Party analyses
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by Weekstrom
Although playing for more than a year now I never published anything in a personal newspaper. But since there are occasionally things I investigate or have my thoughts about I decided to start one and make it possible for you, the reader, to become a sharer of my thoughts. The first one I’d share is my analyses of the 5 main political parties in eNL. I skipped the other ones as they are too small to tell something about the average player in the party. What I try to figure out is what kind of players are member of what party? Is there a clear difference in behavior between parties? And do the facts comply with the impressions I had of those parties? I wondered and thus analyzed the matter. The results you find here. The data used is a snapshot of may 2nd.
The first table I like to present to you;
What you can see here are the data of the five main parties and of all five combined. The latter giving an average picture of eNL.
Age
If you, like myself, have been playing for a year or so you no doubt would have heard I&W members brag about them being the most experienced or (one of the) oldest parties. If you look at the age of the players there can only be one conclusion; They are absolutely right. The average age of an I&W player is 1,238 days where the average age of the member of the five main parties is 637 days. So they are almost twice that age. Not surprisingly UNP has on average the youngest players.
Level and experience
Although the average age of an I&W player is almost double of the average player their levels and experience points aren’t by far. Their age is 94% above average, there experience points only 66%, indicating an on average less active kind of player. The same goes, in a way lesser way, for DemNL and GPN while UNP and VVN are on average more active. This is also very well visible if you look at the average increase per day. For I&W their experience grows only 49,8 while the average for all players of these five parties is 58,3. On the other end of the balance is VVN that increases on average 74,5 points per day.
Strength
With strength the picture is more or less the same. Here also I&W grows less then could be expected due to their age. DemNL however is growing even less while UNP and VVN grow much faster. Of course with strength you can’t come to the same conclusion since the last year Q2-Q4 training facilities were introduced making it much easier to grow in strength. For the average growth younger players could benefit more from that. On the other hand; The younger player lack the funds that older players could have saved. An average strength gain of 9.8 as DemNL shows is in any case very low, with I&W doing it marginally better with 10. UNP and VVN again score much higher. With UNP that could be helped by the on average young age of the players as described above.
True patriot damage
The last thing out of this table is the damage players have done for eNL (in millions). It’s DemNL that scores very disappointing here. They also have on average older players (21% older) but score very low on damage for eNL (21% lower than average). As expected I&W scores rather high. 98% higher than average and UNP, due to their young age scores low of course. VVN scores very high here. While on average 14% younger they still score more than double the average score. Looking at the average damage per day UNP already scores much better than in total numbers while I&W scores only average.
Weighted figures
To make the kind of information more comparable I transferred part of the table above to a table with standardized data where everything is recalculated to the average age of all players, being 637 days;
What is very clear from this is that I&W’s score on experience and strength are very low indicating a low activity. Since their TP damage is still on an average level it would seem that if they are active it is mainly on the battlefield. Their average strength growth is most likely caused by the changes in training facilities.
DemNL scores very low on strength and damage. For their lack of strength there is hardly an excuse given their age. They simply don’t seem interested in fighting and/or gaining strength. The average experience strengthens that picture. It would seem that they would rather work in their facilities then be active on battlefield.
GPN is on all aspects an average party which makes them a perfect reflection of the average eNL citizen which could be the reason for their successes in the last months when it comes to CP elections and politics in general.
VVN is on all aspects by far the most active party with figures between 28% and and 136% higher than the average player of the top 5 parties in eNL.
UNP shows roughly the same picture as VVN. They also are very active but due to their age that isn’t represented by the damage they did until now.
Medals
Another indication of what parties are made of are the medals people have scored;
If I look at the total number of medals the impression stays the same. But that is of course a logical result of the medals that are given the most; Hard Worker and Super Soldier. Also the True Patriot medal reflects the earlier stated statistics.
If you take those medals out of the equation the picture shifts a bit;
I&W now scores a lot better. The average amount of medal is 36% higher, while DemNL still stays behind 20% despite their higher average age. UNP also stays behind but that is caused by their age. That said; The higher amount of medals from I&W is of course also caused by their higher age. They are on average 94% older remember?
So let’s standardize the data again to the average age of all players within these five parties;
Once again we see DemNL and I&W fall behind, GPN on an average level again and UNP and VVN much higher. The main reason for the difference lies in the Battle Hero medal. Gaining of a BH medal became easier with the introduction of divisions due to which lover level players again had the opportunity to win one. Before that only the older and stronger players were able to. If you take that out of the equation as well all parties score roughly the same. From 3.5 from I&W to 3.8 for both DemNL and GPN.
Looking further you can see a difference in party focus. Especially DemNL and in lesser way I&W seem to prioritizes congress membership. They seem to be political animals so to say where GPN and VVN are less. Looking at presidents GPN is the main provider. Of course mainly caused by the 7 terms van Spijck served eNL. DemNL and I&W also had their share of presidents.
Conclusion
The analyses confirmed my impressions of the different parties and their players. I will not judge anyone on it nor will I point things to you more then I already did. It’s up to you, the reader, if you do anything with it and what that will be.
