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September 06, 2005
Distribution of Leveling Times
Server Sample: RP (High), PvE (Medium), PvE (High), PvP (High), PvP (High)
Sampling Period: 8/07/2005 12:00 am - 8/14/2005 12:00 am
Sampling Resolution: ~12 minutes
Parsing Method: The sample unit is leveling event. We tabulate the time between a character's level and when we observe them at a new level. Only a player's online time is counted. We exclude the first leveling event from every character because it doesn't constitute the total amount of time to make that level.
Data Filter: None
Sample Size: 149,240 leveling events
To get a better sense of the distribution of leveling times - whether most people level fairly quickly and the overall mean is skewed by laggers - we calculated the normalized score for every leveling event based on the character level. We then plotted all the normalized scores.
Normalized Score = Z Score = (X - Mean) / Standard Deviation
The plot shows that most people actually do beat the overall mean (a z-score of 0). While the average time it takes to get from level 1 to 60 is now 15.3 days, the median is 13.9.
Posted at September 6, 2005 11:22 AM
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Comments
Does the data point keyed to a level, say "25" represent the amount of time it took to go from 24-25 or the time to the *next* level, i.e. 25-26? That would mean you should have data points from 2-60.
I thought I understood until I read the comment "We exclude the first leveling event from every character because it doesn't constitute the total amount of time to make that level."
Posted by: Eown at September 20, 2005 01:05 PM
The data point 25 is keyed as the time it took to get from 24-25. So, you're right, we would have the data points from 2-60.
The first leveling event is excluded because a character may be in the middle of a level when the logger first starts and thus would artificially deflate the overall leveling times.
I hope that clears things up.
Posted by: Nick Yee at September 22, 2005 12:10 PM
It would make more sense if you provided (X - Mean) / Mean instead of (X - Mean) / Standard Deviation. We don't know the value of Standard Deviation, anyway.
Posted by: Eugene at November 26, 2005 01:26 PM