Fed II Star - May 21, 2006

THE STATISTICS OF VOTING
by Monkey

I was reminiscing the other day; ahhhh, university days. Getting up at noon and rolling onto campus, a quick lecture spent drawing a "lecturer-destruct button" on the desk (how original) and then into the pub by 3pm. Well, that's how most of my friends spent their university days; I did a science degree. Far more work, but I never tire of trotting out this classic gag in vengeance: The science graduate asks, "why does it work?", the engineering graduate asks, "how does it work?", the economics graduate asks, "how much does it cost?" and the arts graduate asks, "Would you like fries with that?". Ho Ho Ho!!

Where was I? Ah yes, student days. Shared accommodation; the perpetually overflowing dustbin. You can tell a lot about someone's response to a full dustbin. You know that it needs to be done, but surely someone else will do it? You can always do it tomorrow and even stomp the rubbish down a bit to make more room. After all, it's not an activity that brings an obvious bounty of rewards.

You may be wondering what this has to do with Fed. To be honest, so am I, but I appear to be still typing so I'm hoping we end up somewhere vaguely relevant. Now, smooth as a cheese grater I shall change gears to talk about Fed voting. I bet you won't even notice. You see, the response to an overflowing bin is analogous to our response to requests by the Fed promotion team to vote. I'll be the first to admit that it's a rubbish analogy (ha ha ha , get it? Thank you! Thank you! .... I'm here all week!).

Statistically, only 25% of players vote. This is because most of us tend to look at it like an overflowing bin. Surely someone else will do it, and after all, it's not going to get me trader credits or pay off my ship loan. However, the stats show that someone else does not do it.

Consider this though: If 50% of us voted on a daily basis for the next 30 days, we would get to 3rd in the rankings. This may be a watershed position. The two games above us will be sufficiently "dungeony" to allow Fed's originality and uniqueness to attract a greater number of new players. Once there, we will have a greater player base such that even when we return to our 25% voting level it may be enough to maintain our position in 3rd. More players doesn't only mean more votes, it means more game expansion, greater scope for in-game profit making and once Founders are able to offer hauling jobs, there will be a group of willing newbods to ferry their cargo about the place.

So, how about we try to increase our efforts, for the next 30 days only? Lets see if we really can get to 3rd in the Mudconnect rankings. Come next month we will all be able to relax again and reap the benefits of our 30-day stint of hard work. I'm not asking you to vote every day (by all means, please do so if you can), but merely to vote twice as much as you currently do. And if you currently don't vote at all, just give us a few votes over the next month and see what happens. It literally takes about a minute. And unless your keyboard smells of old fish and rotten cabbage it's unlikely to be as odious a task as emptying the bins.