Next time
Some analyses of the players from these 5 parties. What do they do, who scores high on what issue?
Weekstrom
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Comments
had some free time weekstrom 🙂
nice article!
i do miss one important thing with the BH medals, since the introduction of divisions it's become more easy to score them on the lower lvl's. in the past you had to compete with everybody so like the CH medal it was very hard to get one.
True, and that's why I took them out of the equation in the end of the article.
true but not the part about why 😉
Good point. Added an explanation. You could argue also that gaining of a CH medal for the older players was much easier then it is now btw. Older players should thus have on average higher amounts which is true for I&W. Absolutely not for DemNL and VVN is the party that has, while on average young, a relatively high amount.
CH was never easy 😛
hard worker has changed too (just remembered). used to be you had to work the 30 days consecutively, so that has become more easy also. lost many of those medals in the early days because i often didn't log on during the weekends.
V!
Nice article. You can clearly see what the older and what the younger parties are.
Hope you will make another article like this again.
Confirmed my suspicions.
GPN is the average party.
VVN is the most tank.
UNP is the rising party that will probably overcome us all in the coming months.
DemNL is all talk, no game : )
I&W is a dieing breed but still has some action left.
very nice work Weekstrom. But no where did you take in acount the number of members of the parties. For GPN, with a lot of new players, the figures would be very different if you'd take them out of the equasion imo. So the newer players do play a big rol here.
That's why I looked at average figures. Old compensates young or vice versa of course... ; )
You would need to take the median average, not the mean. Regardless, I am not complaining.
Interesting article!
Very engaging read 🙂 🙂
Keep the good work
Interesting indeed. Gotta love this kind of weird obsession...
Fascinating it does confirm general impressions - although numbers would change immediately if you would move to another party (kidding)
By all means keep thinking, your thoughts generate very interesting results,
Where did you acquire the average increase per day figures? Did you sample them yourself, and if so how many samples did you take?
It would be interesting to see the within-group variance of level, because the average level seems to be quite even with the exception of UNP. Also, the sample sizes based on players in a party is rather small and varies a lot, which may skew the results a lot in case of a large within-group variance (which I suspect there is).
On a subjective note: From my personal experience, my political parties haven't influenced my playing style. It seems much more likely that the more active parties have a more active recruitment strategy.
if you go to egov4info website you can grab many stats on active players, including their daily change of strenght and rank.
Thanks!
How about taking the strength or exp devided by age? That's how you take an average if you ask me. Simple enough it would seem ; )
That would obscure a lot of effects. The best you can do for a current activity is to sample increase per day (and take as many samples as you can).
Take for instance a very old player. Several years ago it was much more difficult to gain strength and experience, which would in the case of an average be contributed to "lack of activity", giving these old players an unfair disadvantage compared to newer players.
NO PIRATES NO VOTE
HARRRRRR
It is a fascinating article and a sincere congratulations for the time and effort put in as well the wonderful graphs. There is always a 'but' however....
Essentially you are attributing analysis of a military unit as analysis of a political party. That can be very misleading based on the experiences I've had in other countries, Political parties in terms of relevance in my opinion, is down to activity, so therefore newspaper articles, political feed chat, forum and IRC activity. This is much harder to quantify, it's also misleading in eNetherlands as we don't tend to have congress that often.
The numbers here don't add up to having multiple parties. If I was to make a suggestion, it would be to temporarily form a 'super party' out of an existing one (leaving a trustworthy inactive presence in the old parties) as well as 'super MU' (again leaving a trusted individual behind). Then I would within the party and the MU work on a consensus for the road ahead politically, as in, what alliance we favour, while on a military basis we can organise combined pan-division hits for our new, erstwhile allies.
Great article!
We have the youngest party 😃
Good work gathering all the intel, but your conclusions just arent good. You are forgetting for the older persons, that in V1 and V2 of this game you could never get the amount of experience or strength you can get now (per example in V1 you were getting 0.02 strength a day, and the highest at the end of v1 had around 12 I believe,)
If you want to look at average increase, you should look into a specific time period in which the game was actually the same to get a good comparison!
Great article! Voted +Subscribed!
Being old means less strength per day, simply because training used to be much more limited in the past. Similarly TP damage is a relatively recent addition to the game, so TP per day of age is a bad figure. TP per day with a max age of roughly 1 year (since day 1619) would make more sense, but unfortunately, influence increases approximately linearly with age (with a different slope since they introduced higher Q training), so TP influence increases about quadratically with age... So TP/age is probably good for very old players (think epix) and medium old players who started playing around the time when higher Q training grounds were introduced.
I doubt age is actually even a reliable figure, since it sort of assumes a constant game, with constantly active players, which clearly is not the case. The older players often fall behind. They were inactive for a while, and the game changed to a military game.
Speaking for myself there has been a significant period where I completely ignored the military module, because I was weak, but instead focused on the economic module. In v2 that was a perfectly acceptable strategy. eNL wasn't really in danger those days, and the economic module was still an important part of the game. Since they tore that down again, that sort of puts me in a worse position than I should have been in.