Introduction
Oooookayy, hi
You might’ve noticed, but I’m a big Eggwars fan, I’ve been playing for years and I most likely will keep playing for years. I’ve suggested useless, and not so useless things and I care about the state of the game, to keep it balanced for everyone.
There are a couple of problems I’ve seen either over the years, or just recently. And instead of writing small subjective threads on each of them. I decided, let’s take this one big step further and base a lot of my suggestions on straight facts and logic. How to gain facts and logic you may ask? With a little research of course! I’ve done researches for my study in the past and I had a couple of days off, got bored, and decided to do it. In total, the entire thing has cost me way over 10 hours so it’s gotten pretty detailed.
What did I investigate?
I wanted to know more about Voting Behaviour and Gamerule selections.
Why?
Because it affects a lot in Eggwars games. There is a very clear meta right now, but I wanted actual numbers to back up claims I want to make. Within a couple of days, I’ll be posting a big suggestion threads with opinions and suggestions based on the statistics I got from this research. That thread will be pretty subjective, this one however, is not. I’ve tried to keep all text as objective as possible, this for 2 reasons: To ensure quality of the research, I don’t want opinion based results, but also to make it usable for anyone. Feel free to use this research as a back-up for any of your suggestions in the upcoming future, feel free to use the data I collected in ways I didn’t to create your own results and conclusions, and of course, feel free to add any data if you wish Now, this thread is getting way too long (I’ve written the rest of it already at the time of writing) so let’s just get on with the actual research. One quick thing I want to mention though: When I talk about gamemodes, I mean Solo and Team Eggwars, when I talk about gamerules, I mean Item Types and Health. Just wanted to clarify that. Thanks for reading!
Method
In this portion, I explain how and why I got the data I wanted
Results
This is where I put the collected data into tables, graphs etc.
Conclusion
From the results you (possibly) just looked at, I constructed my own little conclusion and theory, this is a little bit more subjecive although I still think it stands. Feel free to interpretet them in a whole different way though :)
Discussion
Just a couple of sidenotes and possibly interesting things
Thank you so much for reading the entire, or parts of this thread. I hope you liked it. Please do comment or something to ensure the thread doesn't die down within an hour...
Bye.
*okay can't add the excel file, just pm me if you want it ^^
Oooookayy, hi
You might’ve noticed, but I’m a big Eggwars fan, I’ve been playing for years and I most likely will keep playing for years. I’ve suggested useless, and not so useless things and I care about the state of the game, to keep it balanced for everyone.
There are a couple of problems I’ve seen either over the years, or just recently. And instead of writing small subjective threads on each of them. I decided, let’s take this one big step further and base a lot of my suggestions on straight facts and logic. How to gain facts and logic you may ask? With a little research of course! I’ve done researches for my study in the past and I had a couple of days off, got bored, and decided to do it. In total, the entire thing has cost me way over 10 hours so it’s gotten pretty detailed.
What did I investigate?
I wanted to know more about Voting Behaviour and Gamerule selections.
Why?
Because it affects a lot in Eggwars games. There is a very clear meta right now, but I wanted actual numbers to back up claims I want to make. Within a couple of days, I’ll be posting a big suggestion threads with opinions and suggestions based on the statistics I got from this research. That thread will be pretty subjective, this one however, is not. I’ve tried to keep all text as objective as possible, this for 2 reasons: To ensure quality of the research, I don’t want opinion based results, but also to make it usable for anyone. Feel free to use this research as a back-up for any of your suggestions in the upcoming future, feel free to use the data I collected in ways I didn’t to create your own results and conclusions, and of course, feel free to add any data if you wish Now, this thread is getting way too long (I’ve written the rest of it already at the time of writing) so let’s just get on with the actual research. One quick thing I want to mention though: When I talk about gamemodes, I mean Solo and Team Eggwars, when I talk about gamerules, I mean Item Types and Health. Just wanted to clarify that. Thanks for reading!
Method
In this portion, I explain how and why I got the data I wanted
Method
I sampled 100 games, from both solo and team (thus 200 in total).
All of the data I collected was collected during the waiting period in the glass cage (for solo), the waiting lobby (for team), or right after the game started. This was done over the course of 4 days (24th -27th of January 2020), at random times (between 12:00am and 5:00am GMT+1).
These are the categories I collected data on:
- Amount of players
- Amount of players able to vote
- The total amount of votes for every gamerule (all item types and all health options)
- The eventual 2 selected gamerules
- Whether the gamerules were selected via a split decision, or not
I will now elaborate more on how I collected said data per category, to ensure it’s made clear how and what exactly I’ve measured everything.
