New Scaratings

Tuesday averages for 2012

Glory Daze(730e/430p) - 5871
Brainbuster(8e/5p) - 5784 (4627 east, 1157 west)
Showdown(830e/530p) - 6925 (5401 east, 1524 west)
Speed(945e/645p) - 3177 - (2351 east, 826 west)

Numbers will not drop much in the east for GD or SD, perhaps 100 less simply from those pissed or unaware of the new start times although it's the same start time for GD. But BB will fall in the east because of those going home immediately after the premium game no matter what. Players will play through other games in order to get to the premium, but they won't stay unless they really want to play a certain game after. We'll be lucky if 80% stay from SD, that would be 4321. 75% would be 4051, somewhere between those could be a good estimate.

Now the west is a totally different animal with lots more to calculate. First, many teams simply won't play at all. Second, many individuals will be gone by the time the block airs. Third, players will be so confused they'll just leave when their games don't air at their normal times. GD will now air in Speed's slot which currently draws 826 players in the west. That number will drop due to lack of teams, but I'm thinking it might be right at the edge of people leaving and count won't drop too bad. Let's be conservative and go with 800. SD will now air after the original time for Speed where CD has been, that CD games gets ~812 players in the west. Since SD is now an hour long it may draw a few more than that due to randoms logging in for 1-2 Q's, let's go with 900 in the west. BB then airs 3 hours later than now when even fewer in the west are playing, it may draw 700 randoms. Maybe.

So for GD I've got 4500 east + 800 west = 5300 total, a 10% drop.
For SD I've got 5300 east + 900 west = 6200 total, another 10% drop.
For BB I've got 4200 east + 700 west = 4900 total, a whopping 15% drop.

I figure this exercise will repeat itself through the other nights with the biggest hits coming on those games that currently air before the premium game and will now air after.

BO

Excellent BO!

I imagine you've asked Buzztime to share their internal projections and their measure-of-success metrics with you and that they refused.

I'll keep track going forward of Sci-Files, Lexitopia, and Tuned In, the first because it's my favorite game, and the other two because they're very likely to suffer from being moved after the premium game. I predict that Lexitopia in particular will suffer because it will go from being the lead-in/warm-up to a very popular premium game to being two games after the end of that premium, when people will have had more than enough time to pay their tabs and put up their boxes. Tuned In may do better because it's more popular than Lexitopia to start with and is on a weekend night when there's more casual players out and about, as especially as it grows later.

BTW, in my counts I'm just looking at boxes where someone got points and so obviously played a question. Of course there's lots of players with zero counts who have just signed in (or who didn't bother to sign out of the previous game). I can see BT trying to artificially up the player count on the post-premium games by including those boxes, even though it's clear the person stopped playing. So all of us should be sure to log off when we're done playing instead of just putting the boxes back in the charger or leaving them on the table.

Brooke/AARDVK

Wednesday averages for 2012

SciFiles - 4577
Six - 4857
PasTimes - 3987
Lexitopia - 4052

Projected player counts based on my (10%/15%) guidelines

SciFiles - 4119
Six - 4371
PasTimes - 3389
Lexitopia - 3444(see below)

Naturally since Lex airs after PT is won't get higher play so let's drop it to 32xx.

Projected player counts based on last night's ratios

SciFiles -3936
Six - 3886
PasTimes - 2791
Lexitopia - 2836

Again, Lex won't get more than PT. Also Six won't draw less than SF. Let's just use this for reference below.

But if there is no voting and all locations are able to play the specialty block my final projections are

SciFiles - 4050
Six - 4150
PasTimes - 3000
Lexitopia - 2900

In theory, after these totals are known, we should be able to nail the rest of the week's numbers pretty damn accurately.

BO

Wednesday averages for 2012
Here were BO's YTD averages for the game based on Don Denton's records:

SciFiles - 4577
Six - 4857
PasTimes - 3987
Lexitopia - 4052

Here are BO's projected player counts amended to include the actual scores

SciFiles – 4119 actual 4941 (up about 9%)
Six – 4371 actual 4632 (down about 7%)
PasTimes – 3389 actual 2955 (down about 11%)
Lexitopia – 3444 actual 2712 (down 34%)

The only surprising one was SciFiles; given that the East/West split was 3914/927, it appears either the East zone likes playing SciFiles a half hour earlier or simply that the game is now benefitting from immediately preceding Six, or probably a combination of the two given the astonishing result that SciFiles beat out Six to be the most competitive game of the night (won by SRO OT, I might add proudly).

