Nalates wrote:
That somewhat miss characterizes studies. Studies generally work to get statistically significant numbers of people involved. Those dealing with games usually have large numbers of people involved, often millions. But, we would need to define small and large to be clear in what we are saying
Okay, let's talk some numbers. There 7 billion people on the planet. Even if a hypothetical study was done that involved 7 million of those people. It would account for .001 percent of the population. Or, to put it another way, there's over 200 million registered voters in the US, if a political originization polled say 2 million of those Americans and asked them "should we abolish the first amendment" and 30 percent said yes. That doesn't mean 30 percent of the population thinks that we should get rid of freedom of speech. That means 30 percent of 1% of the population does. IE 600,000 of the 200,000,000 or to put back into percentages. .003 percent of registered voters. However the mass media will instead use the polling figures and say "30% of those polled" put the poll number of 2 million regsitered voters, without saying how small of the percentage of registered voters that is, and thus how small a percentage people think that way actually is. That my friend is why these studies tend to skew the numbers in favor of a particular idea or theory.
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A point you both seem to disbelieve is that humans in general are predictable, even down to the time they will do things. I get you don't believe it. But we (humans) have the data to prove my position. We now have the ability study hundreds of millions of humans and find commonalities and majority preferences. Businesses and politicians are exploiting it. We too can learn from it. While I can prove my point I am pretty sure you can't provide reason or proof to ignore knowledge.
And again, even if you studied the actions of 700 million people, you've cracked 10 percent of the population. To get any kind of accurate view you'd IMO need to study 3.5 BILLION. That's 50 percent.
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People think any single human can be an exception to a rule. But, the more we learn the less true that seems to be, that just puts them in another group of hundreds of thousands making same choices. Science and Discover channels have shows reveal how we thing
Yes and Science and Discovery channels also have shows like "Secrets of Secret Societies" and History Channel puts out things like "Ancient Aliens' and "Book of Secrets". So I really wouldn't suggest using anything you see on TV as something to bolster one's argument anymore than quoting from wikipedia. It may be a lot harder to track down the actual science and facts but at least you know those are reliable.
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No actually P&G has it down to the week... and they have taken it far beyond paper as have other industries and political systems.
That's because there's a very big difference between what companies like P&G and Google do as far as being able to predict human behavior. Google for example does it by your individual searches through their engine. They can predict your behavior because your google account saves the information on your searches so that they can tailer ads etc to the individual themselves. In other words they don't predict it based on studies but rather on you actually putting information, on a daily basis, into their search engine. Which BTW is the same information they then feed to the NSA etc via Prism.
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Both you and tommyap are arguing for letting people remain ignorant and ignore hard won knowledge because of your opinions and assumptions rather then digging into facts and existing knowledge.
Please do not assume I'm doing anything of the sort, thats your opinion not a fact.
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Again you assume I am talking to those doing development work. Also, you think I want to tell you WHAT to do. I don't. Go develop whatever you want. If you have well considered it, your resulting work will take off. If it doesn't... you missed something and can try again. I am more interested in helping new people avoid the repeating the mistakes we have already made.
Just because YOU believe something is a mistake doesn't make it a mistake. That's akin to saying Uru failed because the idea behind it was flawed. Obviously that's not so because we're all still here because we believe in that idea. Uru failed for a number of reasons but the core idea of it is sound, but the technology behind it was not feasible yet. Just because one type of bot didn't work out doesn't mean ALL bots are not going to work out.
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True. But I do not need to be up to day on everything to know someone repeating a previously failed effort needs to be clued into what is going on and try to get them thinking. You also make too many assumptions about what I do or follow.
Again you use the term failure. Until you can prove with verifiable evidence something is a failure. You don't say it's a failure. You say "You believe it's a failure" but not that it is. That is the difference between opinion, and fact.
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...and again... this thread is mostly objecting to having people learn from studies and past experience. Agreed, not my point on player retention. I previously pointed out I posted this thread because another was locked where people were discounting information in favor of trying things already known to fail.
Yes I know, I posted in that thread before it was locked.
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I've made no assertions as to what developers are doing. You seem to have taken personal offense at something and try to go down a path I never addressed.
I haven't taken personal offense. I don't get personally offended by what anonymous people post on forums or message boards. You however have a bad way of putting out generalized statements sometimes that one can easily read into as being something different than what it actually is.
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One of my points is people imagine how things are rather than finding out. You imagine what you think I think about those developing improved ages and overall game play in Uru and begin inferring from there. You are reading far more into my writing than I am putting in there.
Then I would suggest you not put generalized statements in and try and do a better job of enunciating your beliefs so that people don't read too into them. 
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I've never said you aren't making use of outside information. I am saying I think it is valuable for those about to repeat our mistakes of the past. Surely you don't think you are doing that?
When you respond, to someone you know for A FACT is a long standing community member, and content developer, someone who is consistently pushing to put new content into Uru, and working on a consistent basis to try and improve the game, and you respond to that person with things like this:
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You seem to have missed the thrust of what I am pushing, that what needs to be done to improve Uru and make it more interesting is a well researched subject, game development.
It can give the impression that you believe the person you're conversing with hasn't done just that. Now if you had perhaps added to that statement something like :
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There are some of course, that I don't think have done that research yet, and I'd like to try and push them to do so.
It isn't so generalized anymore more.