Amount of players
This was quite simple, I took the amount of players who joined at the start of the game, minus myself. In most cases, the map filled up all the way and the amount of players was therefore the maximum amount of players – 1. This was however, not always the case, which is why you might find some odd numbers in the results.
Amount of players able to vote
With this category, I took the amount of gold ore above ranked players, (From now on referred to as Gold+ Ranked), the moment the game started, excluding me. I excluded myself because I didn’t want to influence the data in any way, I was observing only. The averages of Gold+ Ranked per Player end up pretty much the same if I don’t count myself towards either of them.
The total amount of votes for every gamerule
This was a little bit harder, I kept track of the votes by counting in fives, if I joined after votes had been made already, I simply checked the amount of votes already casted. If a player were to leave, I checked again. If a lot of players kept leaving and joining and re-voting to the point where keeping track was nearly impossible… I discarded the sample and left it out of the data. If Normal Normal was selected by default by the lack of votes, or Gold+ Ranked players in the game, I did not count a vote towards Normal Item’s or Normal Health. Since no one voted for it. I also didn’t count votes from players with + rank twice, I want to measure the general preference for gamerules. Counting others’ votes twice because they have a rank did therefore not seem fair to me. I also combined the total counts for Solo and Team Eggwars, even though preferred gamerules seem to vary a bit depending on the gamemode. I feel like any possible changes made to Eggwars should be done equally across both gamemodes, meaning that the general opinion of the player base means more than those of the 2 gamemodes separated.
The eventual 2 selected gamerules
This one was the easiest to check. The game displays this bottom left at the start of the game, I simply copied that, nothing more nothing less.
Split decisions
This is the only semi-subjective category out of the bunch. With split-decisions, I mean a 50/50 split between votes for either gamerule, which (if you didn’t know) results in a randomly selected gamerule out of the ones the split was in between. This is still objective, and relatively easy to keep track on. I however, also counted last-minute gamerule changing votes (someone waiting until the last second to cast his Hardcore Triple vote for example). I find these just as unpredictable as when they are selected at random. Therefore, I counted those towards the total amount of split-decisions too.
After collecting data on every 5 of those categories for 200 games (which I did on paper btw @telegamer ), I moved everything into Excel. Which is where I calculated Totals, Averages and Percentages. I also created some epic graphs which I’ll show in a second .
I sampled 100 games, from both solo and team (thus 200 in total).
All of the data I collected was collected during the waiting period in the glass cage (for solo), the waiting lobby (for team), or right after the game started. This was done over the course of 4 days (24th -27th of January 2020), at random times (between 12:00am and 5:00am GMT+1).
These are the categories I collected data on:
- Amount of players
- Amount of players able to vote
- The total amount of votes for every gamerule (all item types and all health options)
- The eventual 2 selected gamerules
- Whether the gamerules were selected via a split decision, or not
I will now elaborate more on how I collected said data per category, to ensure it’s made clear how and what exactly I’ve measured everything.
Amount of players
This was quite simple, I took the amount of players who joined at the start of the game, minus myself. In most cases, the map filled up all the way and the amount of players was therefore the maximum amount of players – 1. This was however, not always the case, which is why you might find some odd numbers in the results.
Amount of players able to vote
With this category, I took the amount of gold ore above ranked players, (From now on referred to as Gold+ Ranked), the moment the game started, excluding me. I excluded myself because I didn’t want to influence the data in any way, I was observing only. The averages of Gold+ Ranked per Player end up pretty much the same if I don’t count myself towards either of them.
The total amount of votes for every gamerule
This was a little bit harder, I kept track of the votes by counting in fives, if I joined after votes had been made already, I simply checked the amount of votes already casted. If a player were to leave, I checked again. If a lot of players kept leaving and joining and re-voting to the point where keeping track was nearly impossible… I discarded the sample and left it out of the data. If Normal Normal was selected by default by the lack of votes, or Gold+ Ranked players in the game, I did not count a vote towards Normal Item’s or Normal Health. Since no one voted for it. I also didn’t count votes from players with + rank twice, I want to measure the general preference for gamerules. Counting others’ votes twice because they have a rank did therefore not seem fair to me. I also combined the total counts for Solo and Team Eggwars, even though preferred gamerules seem to vary a bit depending on the gamemode. I feel like any possible changes made to Eggwars should be done equally across both gamemodes, meaning that the general opinion of the player base means more than those of the 2 gamemodes separated.
The eventual 2 selected gamerules
This one was the easiest to check. The game displays this bottom left at the start of the game, I simply copied that, nothing more nothing less.