There was no apparent cheating going on, at least on a site-wise basis, as the top site score in the East either bettered or tied for perfect with the top site score in the West on all games. However, the data continues to support the player position that specialty games should be played rather than after the main game.

Brooke/AARDVK

Thursday's averages for 2012

AIA - 4287
IW - 4212
Six - 4963
Topix - 4606

Let's start off by assuming the Six count drops by 7% like on Wednesday night, that would be 4616. On Wednesday, the lead-in to Six(Sci-Files) garnered more players than Six, but that game is 30 minutes while AIA and IW are only 15 minutes. Because of that count won't be as high, but it could be very close to that of Six. Let's estimate 4525 on AIA and 4575 on IW, so those counts will probably be ahead of 2012 average because of closer proximity to Six in addition to the fact they don't air as late in the west.

However, Topix will probably get killed in the player count because it was both the lead-in to Six and also a 30 minute game. Now it's after Six, and so far the count for the specialty game after the premium has dropped 30%. This could be worse, Topix could go from an average of 4606 to under 3k, it'll be close.

Predictions

AIA - 4525
IW - 4575
Six - 4616
Topix - 3047

Again, when HOF numbers are posted, do not count the zero scores as all 2012 numbers have not counted them. Simply go to a player's stats for that game and take the (x of y) ranking where y equals the total players. Also, the numbers so far are showing that players in the west go home much earlier than players in the east. We knew that but it's nice to see statistical confirmation of such.

BO

I haven't counted any zero scores, but I did count the negative scores in Showdown. Should I not be including them? The player must have pressed a button.

Brooke/AARDVK

You are doing it correctly. The way I gathered my data was to simply find a player that plays a certain game every week, (such as you with SF) pull up their scores from that game and record the numbers of players from the (rank of total) format on the far right. So long as we are comparing apples to apples we'll have accurate data.

Thought it was interesting last night's games in the HOF included zeros for the first time in many moons. If it was intentional, (and I don't think it was) BT will have to do better than that to confuse us!

BO

But MyTwitBook acknowlegded my 0 in a Countdown game Tuesday. So it will notice those who blinded with the MPM.

_________________
Mitch (MTCHWF/WLFFLY)

Co-Home Bar: Buffalo Wild Wings Edwardsville, IL and Time Out in St Louis, MO

Let's take a quick look at the percentages of west feed players playing the various games.

From one Tuesday night in February I scraped the following data

GD(430p) - 16%
BB(5p) - 19%
SD(530p) - 22%
Speed(645p) - 26%

No real surprise that a higher percentage would be west players the later it gets for obvious reasons.

But here is data from the last two nights, pengwn has shown these numbers in another thread, I just use a percentage format.

GD(630p) - 20%
SD(7p) - 18%
BB(8p) - 16%

SF(630p) - 19%
Six(7p) - 17%
PT(8p) - 16%
Lex(815p) - 16%

Comparing the data you see that the west percentage climbs steadily until 7p and then declines, in a vacuum BT wouldn't want to start any specialty games at 7p or later. Hey wait, that's how it was originally! Hmmmm....

Of course what matters is total players across the network, so you can't simply use these percentage by themselves. But the above steady decline the last two nights is damn consistent and will obviously be checked the rest of the week.

Basically this is simply another way of showing that the habits of east coast players and west coast players are completely dissimilar.

BO

I don't know if Thursday night in general, or this Thursday in particular is an anomaly because of additional people at locations warming up for March Madness with the last of the regular season games, but the three games reported in the BT HOF showed gains over their YTD averages:

AIA – YTD: 4287 3/1/12 4854 (up about 15%)
IW – YTD: 4212 3/1/12 4823 (up about 14%)
Six – YTD 4963 3/1/12 6536 (up about 31.5%)

No comparison can be made on TOPIX because the Thursday night version has vanished from the HOF. However, given its post-premium game slot and the fact that CD was made selectable over it, I would still expect to see its player count go down.

Interestingly the gains for these games seem to have come mostly from the East zone as the proportion of West zone players remains at about 20% across the board.

