Quote from: BedrockBrendan;694778I believe En World was just part of the sample. They were tracking other forums and blogs for that data from what was said in the link.

Yet they do not seem to be drawing data from either Facebook or Google+, which is where the bulk of RPG discussion seems to be happening now. TheRPGSite and Citizens of the Imperium also seems to not have a voice in this data.

Quote from: J Arcane;694919But don't you see! Popularity contests are totally awesome! Now I can use the bandwagon fallacy to further justify my sense that my choice of games are superior!

I like Traveller, therefore my taste in games is superior. By definition.

Quote from: CRKrueger;694976How is it publicity of any sort?  He's currently advertising his list as the "hottest games list" in other words, Hey everybody, these are the games most people are talking about.  Has it been used in an ad yet? No, at least not by anyone other then Morris, but I'm sure it's coming.  That's what this information is typically used for.

The idea of a "hottest list" based on sheer number of threads or topics means there is no idea of whether the "hotness" is positive or negative, whether it is content vs. edition wars, in other words, information completely without context, exactly the sort of "who's up, who's down, who's hot, who's not, what's trending, what's oh so last week" aspect of fast food culture bereft of any meaning other then something to plug into marketing and ad calculations or to tag along because you want to be "in".  

A lawyer in LA needs this explained to him? Oh wait, nevermind. :rotfl:

From what I can tell, the data used also does not discriminate who the posters were, just how many posts. A handful of really dedicated fanbois could be responsible for the majority of those posts. Since the content of the posts are not qualified most of them could just be "QFT" or a smiley and you would get the same results, but no real quality discussion.

Obviously, it's far from perfect but it's a decent attempt given that sales figures are generally unavailable, especially now that less goes through distributors.  The polling of game store owners is just as flawed.  I'd be really hesitant to compare recent vs older games too much as older games are more likely to be played.  But 20th century D&D appears to be small niche these days.
 
The lack of company forums is unfortunate as some of them are big.
 
The new Star Wars game looks to have roughly a 10th of the interest of Pathfinder, despite having a big name to push sales.  Plus they have to pay for a license.  I'm curious how FFG doing with that and if they are going to have trouble making money for a license like many past rpgs.  I know it's far from their only Star Wars game but I never hear anyone talking about the starship miniatures game either - though I haven't been seeking out talk about it.

The one advantage too of this approach is that it means that games when are actually played, or at least discussed, but not necessarily sold or selling in great number, can potentially rise up higher in the rankings, provided it's done right.

Another flawed way to look is Amazon sales rankings.
 
All game books:
http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Books-Fantasy-Gaming/zgbs/books/16211/ref=zg_bs_unv_b_3_16221_1
Mostly Pathfinder.  Rpg books are often overshadowed by cheat books for computer games.
 
Amazon doesn't seem to have a consistent cataloguing of rpgs.  Start wars is 76 in boardgames.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/toys-and-games/166225011/ref=pd_zg_hrsr_t_1_3_last
I have no idea how that compares to a given rating in gaming books.

Quote from: jeff37923;695338Yet they do not seem to be drawing data from either Facebook or Google+, which is where the bulk of RPG discussion seems to be happening now. TheRPGSite and Citizens of the Imperium also seems to not have a voice in this data.

I think the way to approach this is to recognize it as potentially helpful data, but that it is limited and only reflects how often certain key words came up on these venues. It tells us something, but obviously is providing a simple model that might miss certain subtelties. I dont think anyone was trying to skew numbers and i think Morrus likely figured it would be cool to put this sort of thing up on the news page. But i agree with others it could have drawn from wider sources. Still it tells us something about the particular sites it took data from. Might be interesting if someone else tried to repeat the results with wider pool of forums and websites.

Quote from: CRKrueger;694976How is it publicity of any sort?  He's currently advertising his list as the "hottest games list" in other words, Hey everybody, these are the games most people are talking about.  Has it been used in an ad yet? No, at least not by anyone other then Morris, but I'm sure it's coming.  That's what this information is typically used for.

