Few things annoys me as much as claiming that the results of people show a Gaussian distribution: most people have average results and as you move to the extremes, you get less and less people. There is no doubt that the abilities of people follow a Gaussian distribution: our IQ, our strength follow it. In games the amount of time real life allows us to play also. The "results are Gaussian" claim is merely saying "your results depend on your resources". If you play better, you surely played more. If you have better job, you were lucky to have high IQ and a high-earner family to get you to college. Saying "results are Gaussian too" is saying "your results are out of your control".
To disprove it, I started to collect results. It wasn't easy to get unbiased, straightforward dataset. The idea came from my girlfriend: Megaera. This is a very simple raidboss in World of Warcraft for damage dealers: stand where everyone else, shoot what everyone else, minimal "dancing" and even that is ignored in LFR. The Patchwerk of Pandaria. So I resubscribed WoW (just for this project, don't dream EVE players!) and went to kill Megs. 25 times in the same lockout (the week before the patch):
With that said, the average, rounded DPS of the dataset is 65K with the sigma of 20K. I divided the players into half-sigma (10K) wide groups, so the middle group with the name "65" means those who had between 60 and 70K DPS. The left column is to be read "between 0 and 30" instead of "between 20 and 30" while the rightmost is "100 and above". The results are these:
What is this "DoubleGauss"?
This is the point when - instead of being satisfied that I was right - I double-checked everything because I did not want to believe it: the brown "scrub-player" Gaussian has 21% weight only. I - along with most good players - expected to see a small "elite" next to the large group of "n00bs". Instead I found that the good and average players belong to the same dataset, and the scrubs are the small minority that doesn't belong.
This is probably while Blizzard is losing customers: everyone - including myself - believed that the majority of the players is bad and catering to them is a good idea to make the game popular. But no, they are a small, but vocal minority. When Blizzard dumbed everything down to their level, they served this minority against the majority. While there are bad players who belong to the majority, they are indeed newbies and very low playtime players, who are like us, therefore don't need freebies, just shorter timespan content and more materials to learn.
The above graphs don't tell who are the "scrubs" besides two facts: they are unlike the majority and they suck at WoW. Tomorrow we'll see who they are.
To disprove it, I started to collect results. It wasn't easy to get unbiased, straightforward dataset. The idea came from my girlfriend: Megaera. This is a very simple raidboss in World of Warcraft for damage dealers: stand where everyone else, shoot what everyone else, minimal "dancing" and even that is ignored in LFR. The Patchwerk of Pandaria. So I resubscribed WoW (just for this project, don't dream EVE players!) and went to kill Megs. 25 times in the same lockout (the week before the patch):
With that said, the average, rounded DPS of the dataset is 65K with the sigma of 20K. I divided the players into half-sigma (10K) wide groups, so the middle group with the name "65" means those who had between 60 and 70K DPS. The left column is to be read "between 0 and 30" instead of "between 20 and 30" while the rightmost is "100 and above". The results are these:
What is this "DoubleGauss"?
This is the point when - instead of being satisfied that I was right - I double-checked everything because I did not want to believe it: the brown "scrub-player" Gaussian has 21% weight only. I - along with most good players - expected to see a small "elite" next to the large group of "n00bs". Instead I found that the good and average players belong to the same dataset, and the scrubs are the small minority that doesn't belong.
This is probably while Blizzard is losing customers: everyone - including myself - believed that the majority of the players is bad and catering to them is a good idea to make the game popular. But no, they are a small, but vocal minority. When Blizzard dumbed everything down to their level, they served this minority against the majority. While there are bad players who belong to the majority, they are indeed newbies and very low playtime players, who are like us, therefore don't need freebies, just shorter timespan content and more materials to learn.
The above graphs don't tell who are the "scrubs" besides two facts: they are unlike the majority and they suck at WoW. Tomorrow we'll see who they are.
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