “I don’t like that…”

Forums that scored a 4: these people were moderately happy. Common features in a 4 post was people posting smiley faces, including words such as “I really like…” 4’s were also allocated to posts that existed purely to try and help people (guides, etc). 4’s were also posts that set a happy tone by saying “Hey guys!” and “Thanks so much!”

Forums that scored a 5: generally involved people praising the game or Arena Net, or involving words like “I love…”