Brooke/AARDVK

The player count for Topix is 2886, 2418 east and 468 west.

Not sure what to make of this, not only did Six go up tremendously, (almost too much) but the ratios between the games are all funky. Normally the premium game lead-in gets about 90% of the premium count, then the game after gets slightly more than 50%. Last night the lead-ins only got 73% and the game after got 44%.

Topix got about what I thought they would, and the numbers for the lead-in games are believable. But the Six count is just weird. It could be explained by not having the option to vote out Six last night unlike the others. Or it could just be an anomaly, we'll need more than one week of data for this test.

Unless of course BT is correct and the new schedule will increase count.

BO

First, TOPIX came out as predicted:

YTD player count: 4606 3-1-12: 2886 (37% drop)

Thus the projected 3047 was high by a couple of hundred.

Re: Six--this is totally anecdotal, but when we pulled into the parking lot at SRO OT last night, we commented that it seemed especially busy for a night when there was no live entertainment or live poker. There also didn't seem to be any party or meeting going on--just a lot of people out, and a lot of basketball games on. I guess that's the problem with YTD stats--those won't take into consideration a sudden upswing of casual players drawn to the location by a major sports event. But if so, the same thing should have happened in previous years, so BT would be able to compare apples to apples.

Brooke/AARDVK

Yah, but the guy at Buzztime who thought this scheme up is going to say that sudden influx of new players is evidence that the new times/split are working.
XT

I'm certain that's what the BT guy would say, but at this point, BT has the same problem explaining Tuesday and Wednesday as we do explaining Thursday. Of course what might be going on is that each night/premium game might be different and that one principle might not fit all. Sometimes the television networks do a lot of juggling to figure out the optimal day/time slot for each program, and the considerations as to where to put an action-drama are probably totally different than from where to put a sit-com.

Of course it will be interesting when Spotlight and Playback get their turns tonight and tomorrow respectively, but just between Showdown and Six, there are differences in the type of players they might attract--and maybe even a difference between Wednesday Six and Thursday Six. I've always thought Six was the easier sell to new players because it's more well-rounded and allows people in the final round to play to their strengths. In addition, Showdown had teams long before Six (fka Trivial Pursuit) came along, so there may be a bigger culture of team play that is critically affected when the time of the game is shifted. In terms of the two Six offerings, the team competition on Wednesday Six seems stronger than Thursday Six, so maybe Thursday Six is more attractive to the casual or new player as individual players may do better against other individual players than individual players do on Wednesday against the teams.

Brooke/AARDVK

My initial reaction was to say that Thursday is essentially the first night of the weekend for a lot of bars, hence the higher player count for a later game. But then I remembered the game is only later than normal for us in the west, and it is earlier than normal in the east. In that case, if Buzztime's expectations were to be true, I would think that Monday-Wednesday games would see an increase in player count (assuming the peak time to be at a bar those nights is ~8pm, now overlapping with the premium games in the east), and Thursday-Saturday games would see a decrease (as the peak time would be closer to 9-10pm). So the results after a few days are pretty counter-intuitive.

Saturday in particular I predict will show a dropoff because at both Catbirds and Mike's Place, locations that cater more to a bar crowd than a sports-watching one, there's pretty much nobody there at 7 p.m. when Playback will now be available. If people aren't coming from work, and can stay out as late as they want if they sleep in on Sunday, there's just no reason for them to go out that early when no one except die-hard trivia players are out. Friday kind of depends on whether people go directly from work and stay, or whether they go home first, group together with their spouse/significant other and/or friends, and then come out later. If the former is more prevalent, the player count will go up in the East and down in the West; if the latter, the reverse is true.

BTW I know BT is assuming that 8 p.m. on the East Coast time represents peak bar time, but is that really true? That seems awfully late for the happy hour crowd that tends to drive most traffic except at places that offer sporting events, entertainment, or other things extending into the evening. And most of the places we know end happy hour prices by 7 p.m. or 8 p.m. at the latest, so that's an incentive for people to leave rather than get engaged in an hour-long trivia game.

Brooke/AARDVK

How about a factor that Tuesday and Wednesday were the last two days of February and that Thursday was the first day of March, can it be more people going out as a result of paydays and month budgets. And a higher effect on Six because Six remains the destination game, and the higher crowding overall making the other games more of a turnoff to be around for. Just guessing. Hospitality professionals might know better if there is something special about the start of month and/or toxic about the end of month.

