"Bite-Sized" Guild Chat Livestream Notes

From twitch chat :

When will we get the next raid wing?

...

Brin5tar: You will learn about that when we are ready to release that information.

:((

Yeah, I'm not surprised, though. ArenaNet's products (and HoT in particular) are very popular, and there are many obvious (but not useless) demographic axes with roughly predictable audience distributions. For a product like that, information flow can have strong implications for the financial future.

Modelling the flow of information--what bit of information is released, when the bit of information is released (relative to other events of importance), where (i.e. in some kind of graph of "locations" with added structure; determined from web analytics etc.) it is released, etc.--requires a back-and-forth process in which problem scale is determined; predictions and objectives are compared with historical/simulated data and trajectories; modelling and measurement techniques are synthesized and refined; and new measurements/simulations and predictions are determined based on the shortcomings and potential improvements revealed in the work up until the present.

As a really rough example, (personal opinions follow): I think any useful and meaningful measure of the fanbase's "average 1-10 Good-or-Bad Feeling" based on (modelled) information flow into and out of this subreddit would be pretty good at predicting the relative direction and magnitude of the effects from "short 'patch notes' official forum posts" on the GW2 MetaCritic score. (*Assuming that we can measure the MC score directly from the MC site, and that an incorrectly-cited MC score on mentioned on reddit has no effect. It also helps to assume some complicated but basic things, such as "information flowing outward" can be observed in the same way that "information flowing inward" can be observed.)

A lot of the development would be heuristic, but that is par for the course in this field of application. Relative to similar problems, work on something like this is comparatively limited by the number of parameters that can be controlled and the number of quantities that can be measured at each scale; the flexibility of measurement methods available for each of those quantities; and the lack of non-proprietary data for any well-known multiscale systems similar to the "GW2redditSays - GW2MCResponds" (i.e. systems similar enough system to make the data useful, not different enough to obfuscate trends we want to observe that are not completely accidental).

/r/Guildwars2 Thread Parent