Split decisions
This is the only semi-subjective category out of the bunch. With split-decisions, I mean a 50/50 split between votes for either gamerule, which (if you didn’t know) results in a randomly selected gamerule out of the ones the split was in between. This is still objective, and relatively easy to keep track on. I however, also counted last-minute gamerule changing votes (someone waiting until the last second to cast his Hardcore Triple vote for example). I find these just as unpredictable as when they are selected at random. Therefore, I counted those towards the total amount of split-decisions too.
After collecting data on every 5 of those categories for 200 games (which I did on paper btw @telegamer ), I moved everything into Excel. Which is where I calculated Totals, Averages and Percentages. I also created some epic graphs which I’ll show in a second .
This is where I put the collected data into tables, graphs etc.
Now for the fun part, let’s take a look at some results .
This is the raw data:
Very zoomed out, yes, but that’s because the data on it’s own isn’t really all that interesting. The first thing I calculated with this table was the amount of Gold+ Ranked players/Regular player. This to me felt relevant because it gives insight in how many of the games have non-default gamerules in the first place. These are the results:
You can see that, on average, at least 1 Gold+ Ranked player joins per game of solo played. For those who aren’t familiar with statistics: this doesn’t mean that 1 Gold+ Ranked player is guaranteed in every game you join, and it also doesn’t guarantee there can’t be more than one. This number: 0,142 is simply the average amount of Gold+ Ranked players you get per player. It basically says that you’re expected to have 1 Gold+ Ranked player for every +/- 7 players you’re in a lobby with. Chances don’t predict, but they do give an estimation.
As for the results in Team Eggwars, you’re expected to find even more ranked players per regular player, around 0,2, or a little over 2 per 10 players. And remember, Team Eggwars maps often have way larger player maximums of 10. You’d be able to calculate the expected amount of ranked players per map with these calculations, I however, did not find that relevant for this research.
I also calculated the amount of games which have gamerules randomly selected due to split votes, or a last second vote.
Almost 1 out of 3 Solo Eggwars games have randomly selected gamerules in them. This to me is a problem, you might be able to figure out why yourself but I want to keep this thread objective only, I will explain my opinions on it in the upcoming thread I’ve mentioned before. We see around the same percentage in Team Eggwars games, just a little less though, probably because bigger Gold+ Ranked parties often join those games, and in parties, players usually agree more on what gamerules are preferred.
From the mothertable, I created another final 2 related tables. This is the first one:
It’s a count and relative count on all possible gamerule combinations. We clearly see a couple favorites, Overpowered items & Half health being the most popular combination, by far. Almost 50% of all games played in Solo and Team are played with this combination. The other 2 main favorite combinations are Overpowered Items & Normal Health, with 27% of the games played like that, and Normal Items & Normal Health with 20% of the games played that way. All the other combinations were played less than 2% of the time. To illustrate these gaps, I made this simple graph:
It’s very clear that Overpowered Items are by far the most popular of the 3, yet Normal & Normal is weirdly also very popular. I figured this might be the case because that’s the combination games are played in by default (meaning that it’s selected whenever there aren’t any votes cast).
I did not keep track of the specific amount of votes per game, since that would be way too much of a pain, yet I did keep track of games without Gold+ Ranks at all, which are all games with 0 votes at all.
I made another, similar table, this time excluding the games of which we can say there weren’t any votes cast with 100% certainty. I did this to get an even better view of what gamerules are the most preferred ones by the community, once she has the ability to vote for them. Here’s how it turned out:
Naturally, this table has her own graph too:
And would you look at that, Normal Items & Normal Health drops 10% in occurance. And remember, this still does include the games where Gold+ Ranked players joined, but didn’t join (due to them being afk or unwilling to vote). More than 50% of all games in which votes were cast are played with Overpowered Items and Half Health, and more than 80% of the games played were played with Overpowered Items.
Then, the final table, as I said, I added all the casted votes from both Solo and Team, here are those results:
I also made little pie-graphs for both gamerules because who doesn’t like pie… (yes I recycle jokes @Reddog37 )
Over 90% of all votes casted are for Overpowered Items, and well over 60% of all votes casted are for Half Health. All this while less than 2% votes casted are for Hardcore Items, and Double or Triple health.
