Collect "total character-hours played per previous day/week" on a per-cabal basis.

Hours are accumulated to each cabal's pool at character log out, based on whether a given character was a member of that cabal at the time of log out.

If you log on as an uncaballed, play 6 hours, get inducted, then log out 10 minutes later, that cabal gets credited with 6:10.

If you log on as Fortress, play 6 hours, get booted, then log out 10 minutes later, fortress's total isn't modified.

The goal of this is to give a more accurate picture of the "presence" each cabal has. Looking at "number of members" and "number of applicants" isn't very meaningful when maybe only 20% of those members are actually playing regularly.

Hours logged by caballed immortals would be excluded from the totals.

The answer to your question down in the thread about do Immortals have access to see how much people are playing is yes, and I recently added a better method of tracking that.

As for cabal statistics, something I've been kicking around to make cabalwars (the command) a better gauge is this:

Track the past 7 days worth of these data points
- Members
- Pledges
- # items taken
- # items retrieved
- Influence (# of minutes you hold your item / # of minutes CF is up)
- Coverage (# of minutes any mortal from the cabal is online / # of minutes CF is up)
- Presence (total minutes of mortals in cabal online / (# of members * # of minutes CF is up))

The last three give a good idea where the power lies.

n/t

nt

Hmm. Presence is good for comparing how "active" two cabals are that have different numbers of members, but if you're trying to gauge how much "power" a given cabal holds then I'd just take:

total minutes of mortals in cabal online / # minutes CF is up

Imagine two cabals w/ the same number of total minutes. For the purpose of gauging who has more "power" it doesn't matter that one has 15 members and the other 30.

.

Zulg appears to have described coverage as being "when anyone is one" whereas Isildur is talking about aggregate of all cabal member's minutes vs how long cf is up.

Based on what he says, Zulg's would seem useful for telling you how long each cabal is completely empty.

Isildur's would be useful for giving an idea of average number online from a cabal at any time.

I mean, coverage multiplied by number of players will give exactly what Isildur said. No need to clutter the cabalwars output too much.

nt

coverage multiplied by number of players will give exactly what Isildur said

Imagine a cabal (X) with 30 members. Fora given week we have two scnearios:

A: One member is online the entire time but nobody else ever logs on. Coverage = 1.0.

B: All 30 members are online the entire time. Coverage is still 1.0.

Now Zulg's "presence" measure for these two will look very different. But now let's add a second cabal (Y) with only 10 members and consider the following:

X has all 30 of its members online non-stop for the entire week. Y has all 10 of its members online non-stop for the entire week.

Coverage(X) = 1.0, Presence(X) = 1.0
Coverage(Y) = 1.0, Presence(Y) = 1.0

They look identical. Except X had 20 more members online than Y at any given point during the week.

I.e. power = presence * number of people in the cabal.
Then you'd get 1.0 * 10 = 10 and 1.0 * 30 = 30 power respectively. This "power" is easy to calculate, even if it isn't shown directly.

Actually, I'll take my words back anyway, I do not mind it being shown at cabalwars output, there's enough room for it.

EDIT: I just noticed I'm merely repeating what DurNominator said. Huh. Just read his post and ignore mine, that will do it.

Also, percentage of people in cabal online when it's not empty is presence/coverage. You forgot that members is one of the recorded stats in Zulgh's list.

Clarification on coverage:
is a cabal member online this minute / # of minutes CF is up
So 100.00% means that there was at least one cabal member online every minute of the day.

The number you want for presence vs. what I have would look like this:
Fort - 1.77 vs. 6.32%
Out - 1.45 vs. 5.40%
Battle - 2.30 vs. 13.54%
Empire - 3.48 vs. 16.61%
Scion - 1.66 vs. 23.84%
Nexus - 2.83 vs. 10.14%
Tribunal - 1.53 vs. 6.97%

I'm not sure I really see the difference.




Here is what yesterday looked like...

FORTRESS    |Members|Pledges|Taken    |Retrieved|Influence|Coverage |Presence |
2011-04-10  |28     |18     |0        |0        |100.00%  |80.93%   |6.32%    |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
OUTLANDER   |Members|Pledges|Taken    |Retrieved|Influence|Coverage |Presence |
2011-04-10  |27     |15     |0        |1        |82.43%   |70.84%   |5.40%    |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
BATTLE      |Members|Pledges|Taken    |Retrieved|Influence|Coverage |Presence |
2011-04-10  |17     |12     |7        |2        |87.47%   |88.69%   |13.54%   |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
EMPIRE      |Members|Pledges|Taken    |Retrieved|Influence|Coverage |Presence |
2011-04-10  |21     |6      |0        |2        |77.11%   |100.00%  |16.61%   |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SCION       |Members|Pledges|Taken    |Retrieved|Influence|Coverage |Presence |
2011-04-10  |7      |10     |0        |3        |58.58%   |80.93%   |23.84%   |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NEXUS       |Members|Pledges|Taken    |Retrieved|Influence|Coverage |Presence |
2011-04-10  |28     |3      |3        |2        |97.82%   |96.19%   |10.14%   |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRIBUNAL    |Members|Pledges|Taken    |Retrieved|Influence|Coverage |Presence |
2011-04-10  |22     |3      |1        |0        |100.00%  |81.34%   |6.97%    |

