there seems to still be some debate over the trend of human participation in the worlds. i posted these figures a few months back, and there were several things to note:
1) d1 seemed to be holding up ok, except the last season, in which across virtually all worlds, there was a significant downtick. the major question was, was this a 1 off or would we see similar down ticks in the following seasons?
2) d2 numbers were surprisingly up. the question was, would this sustain? why so far up?
3) d3 numbers were crushingly down. but as the last promo had recently ended, the trend didn't mean much. so it would be interesting to see how things went over the past few seasons.
well, here is what it looks like to me. i would like to here how others read the numbers too though.
1) the d1 downtick has very clearly continued. with a fair number of worlds losing more than 25% of their d1 human population over the last few/handful of seasons, i think there is good reason to be concerned here.
2) the d2 bubble has burst in spectacular fashion. this is a few seasons removed from the bursting of the d3 bubble, so my guess is the promo in d3 had significant effects on the d2 population, but most of those coaches have since moved on. will be interesting to see if d2 holds steady now that the promo effect has presumably largely passed, or if it trends downward like d1, or if it jumps?
3) there are some pretty serious drops in d3 numbers lately - is this still related to the promo? not sure. but the numbers still seem to be holding above the bottom of the trough which was about 10 months ago or so.
all in all, it is not yet clear to me if d3 numbers are really up or artificially up. i would expect this to be clear a few months from now. depending on the outcome, it seems to me there are 2 main possibilities:
1) if d3 numbers are up, its possible that the old timers relatively speaking are just not liking the change, but newer coaches are, which is what you would expect to lead to d1 numbers down, d3 numbers up, d2 numbers somewhere in the middle
2) if d3 numbers are not really up (and go back down near their lows) then i think we have to conclude the loss of humans is occurring at a fairly alarming pace.
in either scenario, i think 1 thing is clear - people are not liking the changes to d1. people like to say its the natural progression that after every major change, a bunch of coaches move on. and i think to some extent, those people are right. but the drop in d1 human pop figures is unprecedented - all the data is there since the beginning of HD. unless i am missing something (which is definitely possible).
so, what do you guys think? P.S. the headers for worlds 2 and 5 are reversed, but the data is in the correct order
12/28/2010 12:33 PM (edited)