Megawads have the best visibility, followed by wads from /0-9

[printz]

I ran some analysis on the list of single-player wads by popularity as linked from my signature, and I've noticed that megawads and wads starting at the beginning of the list tend to be more visible to players and will get more reviews.

Here's a list of charts for Doom, Doom ports, Doom 2, Doom 2 ports, Heretic and Hexen. See for yourself.



Keep in mind: the smaller the number, the more reviews it has! Because it's the average of ranks (as from my list) per directory. Again, megawads and 0-9 and others from the start tend to be the most visible wads. This means that you'd do better to upload stuff that goes there.

[Angry Saint]

Not really clear to me.

What did you put on the ordinate?

[printz]

The ordinate is the average rank of the folder. It's a value between 1 and 8000something (the number of /idgames entries listed). 1 is the first place and belongs to Ghoul3.zip. See the link in my sig for what ranks the wads have. A folder should have an average of 4000something to be balanced. If it has less than it (and appears small on the graph), it means its wads are too popular. If it has more, it means its wads are too obscure.

Basically what the graphs say is the user popularity of each /idgames folder, where smaller values = more popular. Larger values = more obscure.

You can see that people flock to Doom and Doom 2 Ports zips (way less than 4000 rank average, unlike the non-ports which tend to be 5000-6000), and strangely to Hexen ones (it might be that famous megawads like Wolfen or Resurrection tend to pull the average strongly down).

[PsychoGoatee]

Very interesting stuff. Though to be fair, how many reviews something has might not be a 100% indicator of ranking popularity. I wonder if some years just had more people reviewing things than other years, etc.

The lurker is a powerful force. :D

Still, it's certainly some degree of an indicator. It is kind of funny that people go in alphabetical order and 0-9 gets the most reviews.

[Angry Saint]

printz, thank you for your explanation, now it is clear and very interesting.

PsychoGoatee said:

I wonder if some years just had more people reviewing things than other years, etc.

It would be interesting to plot the popularity against the years to see if there has been an increase in the wad quality.

[scifista42]

I'm not at all surprised that "megawads" get the most reviews - they have the biggest amount of content to potentially comment upon, the greatest potential to be remembered, acquire some level of fame and attract players and reviewers.

I suppose that "0-9" took the 2nd place because there is relatively little amount of wads named like this, and a few well-known ones improved their average score (1024 series, 32-in-24 series, and the ones from the first page of printz's "Top /idgames WADs" list).

I think the diagram would be more fair if you analyzed and averaged the review count itself and not the rank based on review count. I wonder how same or how different would the result be.