Yep, individual play sessions.
I’ll be interested if this makes a difference. I would have said that a 63% retention rate is good for any web page, never mind an interactive one. Lord knows that I often click on a URL, read eight words scattered randomly around hte resulting page, and then close it.
That was my thought, too: particuarly for webgames, I assume that they’re going to be crap by default, and triage accordingly. Green-on-black retrogame aesthetic? I’m gone. Generic heroic-fantasy? You’ve got thirty seconds to show me you’re interesting.
In IF, I think we’ve got an expectation of patient audiences with catholic tastes. (There just isn’t enough IF in the world for me to use any triage heuristic other than ‘is this game well-written and capably made?’ If there were ten thousand IF game published a year, boy oh boy the things I’d autoquit on. And we’d probably be more genre-bound and poorer for it.) In any case: that’s not how people play free webgames.
My personal experience of the “quit without playing” rate is around 11-13%. I assume the links that lead to the game have some kind of description so people know what to expect and people who abhor the text-only interface won’t click the link at all. (Of course a good part of people will probably just read the topic, scan the text for the link and click without reading the context.)
Do you think there’s a reason behind that? A change, maybe, to the comp that has only affected the last two years?
Then there are all those times I open a page up, and then have to do something else, or open it just to check something quickly. I feel sorry for all the one or two turn transcripts I must have left people in the comp.
My average is a real play session every 10, circa. 8 are 1 to 3 moves, 1 goes in for 50-100 turns (average completing count is 850 turns circa)
Sorry, dude, this is a long-term trend that dates to considerably before in-comp updates.
We’re all aware that you hate in-comp updates with all your heart and soul, but that doesn’t mean that they’re the gaping mouth of hell, responsible for every single problem that the comp might have. Trying to twist every bit of news into a talking point for your hobby-horse doesn’t win you allies: it makes you seem disingenuous.
You seem a little touchy about it if you don’t mind me saying. And hobby-horse? I’m pretty sure I haven’t mentioned in-comp updates on the forum since last year.
Yeah, I did a certain amount of preliminary triage figuring out which games had credited testers and which didn’t. That didn’t mean I was never going to finish those games – I came back later – but that first pass through was just to figure out which games I should plan to review.
Some stats from The Test is Now READY’s “play online” transcripts:
239 total transcripts.
About 100 “complete” games.
87 people stopped playing before entering 20 commands.
The average number of moves was 71.
185 sessions were in October, 54 in November.
77 sessions were recorded in the first week of the Comp.
The most commands entered? 248. And, from the transcript, I can tell it was someone replaying the game.
Number of commands needed for the Violinist section, if I had actually made it equivalent to one “wait” per day? 280.
I (only sorta) wish I had done that.
The Kicker approach, eh? [emote]:)[/emote]
- Wade