A Guide To... The Census! [And now you can win 50 Q7s weapons!]

Day 1,796, 15:01 • Published in United Kingdom United Kingdom • by eUK Home Office


After two days, and over a thousand sent messages, the census is finally over and the results are in! I was quite pleasantly surprised by the number of replies. Of all the messages sent out, I got back a whopping 340 replies! Taking into account those I didn’t PM on account of knowing they were active, that should prop it up to around the 375 mark which isn’t too far off the number that votes in the last CP elections so I think the data will be pretty true to the actual active population. First I shall tell you they system and how I did it and then I will show you the data and a paragraph about what I can extrapolate from it. It’s important to say now as a disclaimer, I recorded the replies of everyone who replied and deemed them ‘active’ but that is not to say that there are more active people who didn’t reply. All I am able to do is work with what I’m given and because such a large number of people replied, I think that’s quite acceptable to use to see which areas are the most active!



In order to see how many people were actually active, I had to message them. The way I decided to get an accurate representation of those active and taking part in the eUK was to go through each party and message everyone in each party. Unfortunately this excludes those who are not in a party but I believe those people to be in such a minority that their numbers will only have a negligible effect on the data. To each person (bar those who I knew were active) I sent the following message:


Hi,

I decided it was high time we did a new census so that we can get some idea of the active population of the eUK and which parties and MUs were the most active people are to be posted in an article soon. If you received this PM then all you need to do is reply to it in some shape or form in the next two days to be included.

Thanks for reading, I look forward to your replies!

Betafoxtrot,
Minister of Public Health & Knowledge





I asked for such a minimal thing for a very good reason. I figured that I could have gone ahead and asked questions and noted each answer, but if I asked for that then people wouldn’t have bothered and I’d have less information to present which would make my data more inaccurate. Instead, I decided, all I would ask for is a reply to the PM. All you’d need to do is write anything in the box under the message that you were already reading. Then, when I did get a reply, I’d go on the persons profile and get the following information; Party affiliation, Military Unit affiliation, Age, Strength, Rank and Level. I’d note each thing down in a set of ranges and when I put each section into a graph or chart. As I say, the number of replies I received was outstanding and really meant I had my work cut out! But after two days of labour, I’m pleased to show you my results. So here they are.



Party Affiliation



As you can see, the number of responses are more or less proportional to the number of people in each party. The only party out of position is New Era which had 1% less people replying than ESO. For those interested here is the number of people in each party as a percentage.



So New Era have less ‘active’ people than ESO despite having more in-game members. I think this is quite interesting, New Era are a new party in the top 5 and have an anti-Elitism stance which is popular with new players and thus when the eUK has an influx of new players, New Era’s numbers go up. One explanation may be that while New Era does attract new players, these players tend to quit and die off for various reasons if they’re not engaged with or for various other reasons. As the time it takes before a player is “dead” is quite long and hardly checked and cleared by the admins, it may be that they just house a lot of “dead” players. This isn’t a criticism of New Era, every party have dead players making up some of their numbers, but I just think New Era attracts more new players, and those are the most at risk of quitting. Either way, I’m sure New Era and all parties will capitalise on this!



Military Unit Affiliation



It’s probably a shock to no one that 3 of the top 4 active Military Units are party affiliated or once were. This graph is the only one I didn’t do by percentage as I think it makes more impact using whole numbers. Here, once you get to the non-affiliated Military Units, the number of members drops straight off. I don’t have much insight into why this might be, I assume people join parties first before they get evolved in anything else and stay where their friends are. I think this backs up a claim in my other article that the political module is possibly the most popular module in eRepublik. Another option may be that as these units are privately funded, the people who fund them prefer to do so for the sake of the party as a way of recruitment.



Age



One of the recurring themes people want to see is a baby boom and this graph shows that the majority of the active population have joined within 6 months. What is perhaps more interesting is that after 6 months people seem to stop playing. In my opinion, less time needs to be spent recruiting and more time needs to be spent keeping people active and playing! If it all goes right, we might be able to do another census in 6 months’ time that shows those who joined after 7 months have increased. Myself and BlueandEvil have already started working with new players even more, and this reinforces that this should be where a lot of our efforts go.



Strength



Most of the citizens of the eUK have under 2500 strength which should be a very obvious statement after looking at the graph for age. The younger the population is, the more people who have a low strength. 29% of the population do have over 7500 strength so that is a plus sign, we do have some hard hitters!



Military Rank



I can’t quite get my head around this one to be honest. The majority of the population seem to be in the General-National Force*** bracket. You’d think most of them would be in either of the lower bands. The only thing I can think of is that eRepublik is constructed so that early in the game you rise through the ranks very quickly, giving you an incentive to keep playing, and around General is where you hit the buffer where you stop climbing ranks very quickly. It’s worth noting to qualify this thought; you can get to level 20 in a day so I’d not be surprised if ranks were similar.



Experience Level



And finally, the average active eUKer is between levels 26 to 30. This is quite the contrast to the average level of a citizen that eRepublik gives us which is 19. It’s not terribly vital information, but it does show that we have the ability to keep players around for a time! I think this gives a hope and an incentive to keep on what we’re doing. Controversies or not, we should be proud that our eSociety works to a degree and even if we don’t get on all of the time. Believe it or not, elites or no elites, forums or no forums, we keeping people here playing. We’re getting people involved and keeping them playing. I think we have a way to go, but we at least deserve a pat on the back!



Hopefully you’ve found this as interesting as I have and you can put the information to good use. Thanks to those who replied, I apologise I didn’t respond back again but I just had too many messages to get through!

And now for something completely different.

Today’s guide also features a chance to win 50 Q7s! All you have to do is vote and comment, that’s all! There of course is a catch. To win, you have to be the last comment before Goku Jones comments. The last person before he comments will win 10 Q7s and the person who commented before that person will get 5 Q7s. Only your first comment will count so judge when you post carefully, you never know when he’s lurking around.

Thanks for reading,

Betafoxtrot
Minister of Education