Quest Stats Deeper Look: Those Who Shun Quests

by trace

Last week, I looked into statistics for all the community quests to date, and tried to draw some conclusions based on user quest addiction stats. I'm not sure I found that much information of value, but I did get a couple of massive Excel files to flaunt for my troubles. This week, I thought I'd update my workbooks and try to draw out another interesting statistic or two.

As of my data pull last night, we have 99 people on the site who have completed every community quest (and my Excel file tracking all this is now up to 9 MB). These people are crazy and show a passion for questing that is hard to rattle or deter, and as the #1 wacko on the list, I feel very comfortable making this statement. However, intense addicts aren't necessarily the best way to judge the success or failure of quest sets, since completionists are more apt to tackle any challenge. How about the rest of the people who have participated, though? Perhaps there's a bit of insight in looking at users who haven't completed every set available.

I ran a few quickie stats trying to figure out how the non-100% users function. It shouldn't be a surprise that there's a pretty good correlation between how many quests a user's finished and their average finishing place in a set. Those who have finished 19 of 20 sets average a finish within the top 32%, while anyone who's completed five sets or less tend to finish within the top 57% on average. Seems right.

I then ran numbers to see what sets users missed or avoided the most. Ideally, my findings should indicate that the rarest sets are completed the least, while the more popular sets are completed the most. Makes sense, right? Indeed, there's a fair amount of accuracy to this, as my numbers showed. However, there were a few interesting inconsistencies, and that's where the more entertaining findings come from.

Have a look below. I put the numbers to conditional formatting in Excel to help illustrate the stratification. It's a bit small, but I don't think the numbers are as important as the areas where the perfect stratification's off. I've circled six areas of inconsistency that I found interesting.

The Table of Avoidance! Generally, this table makes sense, and red-to-green looks about proper. Let me discuss each Section of Note™, though:

A) Amongst the people who have missed one set, Stalker Status is the most avoided quest. Not surprising, since it involves attaining a crapload of wall posts and profile views. However, the second most-avoided quest isn't Welcome Wagon, as I'd expect. Instead, The Big Quiz is significantly more avoided over these almost-perfects. I suppose completionists are more interested in hunting down brand new users than creating trivia questions. This might be a fluke, but it's part of a general disinterest in participating in the trivia system.

B) Here's something a little less surprising: Newer quests are often missed or avoided a little more than older quests. This example's Uh Uh Uh Uh Uh, which activated a little under three weeks ago. It's not an extreme amount of inconsistency, but I think it's an interesting note.

C) This is almost contrary to B, but X-Treme (circled) and Hell, It's About Time are avoided a little more amongst heavier quest users than expected. This might be age, but I have another theory: Both of these quests had a small 2,000 user goal during their community challenges. Since completions tend to drop off after a community challenge is complete, maybe low goals that are easily accomplished suppress completions afterwards. It's a thought.

D) Here's a more pronounced example of B: This is Mickey Mouse Club. Some quest addicts might not be concerned with bonus XP, I suppose.

E) My favorite inconsistency by far. Across the board, people tend to avoid this quest a little more than usual, except for people who have only completed two quests, who actually avoid it less. This is Basic Building Blocks, which is a rather tough scavenger hunt quest, in my opinion. I'd say this difficulty makes it slightly more avoided than expected by the lesser addicts, but how do we explain the oddity for people who completed two quests? Perhaps easier than you'd think -- This was the second community challenge. There was a lot of enthusiasm for community challenges and quests in the beginning, before that fervor died down a little. Whether these people simply decided to move on or were outright broken in spirit by Basic Building Blocks, I dare not say.

F) Finally, this is the Best Buy quest Next Class. There's notable avoidance amongst users who have completed 10-16 quests, and I can only guess that it's either due to people not wanting to participate in a sponsored quest, or simply people without enough followed users to get the "six followed online at once" quest.

So there's another look at some stats. Can we draw any conclusions from these observations? Maybe not, but I think it's safe to say that giving community quests a threshold that's too easy will hurt their overall completion rate, and scavenger sets that are too difficult will be avoided by the less-dedicated quest users. Neither of these are stunning conclusions, but I guess that's a sign of the quest system working exactly as I'd expect.

In the future, I'm considering looking into finding correlations between level of devotion to quests and its relation to how quickly users complete certain types of quests. Until then, if you've read through this wall of text and have any suggestions of questions I could answer by drilling through quest stats, I'd love to hear them.

To spice up this blog somewhat, and as a thanks for reading, here's a few tables showing the new top 25 addicts, and the top users from each level of completion, if that makes any sense.

Top Addicts

Rank	Prev	User	Average Finish	Average Ranking
1	1	PsEG	133.50	5.90%
2	2	Video_Game_King	190.80	8.10%
3	3	Psycosis	228.60	11.30%
4	4	Milkman	253.90	10.00%
5	6	KaosAngel	323.25	8.60%
6	9	Hamz	336.70	11.10%
7	7	Bozar	343.60	15.10%
8	8	arab_prince	384.95	12.70%
9	10	crono11	386.50	14.40%
10	11	groin	390.70	13.10%
11	12	Victor018	419.70	18.00%
12	13	mracoon	422.70	13.60%
13	15	Meltbrain	480.30	17.10%
14	17	Marino	486.10	13.70%
15	20	xanavi	487.70	13.60%
16	14	onimonkii	494.60	20.10%
17	18	ZombiePie	496.05	17.70%
18	23	MillerWakka	503.30	21.00%
19	16	TurboMan	506.15	19.80%
20	22	Atomasist	520.80	18.40%
21	21	BunkerBuster	520.90	17.40%
22	24	Shini4444	539.35	15.60%
23	19	S1LENT_ASSASS1N	541.95	19.10%
24	30	jinkelus	572.60	20.90%
25	26	Toxin066	592.80	21.60%

Top User by Each Level of Quests Completed

Rank	User	Quests Finished	Average Finish	Average Ranking
100	GoodAssLettuce	19	273.84	8.5%
209	monkyofdoom	18	384.67	10.3%
388	mosdl	17	254.00	7.9%
600	gregSTORM	16	486.31	15.0%
795	timay	15	599.47	16.7%
1029	stawnkald	14	480.29	13.1%
1224	Eristocrat	13	548.08	14.4%
1416	MisuseOfLasers	12	435.58	15.5%
1649	Homer39	11	651.73	16.6%
1919	TheLegendofLuke	10	621.50	21.5%
2211	mrBRIGHTDAY	9	513.11	17.3%
2576	darkivn	8	415.38	16.7%
3023	C_Rakestraw	7	449.29	11.7%
3484	thesonicyouth52	6	417.17	11.3%
4069	SpunkyHePanda	5	289.60	8.3%
4761	TheMasterDS	4	329.50	6.6%
5729	Webby	3	217.67	17.2%
7253	xobballox	2	50.00	1.4%
9854	OneLetter	1	5.00	0.0%

Additionally, if you've read (or skimmed) this far and want to inquire about your ranking in my arbitrary-and-silly system, please feel free to do so. Consider it a test of my system's integrity. Hell, ask any question you want. I'll be glad to answer if I can.