RCT Discussion / saxman1089's NE Math - Episode 1 - Accolade Trends
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28-December 17
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saxman1089
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Hey all,
I'm a certified nerd, and as such, I like to study data. And if you have not realized, NE is ripe with data. It is the veritable motherload of data, and it's just begging to be analyzed.
Not being one to argue with this data, I've been hard at work sifting and sorting through it, and I've decided to start this little series called NE Math.
Be excited, because Episode 1 is here today! This episode looks at the number of accolades over time, if there are any trends, and if these trends might be explained by happenings in the NE or RCT community.For this analysis, I counted the number of each accolade for each year, not counting contest accolades (H2H, NEDC, etc.), and plotted them both as absolute counts and as percentages of 1) total accolades (including design) and 2) full size park accolades (not including design). Some of my graphs are below (Steve, if you don't post a picture of a giraffe in the comments, I'm going to be extremely upset).
- The number of accolades peaked in 2010, followed by a general decrease in accolades until 2016, when the number of accolades began to increase again. I believe this is partially due to OpenRCT2 making the process of producing high quality works much easier.
- The number of gold parks as a percentage of both full size accolades and total accolades has risen over the past 5 years or so. This has been made up for generally by the number of silvers decreasing. Either voting patterns have changed and more silver parks are being given the "benefit of the doubt", or people are producing higher quality works. You guys can all debate that one.
-On Discord, posix pointed out that the number of bronzes massively fell in 2014. This might be an effect of Starpointe's influence on the site, in that it motivated people to build better parks, leading to more silvers and golds the following year that may have been bronzes without the extra motivation.-As far as a year where I think the mix of accolades was the best, I would say 2010, followed by 2012. In each of these years, Bronzes are the most common accolade, followed by Silvers, Golds, and Spotlights in that order. In recent years, golds have been the most common accolade.-There were no spotlights in 2012 or 2015, which is probably an effect of H2H6 and H2H7 taking up people's building time.- I didn't focus much on designs in this analysis, but I can tell you this: as a percentage of total accolades, the number of designs has generally decreased over the years, but has leveled out during the past 2-3 years. Not quite sure why this is. Any thoughts? Why are people doing more full-scale parks now?Let me know if you agree/disagree with my observations, and feel free to add others that I may have overlooked!
Also, DEBATE! I want to see fruitful discussions in the comments.
EDIT: Added the plot for the number of full park accolades too, just FYI.Attached Thumbnails
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saxman1089
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Wow 2008 jumps out at me. I wonder why so many spotlights were given
That might be a mistake actually. I may have switched gold and spotlight. Stand by.
EDIT: Nope, that's correct. There were 11 park accolades that year, and 4 were spotlights. The other 22 accolades were all designs. I added another plot to the OP showing the plot of full park accolades each year.
Perhaps there are some parks still waiting to be scored from that year? I'm not sure. -
csw
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This makes me wish we still had all of the voting statistics like we did on NE4. Any chance those are still in an archive somewhere?
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posix
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I'm pretty sure they are csw. Good to know someone actually looked at these!
Lovely stuff Sax. Reason to be optimistic about the community. -
mintliqueur
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Very nice idea, saxman! It's interesting to see that 2010 was the peak year for number of accolades awarded. I would've expected it to be 2006 or something. Regarding the number of golds compared to bronzes, I'd say it also depends a lot on the size of the accolade panel and the tastes of the people currently on it. Another factor is how the tastes have evolved over time of those who've been on the panel for several years. These things are, of course, hard to measure, but I guess that's what you want the discussion to be about! Though not having been here for most of these years, I myself really haven't got anything to add to that discussion, but I would read it with interest!
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