Elder Sign Statistics Reports

By Tibs, in Elder Sign

Ahoy, CaptnM.

My best answer to your question is that it's actually just too easy to win. I'm sure future expansions will help to take care of that (not that I'm implying there are any). I myself have a project nearly through the tube and ready for upload...

Interesting news!

A sufficient number of games has been submitted to declare that the Master Mythos option has a difficulty of 17.02% , as opposed to the 16.17% difficulty of using no option.

Edited by Tibs

A slight increase then! Good to know :) Just for curiosity... how many games is "enough games" to have data entered to generate some sort of output statistics?

Enough so that its difficulty is higher than when using no option/expansion :P

This of course means it's possible that it'll fall back into "insufficient" sometime in the future...

Hey everyone. Apparently I forgot to add the two new defeat conditions (Abhoth's and Shudde M'ell's) to the submission form. This has been corrected and I've corrected the two submissions I suspect were affected by it.

To follow-up from my last post, someone submitted the first World Cracking defeat! Gnarly!

Gnarly!

Nope, Nyarly is another AO : shudde® :

:P :p :P

Gubirobi has suggested that I add a "game length" question, and the spreadsheet has been updated with such.

After some poking at it, I've also added a Time page on the report. It's blank now, but that's because you guys need to submit more games! If I've done my formulas correctly, the Time page will update fluidly as more info is added.

Edited by Tibs

Just a friendly reminder: the Time entry requires the play time in minutes . If you put something like "2.5 hr" it is a string and the formulas would crash. I've now hard-wired my code to ignore anything besides numerical entries outright.

I'll try to catch and correct such entries if I find them.

Question: How important is Game length in these statistics? I want to submit my data, but my game lengths are always iffy because I'm playing on Vassal on my computer and I can't think of a time when I've sat down and played all the way through without getting distracted by email, my cell phone, my husband, etc....

Should I guess how much time was ACTUALLY spent on the game? Should I put the time from start to finish as if I didn't spend many minutes away from the game? Should I leave that slot blank? Should I keep my data out and save it for the serious players that don't have the distraction issues I do?

Point for "time" is to allow Tibs to do an actual statistical inference on how much the game lasts when played tabletop. So, since you play on pc, I think the best is if you simply skip reporting the length of the game

Yeah that's what I'd recommend. If you were playing the tabletop version, chances are, you'd be playing with other people and you'd be less likely to be distracted by non-game stuff. The entry is geared toward the "actual" copy anyway so don't bother entering a time.

...which kills me because as you can see, there are so few timed entries that I only have (tenuous) stats for two player counts, and not nearly enough info to draw up a best-fit line. I'm starving for times. Ugh.

Edited by Tibs

Thanks, Julia and Tibs. I'll definitely keep stats the next time I play in person, including time in minutes, but I'm leaving that part out for my Vassal runs.

Question, though: under the Investigators tab, why are some Win %s and Battle %s missing under Team size? Those seem like they should have entries even if there's only been one game won with that many people...

Question: what exactly is the purpose of recording games that were forfeited? How do you define a forfeit?

I ask because, when I'm playing solo on Vassal, I forfeit games ALL THE TIME. As a way of forcing myself to be careful and think about the rules, I forfeit when I realize I've broken one and I can't remember what happened well enough to go back to the point I think I messed up and play properly.

I'm assuming, however, that you wouldn't want those reported - that you want reported the games that multiple people were playing tabletop, and they felt that failure was too inevitable, so they just gave in and let the Ancient One devour them?

Am I correct on this?

(I'm of the personal opinion that forfeiting is lame. Play the game through to its bitter end. My husband was CONVINCED that the last game we played together was going to be a failure - things just kept going so terribly. He wanted to just start over before one day had even passed. It came down to the final battle, and my investigator ultimately won against Hastur. But if I'd listened to my husband, Hastur would have won!)

Certain percents are missing because I don't have sufficient data to produce a meaningful answer. As more games trickle in eventually that entry will display.

Forfeit is supposed to be when you've played a game to the point where you have to give up because of either time or hopelessness. It's also interesting to see what percentage of games end prematurely because players don't want to play through the end.

Yeah, a game where you made such a significant rules mistake that it would compromise the game result shouldn't be reported, right.

Congrats on your Hastur win! Unless you beat down the monster count, he can be DAUNTING.

I entered a few plays in the stats, and unefortunately I realised that I had a single very important rule wrong : once the doom track is full, you are not eliminated, but the ancient one awakes ! :wacko: :wacko: :wacko: So i've logged most of my defeats as defeat by elimination, when only one or two from them are real eliminations.

Hopefully, it won't have too much effect on the total stats.

I guess i've played the 1987 "Arkham horror" (no final battle after the doom track is filled) one time too many.

Sorry for the little disturbance !

Ooh, uh... so you have never conducted final combat as normal? What would you like me to do with these data?

I think I'll delete the entries that say "defeat by elimination" but don't indicate that you've been devoured excessively (which is what "elimination" means: either all 16/24 investigators have been devoured or devouring all in-play characters simultaneously causes the AO to awaken).

I think it's fine to write them as "defeat by final battle" as, anyway, I've never won a single final battle in "elder sign" !

Thanks for the fast correction !

Sure thing. I now have them as "Defeat by final battle" but also flagged in red in case you change your mind.

Okay, there's something about some of these submissions that's driving me nuts, but I never said anything until now. There are a whole bunch of defeats by elimination because people challenge themselves by not replacing their dead investigators. Now that's all well and good - house rules and other such variations can enhance the game!

But shouldn't these be labeled as defeat by forfeit? If you had one investigator, and she got killed, and YOU CHOSE not to replace her as per the rules of the game, isn't that a forfeit? (I'm looking at line 439 here, but also most, if not all, of the rest of the defeats by "elimination.") The ONLY WAY you should have a defeat by elimination is to have 16 (or 24 if you're playing UF) devoured investigators. (And that would be very difficult (if not impossible in vanilla where no rewards have you removing doom tokens) to do with the way the doom track and devouring rules work.) So there should NOT be very many of these.

I know it's not the most official data, but couldn't we at least try to keep it standard to the printed rules? I mean, it's not my data, so it's ultimately up to Tibs - just wanted to point it out.

I agree completely. I try to make it clear in the question description what I mean by "elimination" but there's only so much you can do to enforce it. Really, the single most important statistic is whether the investigators won or lost.

I'm sorry, I made a mistake with the last entry, we were with 5 instead of 4 and Wilson was the fifth player/character

we played with the new Expansion and we totally loved it :-)

Greetings! I am writing because I noticed that I have made a couple of typing errors, resulting in three different sets of entries under the name "Hector - Xavier". If you could take a moment to remedy this, it would be really nice of you. Thanks in advance!

I've changed them to be HectorXavier to match your FFG username.