I think a lot of the low early week player counts are coming from the voting down of the premiums.
I'm assuming there was no vote on Thur.

Here is one player who I know plays CD instead of premiums, killing them when possible.
Wed. had a large number of CD players during prime time.

Feb 29, 2012, 6:00 pm Paradiso Italian Restaurant Alexandria, VA 10,114 15 1st of 5 257th of 1554
Feb 29, 2012, 5:30 pm Paradiso Italian Restaurant Alexandria, VA 9,491 15 1st of 5 500th of 1726
Feb 29, 2012, 5:00 pm Paradiso Italian Restaurant Alexandria, VA 9,141 15 2nd of 5 589th of 1856
Feb 29, 2012, 4:30 pm Paradiso Italian Restaurant Alexandria, VA 10,260 15 1st of 5 263rd of 847

Mar 1, 2012, 5:00 pm Paradiso Italian Restaurant Alexandria, VA 8,860 13 2nd of 5 284th of 903
Mar 1, 2012, 4:30 pm Paradiso Italian Restaurant Alexandria, VA 8,810 15 4th of 7 224th of 769

The 1st of the month does have something to do with it, in terms of players wanting to get on the new boards before it's full of real scores. I know this happens at Hardtimes, always more part time players on the 1st & 2nd.

We'll get a better idea after next week.

_________________
BUD - Stained Glass Pub Silver Spring MD
OC BUD - Grotto Pizza DE near Ocean City MD

LET'S GO ....Orioles and the 9 and 5!!

Here's the problem with analyzing those CD numbers, we have no idea how many of that total come from the eastern split. On Wednesday the 29th at 9e when most of the east split is playing PT, the west split is playing CD. And when a location in the east split plays CD in that time slot, they are playing the same game that the west split is seeing as it's only option.

So at 9e on the 29th, there were not 1554 players that opted out of PT to play CD.

BO

Friday's averages for 2012

Topix - N/A
SL - 7470
Trend - 4506

FYI - in the past, the percentage of west feed players for premium games was 20-22%.

After the results of Thursday night, I have no friggin' idea what the numbers will look like tonight.

BO

Here's the numbers for Friday (TOPIX omitted as no YTD average available and no TOPIX West info in BT HOF):

Spotlight
YTD – 7470 Actual 3/2/12 8487 (up around 14%)

Trendalicious
YTD – 4506 Actual 3/2/12 3532 (down around 24%)

Again the increase in the premium seems to be coming not from West zone people finally getting to play the game in primetime but from East zone people. And the first 15 slots at the top of the West zone individual player HOF were filled with non-Player+ handles, including amusing ones such as UPU BT, WCFEED, CHETAH, and BT SKS, being six perfect and several more near-perfect scores.

I was a little surprised that Trendalicious dropped as much as it did because unlike the games that have been taken out of their lead-in position and put after the premium game, Trendalicious has always been played after Spotlight. So one would have expected to have the player count drop after Spotlight (the post-premium slump), which it did by more than half, but not necessarily for the Trendalicious count to drop relative to its YTD average. But Trendalicious (like TOPIX) may be difficult to ever predict because the player count will be very much affected by people's interest in that night's specific subject matter.

Brooke/AARDVK

Saturday's averages for 2012

PB - 6291
TI - 4858
SF - 4774

Naturally numbers for TI and SF will fall off the map. The way things are going, PB numbers will rise.

BO

Playback
YTD – 6291 Actual 3/3/12 7167 (up about 13%)

Tuned In
YTD – 4858 Actual 3/3/12 4511 (down about 7%)

Speed Freaks
YTD – 4774 Actual 3/3/12 4467 (down about 6%)

Again the proportion of players from the West is not significantly increasing, so most of the increase is coming from the East zone. The pattern of games losing players post-premium as compared to their pre-premium game holds, although appears to be ameliorated on Saturday, perhaps by it being a night where folks tend to come out later and stay later than during the week. And Speed Freaks likely attracts more casual players. (Tho given last night's game was either a complete repeat or filled with repeat questions appearing in the last couple of weeks, anyone playing it for the first time against people who'd seen those questions before undoubtedly became discouraged.)

Brooke/AARDVK

Monday averages for 2012

SIQ - 3346