This is the raw data:
Very zoomed out, yes, but that’s because the data on it’s own isn’t really all that interesting. The first thing I calculated with this table was the amount of Gold+ Ranked players/Regular player. This to me felt relevant because it gives insight in how many of the games have non-default gamerules in the first place. These are the results:
You can see that, on average, at least 1 Gold+ Ranked player joins per game of solo played. For those who aren’t familiar with statistics: this doesn’t mean that 1 Gold+ Ranked player is guaranteed in every game you join, and it also doesn’t guarantee there can’t be more than one. This number: 0,142 is simply the average amount of Gold+ Ranked players you get per player. It basically says that you’re expected to have 1 Gold+ Ranked player for every +/- 7 players you’re in a lobby with. Chances don’t predict, but they do give an estimation.
As for the results in Team Eggwars, you’re expected to find even more ranked players per regular player, around 0,2, or a little over 2 per 10 players. And remember, Team Eggwars maps often have way larger player maximums of 10. You’d be able to calculate the expected amount of ranked players per map with these calculations, I however, did not find that relevant for this research.
I also calculated the amount of games which have gamerules randomly selected due to split votes, or a last second vote.
Almost 1 out of 3 Solo Eggwars games have randomly selected gamerules in them. This to me is a problem, you might be able to figure out why yourself but I want to keep this thread objective only, I will explain my opinions on it in the upcoming thread I’ve mentioned before. We see around the same percentage in Team Eggwars games, just a little less though, probably because bigger Gold+ Ranked parties often join those games, and in parties, players usually agree more on what gamerules are preferred.
From the mothertable, I created another final 2 related tables. This is the first one:
It’s a count and relative count on all possible gamerule combinations. We clearly see a couple favorites, Overpowered items & Half health being the most popular combination, by far. Almost 50% of all games played in Solo and Team are played with this combination. The other 2 main favorite combinations are Overpowered Items & Normal Health, with 27% of the games played like that, and Normal Items & Normal Health with 20% of the games played that way. All the other combinations were played less than 2% of the time. To illustrate these gaps, I made this simple graph:
It’s very clear that Overpowered Items are by far the most popular of the 3, yet Normal & Normal is weirdly also very popular. I figured this might be the case because that’s the combination games are played in by default (meaning that it’s selected whenever there aren’t any votes cast).
I did not keep track of the specific amount of votes per game, since that would be way too much of a pain, yet I did keep track of games without Gold+ Ranks at all, which are all games with 0 votes at all.
I made another, similar table, this time excluding the games of which we can say there weren’t any votes cast with 100% certainty. I did this to get an even better view of what gamerules are the most preferred ones by the community, once she has the ability to vote for them. Here’s how it turned out:
Naturally, this table has her own graph too:
And would you look at that, Normal Items & Normal Health drops 10% in occurance. And remember, this still does include the games where Gold+ Ranked players joined, but didn’t join (due to them being afk or unwilling to vote). More than 50% of all games in which votes were cast are played with Overpowered Items and Half Health, and more than 80% of the games played were played with Overpowered Items.
Then, the final table, as I said, I added all the casted votes from both Solo and Team, here are those results:
I also made little pie-graphs for both gamerules because who doesn’t like pie… (yes I recycle jokes @Reddog37 )
Over 90% of all votes casted are for Overpowered Items, and well over 60% of all votes casted are for Half Health. All this while less than 2% votes casted are for Hardcore Items, and Double or Triple health.
Conclusion
From the results you (possibly) just looked at, I constructed my own little conclusion and theory, this is a little bit more subjecive although I still think it stands. Feel free to interpretet them in a whole different way though :)
Conclusion
So… quite a bit of calculations and statistics to talk about. Let’s start off with the big one, the 91,1% of Item Type votes for Overpowered. This is far from a surprise to me, I too prefer Overpowered above the other Item Types. But why? Why does 90% of the voting (and most of the non-voting as well) prefer Overpowered items? Here are the reasons I’ve heard the most:
- Games are generally faster
- Items are way cheaper
- You take less fall damage
And honestly, the first reason is pretty much a result of the second and third reason so you’re pretty much allowed to not count that one. Also, fights in Overpowered aren’t even faster than those in Normal or Hardcore… In fact, it’s the straight opposite. I’ve created a theory, based on my results, let me make perfectly clear that this is just at theory, we’ve left the statistical part of my research so I’m free to throw in some more subjective things. Here’s how I think the community ended up in this Overpowered – Half driven set of gamerules.
“Players generally prefer fighting, building or at least some form of action over sitting and waiting on a generator, this is why Overpowered became the most popular gamerule the second it was released, however, fights last longer in Overpowered, the Protection V neglects more damage than that Sharpness II adds to the weapons. Fights started to take longer, hence why Half Health became more and more popular”. This is actually proven by the community itself, I’ve seen so many messages of players around the lines of “I didn’t like half at first, but I’ve grown to like it more”.