So I was mostly interested in a way to gauge which cabals are likely to have numerical superiority at a given point in time. That Scion's presence is higher on a per-member basis than Empire's doesn't mean a whole lot when Scion has less than half the members. If that makes sense.

Imagine two enemy cabals with 5 and 50 members respectively. Even if the first cabal has a presence of 50% and the second a presence of 25%, the second cabal is likely to be kicking the first cabal's butt the majority of the time.

Personally, I prefer Zulgh's numbers as presence tells how active an average member in the cabal is and coverage how often the cabal is not empty. Members is right in the same table, you can easily calculate your figure from that.

True, but you only get a snapshot of the member count at the end of the period. I can multiply presence by cabal members to get the measure I'm after, but if a bunch of guys just deleted or a bunch of guys just joined the cabal then the result won't be accurate.

I like presence how Zulgh has it, because you can pretty much think of it as the average amount of time members of that cabal play each day, right?

Like 10% Presence means members in that cabal average ~2.4hrs/day (10% of a 24hr day, assuming CF is up all day). Some characters will be playing more or less of course, skewing the average, but I think it still gives a real intuitive sense of how active players in that cabal are.

It's a lot easier for me to think "okay, there's nearly 30 of them and they're still averaging 2.5hrs a day, that's a pretty active cabal not just being carried by 1-2 characters" or, in the case of scions, "at first glance those numbers might sound low (60/80/20) and there's only 7 of them, but if you think about what presence means, the members in that cabal are averaging 5+hrs/day, if I join scion it probably will NOT feel like a dead cabal"

Having a less intuitive number like 1.53 vs 2.6 is harder for me to get my head around besides thinking "okay 2.6 is bigger, so I guess they are 'winning' right now?"

Just curious how it handles deleting characters? 

I.e. Suppose that we have below figures at a given point of time, and that one single  character in the cabal makes up for 3% of the presence figure and 25% of the coverage.. 

|Members|Pledges|Coverage |Presence |
|28     |18     |80.93%   |6.32%    |
 
If that character then deletes, would he be eliminated from the historical data so that the figures right after his deletion would become like this: 

|Members|Pledges|Coverage |Presence |
|27     |18     |55.93%   |3.32%    |

Or would the effects from his deletion gradually change the figures so that it takes a week until the cabal stats have normalized to a state without him? 

>Just curious how it handles deleting characters?

Since the data is tracked daily, the day after the character deletes wouldn't be affected by him at all. The characters contributions up until the moment they delete is still accurate and will show up there.

>Or would the effects from his deletion gradually change the
>figures so that it takes a week until the cabal stats have
>normalized to a state without him?

It should normalize the next day. You'll see 4/11 with 20 members, and 4/12 with 19 members.

For example:

OUTLANDER   |Members|Pledges|Taken    |Retrieved|Influence|Coverage |Presence |
2011-04-10  |27     |15     |0        |1        |82.43%   |70.84%   |5.40%    |
2011-04-11  |27     |15     |1        |0        |100.00%  |72.45%   |6.14%    |
2011-04-12  |26     |14     |1        |0        |100.00%  |76.87%   |5.33%    |

Without the item taking part, obviously, but I'd like to know how many are there and how often they play. It's just wrong that sometimes Herald looks like the most secretive cabal, even more so than Scion.

http://forums.carrionfields.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=3&topic_id=2448&mesg_id=2448&page=

Sort of a in a different fashion, that cabal leaders would have a command to see hours and such of their members/applicants? I think that got dismissed too, but you variation on the idea might be generally useful. (I don't like the notion of cabal leaders seeing individual times because I think people who play with schedules of 1-2 hours a week should be able to play their char caballed if they want to the same as someone logging 10 hours a week)

I think some players like to go play the underpowered cabals, and while one has 25 people and the other 15, the 15 may be logging more hours by far than the 25 and so have more of an actual presence. Could be useful to know this info when doing character design/concept. I know I would probably not want to design a character for a cabal with the strongest presence, cause that can lead to boredom during playtimes.

I will say, look at % influence. That tends to tell who has the presence, since they will hold their items and take others more than most, no matter what their members numbers say.

I'm pretty okay with leaders not being able to see this info so long as the staff who can see it are willing to boot people who just aren't playing. For the most part I think they are.