Call for Research Volunteers

Day 2,678, 15:47 • Published in Japan Japan • by Eikyuu

As the topics studied in my articles get more and more difficult, so do the tools used and gathering the required data. One example is the analysis of phenomena generated by the whole population interacting, like the monetary market or the battle outcomes. As opposed to training costs or company upgrades, the relevant numbers change frequently and a lot of them need to be gathered before the analysis itself.

That is why I am looking for citizens willing to devote some of their time to helping me gather data and speed up the process. I am aware that the degree of involvement and interest vary greatly among us, and for that reason I devised different types of experiments, which will require varying amount of effort.

In general there are two fields to consider: warfare and economics. The former usually draws more attention, but is also harder because of the recent buggy changes to the old battlepage and inaccurate in-game info (like military rank supposedly increasing damage by 5😵. Most importantly it is a commonly used argument that medals are a consistent and considerable source of income.

I fear that most people advertising this fall victim to the confirmation bias, but that is my guess and to get even preliminary answers to that question serious statistics is needed. For example, have you ever wondered what the probability distribution is for the strength of people who get the medal? Here is an exemplary histogram and Gaussian fit based on division 3 data I gathered myself:



This is just a teaser, with detailed results to follow once enough data is gathered, but you can already see that even the strength of 70k appears to give "only" a 50% chance of getting a medal.

So the first project you could get involved in is related to collecting the battle data. If you would like to help and participate, just leave a comment below stating that you want to take part in the warfare analysis, and whether you want the short/simpler version or longer/complex version. Once there are enough participants – I hope at least 25, for obvious reasons – I will send a message to both groups explaining the details and we can get to work!

In the second area of economics, I would like to research the monetary market, as the split is so commonly used for earning. In particular, the unreasonable way of expressing Gold price in cc is quite inconvenient and it seems that proper timing is crucial in ensuring the realization of one's offer. There are some interesting variations in speed at which the offers disappear and just as a teaser look at the speed distribution in this graph:



I have left the axes blank on purpose to save the really juicy details for later, once there is more data. Hopefully the mystery will provide an incentive. As above there are two options for participation – a short and long one, so if you would like to help, just leave a comment indicating you want to gather economic data. Of course, you can participate in both monetary and battle analysis – that would be ideal!

I hope that with enough people we can overcome the time-zone limitations and quickly reach enough data points to publish meaningful results. And do not worry about knowledge of maths or economics because the tasks involved are really simple. In fact you could use this opportunity to learn it if you want. So do not hesitate – comment and take part!