Then, the gamerules selected through split-decision. I find 1 in 3 a pretty stunning amount. There are disappointed players because of the selected gamerules in every game, selected through split-decision or not. That’s not the point I’m trying to make. 30% of the games’ gamerules in Solo are unpredictably selected the moment the game starts. This means that in 30% of the games, players are not able to adapt their kits to the selected gamerules. I’ve explained why this is a problem before but I will do so again in the upcoming suggestions thread.
Finally, because of the fact that some gamerules are voted for way more often than others. The eventual selected gamerules are also far from equally spread. This is not a must, don’t get me wrong, but it would keep the game fresh and more replayable (more variety = more replay ability because the game never becomes repetitive).
Those are the most important conclusions I conducted from the results.
So… quite a bit of calculations and statistics to talk about. Let’s start off with the big one, the 91,1% of Item Type votes for Overpowered. This is far from a surprise to me, I too prefer Overpowered above the other Item Types. But why? Why does 90% of the voting (and most of the non-voting as well) prefer Overpowered items? Here are the reasons I’ve heard the most:
- Games are generally faster
- Items are way cheaper
- You take less fall damage
And honestly, the first reason is pretty much a result of the second and third reason so you’re pretty much allowed to not count that one. Also, fights in Overpowered aren’t even faster than those in Normal or Hardcore… In fact, it’s the straight opposite. I’ve created a theory, based on my results, let me make perfectly clear that this is just at theory, we’ve left the statistical part of my research so I’m free to throw in some more subjective things. Here’s how I think the community ended up in this Overpowered – Half driven set of gamerules.
“Players generally prefer fighting, building or at least some form of action over sitting and waiting on a generator, this is why Overpowered became the most popular gamerule the second it was released, however, fights last longer in Overpowered, the Protection V neglects more damage than that Sharpness II adds to the weapons. Fights started to take longer, hence why Half Health became more and more popular”. This is actually proven by the community itself, I’ve seen so many messages of players around the lines of “I didn’t like half at first, but I’ve grown to like it more”.
Then, the gamerules selected through split-decision. I find 1 in 3 a pretty stunning amount. There are disappointed players because of the selected gamerules in every game, selected through split-decision or not. That’s not the point I’m trying to make. 30% of the games’ gamerules in Solo are unpredictably selected the moment the game starts. This means that in 30% of the games, players are not able to adapt their kits to the selected gamerules. I’ve explained why this is a problem before but I will do so again in the upcoming suggestions thread.
Finally, because of the fact that some gamerules are voted for way more often than others. The eventual selected gamerules are also far from equally spread. This is not a must, don’t get me wrong, but it would keep the game fresh and more replayable (more variety = more replay ability because the game never becomes repetitive).
Those are the most important conclusions I conducted from the results.
Discussion
Just a couple of sidenotes and possibly interesting things
This is honestly the least interesting part of the whole thread, but thanks for reading it nevertheless . I just quickly wanted point out some things:
- My research is far from perfect, I’m still relatively inexperienced in doing “big” quantitative research and there is a chance I might’ve missed some things or made some small mistakes a couple of times.
- Although 200 samples seems like a lot, it actually still leaves a lot of room for so called “errors” to appear. This means that the percentages I showed you are probably not perfectly representative, although they do give a pretty good indication of the actual statistics. I could’ve calculated these chances and errors and all that but that’s too much work to be honest.
- If you have any questions about my methods (data-collection and analysis) feel free to ask me
- If you’re interested in the full excel doc. With all the data and calculations in it. I’ll try to link it in this thread, if I however fail to do so, you can always send me a pm on discord (RPoule#4491) or on the forums itself.
- My research is far from perfect, I’m still relatively inexperienced in doing “big” quantitative research and there is a chance I might’ve missed some things or made some small mistakes a couple of times.
- Although 200 samples seems like a lot, it actually still leaves a lot of room for so called “errors” to appear. This means that the percentages I showed you are probably not perfectly representative, although they do give a pretty good indication of the actual statistics. I could’ve calculated these chances and errors and all that but that’s too much work to be honest.
- If you have any questions about my methods (data-collection and analysis) feel free to ask me
- If you’re interested in the full excel doc. With all the data and calculations in it. I’ll try to link it in this thread, if I however fail to do so, you can always send me a pm on discord (RPoule#4491) or on the forums itself.
Thank you so much for reading the entire, or parts of this thread. I hope you liked it. Please do comment or something to ensure the thread doesn't die down within an hour...
Bye.
*okay can't add the excel file, just pm me if you want it ^^
