Hinten Mui.
Apologies for the late post, but Silsilay was lit. Today, we welcome back the Statistician for the third part of his series:
Welcome back to another episode of Spoontistics! Today, we'll examine the overall pacing of the game, and ultimately figure out if The Quota was necessary or if the Goderators just wanted to be evil.
Before we dig in to the math, let's talk a bit about the nature of the game. Just like any other fun strategy game, like Civilization, chess, go, Minecraft, or whatever, spoons has a beginning, midgame, and endgame. In the beginning, the game field is overly crowded, everyone is still new and stumbling around, and the very weak are eliminated. Once midgame comes around, the weak start to die off, and the strong must die off. Finally, in the endgame, full-on savagery occurs in ridiculous free-for-all immunities, as most people already know a good five spooners above and below them on the kill chain. I'd say that as of now, we're somewhere between the midgame and endgame.
Why does this all matter? Because pacing! For the game to work, there must be exactly one player remaining at the end of the last day, and the Goderators must control the kill rate so that this occurs successfully. If the pacing is off, some portions of the game will be weird. Let's look at a few different kill rate scenarios to see what happens:
These graphs tell you how many people are alive at different points in the game. How far up is how many people are left, and how far right is how many days have passed. The dotted vertical line is the end of the game.
In the first chart, the kill rate is too fast. People are dying too quickly. Graphically, the slope is too steep. As a result, everyone's dead before the endgame -- so we don't get to enjoy embarassing and exciting free-for-all immunities. There's no suspense. That's not cool.
On the other hand, in the second chart, the kill rate is too slow. The line isn't steep enough. Not enough people are dying, so there's no winner on the last day because too many people are still left. This scenario isn't cool either because the endgame is too crowded and the game doesn't finish on schedule.
Instead, the best case scenario is the goldilocks situation, where the kill rate is just right so that we end up with one winner after the final day of spoons. If we hit this rate, each portion of the game will be perfectly in proportion and people will be happy. So what exactly is this magical kill rate? There's 265 OG spooners, all but one of whom must die within the 60 days of the game, so... 4.4 kills/day.
How are we doing right now?
Surprisingly, the current kill rate is pretty close to the goldilocks rate -- as of today, we're averaging 4.65 kills a day! (It's actually a bit higher, probably because we just had an immunity day yesterday.) Still, it's pretty impressive that our pacing is so perfect, considering that the kill rate is completely out of the Goderators' control. Or is it?
The Goderators have two main ways to control pacing: adjusting the difficulty of the immunities, or introducing quotas. Quotas can incentivize people to kill and thus increase the average kill rate when it's too low. Indeed, as of Day 32, when the Goderators informed us of the quota, the average kill rate was only 4.13 kills/day, which is less than the goldilocks rate. (This was after WASC week, a particularly slow, rainy week, so it's no surprise.) So there really was a reason for the quota!
However, by the time the Quota actually rolled around a week later, on Day 39, the average daily kill rate was back up to 4.41 kills/day -- basically spot on the goldilocks rate. That's impressive! It suggests that the Quota worked and made people want to kill more!
(As an interesting side interesting note: Only 14 people died to the quota. That means that people who were good at staying alive were also pretty good at killing. I wonder if there's a correlation between a spooner's ability to survive (defense) and ability to kill (offense) ... maybe this is a topic for a later spoontistics ;)
So to conclude, The Quota was in fact necessary for keeping the kill rate on schedule, at 4.4 kills/day! When The Quota was announced, the rate was too low, at 4.13 kills/day, but after the Quota, we were right back on schedule, at 4.41 kills/day. Yipee. That's it for today, thanks for tuning in!
We have the story of a pretty interesting kill, but we'll save it for tomorrow. It's been a long day. Just like this coming week is going to be a long week for all of you still in the game. Until next time!