Far far too many factors involved. For example, a lower population should have higher certs per hour I would expect, but a higher pop less due to time wasters and those standing around at a warpgate. Even dedicated outfits can create a difference But I'd say 50-60 difference higher or lower is okay.
I'm also curious whether the spreadsheets that go around on these forums actually involve XP boosts in their calculations, since PSUs as well as PSPs stats tracking system does afaik. If so the data is completely invalid anyways
Well I have always wondered how much of an impact boosts have on the current exp/hour or score/hour. It seems to me if one faction attracted more paying players wouldn't that affect the overall outcome?
50-60 XP an hour is not very much when considering 250XP = 1 cert- or were you referring to 50-60%? I realize there are probably a lot of factors that go into this but I was thinking more on the faction-wide (rather than say, server wide) level. Still, it seems like a lot of these factors would be relatively easy to adjust for from a statistical perspective provided you have the full data from every character.
No I meant in total. Like, I would "guess" the average SPH is around 150 looking at random character sheets. So anything between 100-200 or so. I don't know what the average is but like I said, just a guess looking at most peoples.
You make a very good point but this would only invalidate the data if there are significant differences in terms of the amount various factions spend on boosts. I was not really thinking about this in terms of the simple spreadsheets that are readily available so much as the full data available to SOE. A lot of these factors, like boosts, pop. differences overall and on servers, BR, etc. can be easily factored into structural equation models or hierarchical linear modelling.
You really are not going to stop spamming the forums with those spreadsheets that prove nothing are you?
Do you see a spreadsheet? The spreadsheet you are referring to neither shows up in this thread nor have I said proves anything beyond the numbers that it presents. In fact, I started this thread because I had an informative discussion with another poster that got me wondering whether the differences you can see in said spreadsheet were really meaningful to any of the player base. Finally, statistical analysis can never prove anything because it is based upon probability. The most you can ever do with statistics is to say something to the effect of "there is a 95% probability that the underlying population mean lies somewhere between the values x and y"- it can never prove what value is, in fact, the underlying population mean. Also, you may not like spreadsheets and may think that they are worthless but, even if they are, they are still better than personal opinion and pure conjecture.
You keep asking for the game to be balanced around what the spreadsheets show the score per hour to be even though this is not a good metric to use.. There are far to many variables involved with score to use it as a balancing tool.
Why is score per hour not a good metric to use when it is the only way the game rewards players or values activities? What are the good metrics to use? I do not think they should balance around the spreadsheets because the data available to SOE is far more rich than what we are allowed access to, as far as I can tell. Also, I disagree that there are too many variables involved with score to use it as a balancing tool and I say this as a professional statistician. With the ungodly amount of data available we could easily throw 1,000 variables in the model and still have more than enough degrees of freedom to run a legitimate model. Or we could throw every available variable in a step-wise model that would eliminate the variables that do not explain significant unique variance.
The last thing this game needs is for some arbitrary player efficiency formula to make an entrance. What makes a good player is how well they work with a team and not some numbers that can be farmed. Wot has this retarded efficiency formula that took over the forums and turned them into a total elitist spam fest when anything about balance or tactics comes up. i.e. you have a lower efficiency score than me therefore your opinion is irrelevant. Much like the kdr kiddies. So no thanks.
This is an interesting point- I had not really thought about this question from that angle before and I can see where you are coming from.
