X-Treme Community Challenge: Some Post-Success Stats

by trace

I love community challenges. Watching Giant Bomb users work together at rushing through quests...well, it's not so much teamwork as a bunch of quest addicts who want the extra XP, but I enjoy watching the completion meter increase regardless.

When users complain that a challenge has no chance of success, however, I wince. Sometimes they're completely right, and we as a community come up short. However, I can't help but think a lot of these predictions aren't taking any consideration of the completion pace or amount of time left into account. I want to help change that, if possible.

I'm a sucker for stats, so I made a spreadsheet for tracking these community challenges on Giant Bomb. All I have to do is check the progress on the home page periodically, input the time and completions, and it does the rest of the math for me. This is the first challenge I've been able to use it on from start to finish (since the ConQuests aren't challenges), and I thought I'd share my findings with you. I plan to post stats like this for future challenges -- this challenge has obviously gone by a little too fast to give daily updates and the like.

First off, how about a graph?

X-Treme Quest Completions vs. Time
The gold line at the top is our goal, and the red line is the pace we need to maintain to be successful at the very last minute. The green line, as you might expect, is our actual progress over time. Quite fast!

Let's take a closer look at the first 24 hours of that graph.
X-Treme Quest Completions vs. Time (24-hour period)
You can see the community progress taper off a little bit over time, but compared to what we needed to be successful, we made this quest look downright silly.

Here's some other tidbits from the information I've gathered:

It took us about 7 hours and 32 minutes to complete this challenge -- well ahead of the 133.5 hours or so given.
The average rate of completion was just under 330 completions per hour.
Given our pace (even though it was slowing down over time), I estimate that a target around 5,000 to 7,500 would have been achievable for this challenge. No interval calculation dropped below an estimated 8,000 completions, given the full time to complete this challenge (and that was only right at the beginning; beyond that, the estimated final total based on interval completions rates never dropped below 9,500).
The fastest rate of completion occured between 2 PM and 3 PM EDT (11 AM and 12 PM PDT), not long after the quest became available. No surprise, there.
Had we maintained our fastest pace (fat chance of that!), we would have exceeded 57,000 completions.
At the time we finished this challenge, we only needed 113 completions to be on pace for success.

OK, so maybe it's not that interesting for everyone, but I enjoy these sorts of silly numbers, even if they are using simplistic straight-line methods. I'll probably be speaking up again next time a community challenge appears, hopefully with a longer-lasting challenge to bring up endless silly statistics.

Also, if you see anything weird or strange in my numbers, feel free to ask or point it out. It's been a while since I've done anything like this, and I wouldn't be surprised if I've made some crazy or incorrect calculations (outside of the simplicity of it all), or if I've forgotten a statistic or two that might be interesting to know.