NP… I’m saying that… well, let’s do hypothetical math maybe that’s easier:
There are between 20,000 and 40,000 active players who have logged on to “Funcom Live Services” this week - according to steam.
There are more console players than there are Steam players - According to Funcom (video interview).
Likely there are somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 active players this week who have never posted on these forums, nor FC-Facebook, nor FC-Twitter, etc. (let alone this week) as the number who do/did is likely only a few thousand this month from looking at the tallies.
Let’s take the middle number of the total unique weekly users: 75k, what do they do when they have a problem? They don’t post about it or we would see it. And likely 10% of them have some problems (7,500 people with problems per week)
So, how many people do post related to a ban or wipe? I would say it’s close to 0.02% (or about 15 people - remembering that this is per week.) We can see this in the new threads being created here.
How many people are getting banned? I would guess close to 10 times that - somewhere between 75 and 150 per week - this seems to also line up with my own personal observations on my public servers as for extrapolations.
Where are the 10% (~7,500-15) of people who have problems then?
Where are the other hundred or so people who got banned this week?
Why are there only 15 people or less per week coming here to “wonder why” they were banned when there are another 100 (approx.) who went somewhere else, nowhere else, or could answer their own questions as I claimed I could?
I’m of course not saying they shouldn’t come here. Just that 100% of the ones who do are disgruntled, 90% of whom post jadedly (as I admitted I myself would likely do under the same circumstances) and if my guess is correct, already know exactly why - and if not exactly then they likely have a pretty dang good idea why.
That was what I was saying. So from my own math: of the 15 people who come here about a ban 13 or 14 of them already know full well before they even post. 12 or 13 of them have their threads locked and unlisted within the first few hours. Maybe, one guy a week really couldn’t figure it out. And usually that guy get’s his thread answered to the degree where after reading the replies, now knows - or has a really good idea of what not to do next time. Of those 4 people per month one or two of them will hang around here and continue complaining about fairness, clarity, and Funcom for the next month or so - or until their ban is over and they can play again.
Of course there are always exceptions but it’s a tiny tiny tiny minority IMO. And that is the very definition of common sense after all. it is likely enough.
The problem with using Customer Feedback mechanisms in looking at statistics is that it’s skewed. Those that are upset try to find vehicles to provide feedback to the company. I would say your number of people banned is significantly over inflated because of that. I would actually lower that number to double the amount that we see here. IMHO, FC isn’t banning a lot but what you are seeing is the banning is affecting multiple servers at once because the folks that are getting banned are the ones that are sitting in multiple servers. So everyone has a story about that clan or this base got admin wiped…even though it’s only a handful of people.
Put that number away, you don’t know where it’s been
Seriously, you built up a whole house of cards on top of that guess. Just like you built up your own interpretation of the rules based on what you’ve been observing, which wouldn’t be a bad thing in and of itself if you didn’t insist on pushing it around on these forums in a way that implies that anyone who doesn’t share it is making an easily avoidable mistake.
Anyway, I’m not here to debate shaky statistics and conjectures. As @erjoh pointed out, and as I keep saying, we don’t have access to data Funcom has.
Regardless of the actual percentage of people affected by bans – whether justly or unjustly – there’s currently a perception among the playerbase that they need to worry about bans, that they need to ask the kind of questions OP asked here. That perception is definitely a problem that needs to be solved.
Could be, it’s all just mathematically informed speculation after all. But on the 4 official servers I was on when these bans started hitting it was about 2 people per week per server on servers with about 100 to 150 members total - and that held for the several months I was actively looking into it - more at the beginning. So it could even be a lot more than I estimated. There are about 550 “Official” servers and I selected the ones I’m on for being in the top ten or twenty percent most populated. So that brings the numbers right in line with my estimations.
EDIT:
That’s 550 official servers for PC alone BTW. If we assume there are even just the same number for console that’s 1,100 total servers - (I do think there are more console servers than PC servers tho). If 1 person per server per month got banned that’s 275 people per week. Of course we should cut that down as some server I’m sure saw no bans because the population was low. But even if we cut that to one third (1/3rd) we still arrive at something pretty close to that “100 per week” estimate - 91.666 to be specific. So, even looking at it from a different angle the numbers seem to approximately align. Right, raise your hand if you’ve noticed one or two bans or base wipes in the past one or two months: See, everybody!
I only say that to the “Funcom Evil” crowd who also get personal. If neither of those conditions are true I only politely suggest them - and even then only about 10% of the times I’ve had the opportunity to do so. We’re talking something close to 6 to 8 total threads…
It’s not a debate. You asked me what I meant. I explained what I meant.