LOL you didn't even bother to read what he wrote about it.  This whole thing is, essentially, incidental to another project he's working on.  He threw it up there for fun, because he could as he had that data.  You're looking for some "publicity" motive where there isn't one...at least no more than anything a guy who posts something to his site has when that site is for-profit.  Are Pundit's posts here "for publicity"?

QuoteThe idea of a "hottest list" based on sheer number of threads or topics means there is no idea of whether the "hotness" is positive or negative, whether it is content vs. edition wars, in other words, information completely without context, exactly the sort of "who's up, who's down, who's hot, who's not, what's trending, what's oh so last week" aspect of fast food culture bereft of any meaning other then something to plug into marketing and ad calculations or to tag along because you want to be "in".  

If that were the motive for doing that, you'd have a point.  Given it's not, unless you're claiming some hidden nefarious purpose, your point is about as meaningless as you claim this thing is.  Look, if you find no meaning in it, that's fine.  He's not looking to satisfy your particular desires.  You keep talking about this in terms of what is valuable to YOU, as if this thing is about YOU.  Again, it's not a CRKrueger-centric universe no matter how much you want it to be.  If it's not for you, it's not for you - but others find it interesting even if you don't.

QuoteA lawyer in LA needs this explained to him? Oh wait, nevermind. :rotfl:

You have not explained anything other than you're some spoiled brat demanding that some other website make something interesting to his particular interests or else he's going to stomp his foot and whine about how life is wrecked by stuff you don't like.

Quote from: Nicephorus;695426Another flawed way to look is Amazon sales rankings.
 
All game books:
http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Books-Fantasy-Gaming/zgbs/books/16211/ref=zg_bs_unv_b_3_16221_1
Mostly Pathfinder.  Rpg books are often overshadowed by cheat books for computer games.
 
Amazon doesn't seem to have a consistent cataloguing of rpgs.  Start wars is 76 in boardgames.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/toys-and-games/166225011/ref=pd_zg_hrsr_t_1_3_last
I have no idea how that compares to a given rating in gaming books.

I'm looking at the first list and it has some game books that haven't been released yet (Pathfinder Bestiary 4), so I wonder if they are including preorders with that.

Quote from: jeff37923;695338Yet they do not seem to be drawing data from either Facebook or Google+, which is where the bulk of RPG discussion seems to be happening now. TheRPGSite and Citizens of the Imperium also seems to not have a voice in this data.

He's drawing some data from G+ I believe.  But, he can't draw data from FB, at least not at the moment (from a technical perspective).

I suspect both of those other sites you mention are covered, but if you'd like me to check (and see that they're added if they're not included) I can probably do that.  He's really just beginning this thing (and he's doing it for a later purpose concerning a survey), so he wants to include as many sources of information that are relevant to his project as possible.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;695430I think the way to approach this is to recognize it as potentially helpful data, but that it is limited and only reflects how often certain key words came up on these venues. It tells us something, but obviously is providing a simple model that might miss certain subtelties. I dont think anyone was trying to skew numbers and i think Morrus likely figured it would be cool to put this sort of thing up on the news page. But i agree with others it could have drawn from wider sources. Still it tells us something about the particular sites it took data from. Might be interesting if someone else tried to repeat the results with wider pool of forums and websites.

The data is interesting, but it needs to be sorted through before it can be used in a meanigful way. I don't think Morrus is intentionally trying to skew numbers, but the unintentional consequence is that they are skewed and thus the results are questionable.

Quote from: Mistwell;695442He's drawing some data from G+ I believe.  But, he can't draw data from FB, at least not at the moment (from a technical perspective).

I suspect both of those other sites you mention are covered, but if you'd like me to check (and see that they're added if they're not included) I can probably do that.  

Do that, please.

Quote from: Mistwell;695442He's really just beginning this thing (and he's doing it for a later purpose concerning a survey), so he wants to include as many sources of information that are relevant to his project as possible.

What is the project? What information is considered relevant?

For some context, here's what Morrus posted when he put these up:

Quote from: Morrus;1504630OK, so take these as you will.  What they are are charts showing what games people are discussing online based on a sample consisting of several independent RPG forums (totalling about 250K members) and just under 1000 blogs over a period of 90 days.  Note that this was done today, just a few days after the final D&D Next playtest package was released (well, one was done two days ago, and the other was done today, so the figures changed slightly in between), which undoubtedly skewed the results.  So that's what it displays; decide what it means - or what it doesn't mean - for yourself.  

It's *not* sales figures; and it's *not* what folks are playing at home.  It's games that are discussed in forum posts, blogs, and PbP games on the web.  So it's probably not worth extrapolating any meaning beyond that.

Figures gathered using this system: http://www.enworld.org/forum/hotgames.php

Basically I took the figures, pasted them into Excel and said "make me a pie chart!"

and

Quote from: Morrus;1504634One important thing to bear in mind: I deliberately chose NOT to include official sites.  So the figures do not count discussion at wizards.com or paizo.com, or any other official site.  Obviously each of these would constitute a big extra chunk for the game in question; however, when I started to do it (and they were harder because many don't have RSS feeds the system could access and monitor) I found that proportionally the ratios stayed very similar - a publisher site with twice the amount of discussion as another publisher site also tended to have twice the amount of discussion off-site that the other publisher had.  That meant that the independent sites and the 1000-ish blogs appear to have a reasonably neutral sample.  So it's best to keep that fact in mind when looking at the percentages.

And for context on what he said next...

Quote from: francisca;1504723LOL!  Nice try, but it's the INTERWWWEBZ, buddy!  People are going to take this as the gospel and use it in ammo in the next round of edition "warfare".

His response was...

Quote from: Morrus;1504730Yup.  You should see Google+.  Out of all that data, the one single thing folks are focused on is whether or not Dungeon World should be called a D&D variant.  Just that.

Probably it shouldn't, but whether it's called a D&D Variant or a Slice of Pink Cheesecake, the numbers stay the same!  I mean, wood, trees...

Quote from: Morrus;1504780Bwa ha ha!  I have now been accused on Google+ of fraud by a chap named Jesse Butler who is claiming that the system does not track the sources it claims to and is based only on EN World posts.  I'm curious what my motive or profit is in his wild imaginings?

Plus someone on Twitter says I'm the equivalent of Fox News for it; but then he once demanded I keep my personal opinions off my own Twitter account so I take that with a grain of salt.

Quote from: Morrus;1504785Just Googled him - he works for Open Design, apparently. Which is disappointing.  And on his own G+ timeline he's started his own thread which, as far as I can tell, accuses me of lying. I still don't get what my motive is supposed to be though.  But, hey.  He's not heard of RSS feeds, I guess.

Quote from: Morrus;1504791Aha!  I now know the motive.

His favourite game is Earthdawn, and it didn't rank.  And apparently me publishing a pie chart without Earthdawn on it would result in more traffic to my website than one with Earthdawn on it, and thus result in profit.

This guy's a professional writer, BTW.  That's the best evil villain plot he could come up with?

Quote from: Mistwell;695439LOL you didn't even bother to read what he wrote about it.  This whole thing is, essentially, incidental to another project he's working on.  He threw it up there for fun, because he could as he had that data.  You're looking for some "publicity" motive where there isn't one...at least no more than anything a guy who posts something to his site has when that site is for-profit.  Are Pundit's posts here "for publicity"?

Well, yes.

I don't think Morrus is evil, he's trying to find a way to serve ALL tabletop gamers.  His forums obviously don't do that.  The more stuff he can make available that people can consume no matter what game they play (or sell, or want to cross-advertise to, etc...), the more hits he gets, the more money rolls in.

I understand it's a trial run of both tools and methodology, but the information itself, raw unquantified data, only provides the level of depth of any type of "hot and trending list" which is really not useful for anything other then uninformed TMZ-level marketing (which is probably what the Fox News thing was about, no context).

If he'd clarified what he's doing and mentioned this is just the trial run, that would be one thing, but he didn't.  He put a Hot Games tab up on his site, to answer the questions...

What's the current zeitgeist?
What are the hottest games being talked about right now?

It sounds like his "secret formula" is mainly RSS, which is not exactly the best tracking method he could use either.