Just a grumbling female player...

[Ice Dragon]

7 minutes ago, Vince777 said:

I would agree entirely with this if they weren't actually using popular male characters such as the Black Knight and Joshua, who are banner worthy, as tempest rewards.

Literally everyone was expecting the Black Knight as a Grand Hero Battle, which is not functionally different from being a Tempest Trials reward.

You mention Joshua but choose to leave out the fact that Marisa was also very much banner-worthy (more so than Joshua from a marketing standpoint for the simple fact that she's female), but was also chosen to be a Tempest Trials reward.

[thecrimsonflash]

23 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

Literally everyone was expecting the Black Knight as a Grand Hero Battle, which is not functionally different from being a Tempest Trials reward.

You mention Joshua but choose to leave out the fact that Marisa was also very much banner-worthy (more so than Joshua from a marketing standpoint for the simple fact that she's female), but was also chosen to be a Tempest Trials reward.

So far we have only had one tempest reward unit rerun and there appears to be little to no indication of whether or not we will get another one (Masked Marth seems like a filler unit to me, so I feel like the example is unfair and BK is another anomaly (and a very popular villain) which I also dont think is reasonable to use as an example), GHBs have shown a pattern of reruns which at least gives us the idea that a +10 of one of them is a legitimate possibility, TT units (aside from the two anomalies I previously mentioned) have a weird feel to them, in that they feel so much more likely to never show up again. I certainly hope they offer some slightly better distribution in the future for some of them, maybe trading arena medals for limited units and other things which rotate every week in the arena just to give them some more use.

Yes they may be just as much units as any other but merges are far less easy to predict and this in turn hurts their arena variability.

Edited February 7, 2018 by thecrimsonflash

[Baldrick]

2 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:

You mention Joshua but choose to leave out the fact that Marisa was also very much banner-worthy (more so than Joshua from a marketing standpoint for the simple fact that she's female), but was also chosen to be a Tempest Trials reward.

Doesn't Marisa further undermine the argument that TT is used to get unpopular males into the game?

Edited February 7, 2018 by Baldrick

[Ice Dragon]

5 hours ago, Baldrick said:

Doesn't Marisa further undermine the argument that TT is used to get unpopular males into the game?

No, not really. Saying that "Marisa undermines the argument that Tempest Trials is used to get unpopular males into the game" is like saying "being able to transport your groceries from the grocery store to your house in your car undermines the argument that cars were designed to transport people". A bag of frozen vegetables being intended to be food doesn't make it any less food if you also use it as an ice pack.

[Baldrick]

51 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

No, not really. Saying that "Marisa undermines the argument that Tempest Trials is used to get unpopular males into the game" is like saying "being able to transport your groceries from the grocery store to your house in your car undermines the argument that cars were designed to transport people". A bag of frozen vegetables being intended to be food doesn't make it any less food if you also use it as an ice pack.

No, it really does. Your analogy would only work if both Marisa and (for example) Gerik were TT rewards; as it is, only one unit is added through TT, and the groceries (Marisa) being transported to the house (Heroes) means people (Gerik) aren't.

I can draw you a picture if it would help.

Edited February 7, 2018 by Baldrick

[Vince777]

10 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:

Literally everyone was expecting the Black Knight as a Grand Hero Battle, which is not functionally different from being a Tempest Trials reward.

You mention Joshua but choose to leave out the fact that Marisa was also very much banner-worthy (more so than Joshua from a marketing standpoint for the simple fact that she's female), but was also chosen to be a Tempest Trials reward.

Marisa fits as well but I left her out because we were discussing male units. 

 

[Ice Dragon]

5 hours ago, Baldrick said:

No, it really does. Your analogy would only work if both Marisa and (for example) Gerik were TT rewards; as it is, only one unit is added through TT, and the groceries (Marisa) being transported to the house (Heroes) means people (Gerik) aren't.

I can draw you a picture if it would help.

You can obviously make two trips with your car or have a friend pick up what you left behind. Unlike in real life, Gerik won't freeze to death by being left at the grocery store for 6 months waiting his turn to come home.

Nothing in this game needs to work on all-or-nothing criteria. Grand Hero Battles mostly consist of enemy-exclusive characters, but Robin and Xander don't fit that description. The summoning pool mostly consists of player-usable characters, but Reinhardt and Eldigan don't fit that, either.

Tempest Trials rewards is clearly the place to go to add less popular characters (Tobin, Clive, Arden, Corrin) (bringing home Gerik in the analogy), but it shares that role with things like adding characters that don't really fit anywhere else (Masked Marth) or throwing bones to the player base (Black Knight, Joshua, Marisa) (bringing home the groceries in the analogy).

 

The original argument, which it looks like we're losing sight of, is that Tempest Trials rewards have every reason to be male-dominated. Currently, half of the rewards fall in the bucket of "less popular characters", which is a male-dominated category, and that means the entire reward pool will be veritably male-dominated.

[Baldrick]

5 hours ago, Ice Dragon said:

You can obviously make two trips with your car or have a friend pick up what you left behind. Unlike in real life, Gerik won't freeze to death by being left at the grocery store for 6 months waiting his turn to come home.

6 months?

3 less popular characters have been added through TT in a year (NY Corrin is a Fates character, so popular by default seasonal alt). It will take decades if this is the only way they are added. Even if monthly mini-TTs become the norm, and they're exclusively used for less popular characters, it will take several years.

Yeah, Gerik might be the next one added, but he's barely unpopular. I'm thinking about characters outside the top 200.

Edited February 7, 2018 by Baldrick

[Ice Dragon]

15 minutes ago, Baldrick said:

3 less popular characters have been added through TT in a year (NY Corrin is a Fates character, so popular by default seasonal alt). It will take decades if this is the only way they are added. Even if monthly mini-TTs become the norm, and they're exclusively used for less popular characters, it will take several years.

I've been saying for a long time now that there is physically no way they'll ever get through all of the characters without an occasional mass dump of characters into the low-rarity summoning pool. If they are planning on getting to all of the characters, then there is guaranteed to be a mass dump at some point. If no mass dump is planned, then it's clear that the developers have no intention of ever getting through all of the characters.

In other words, it doesn't matter how slowly they add characters my means of Tempest Trials rewards because that's never going to make a dent anyways. You can think of this as getting a few characters from an upcoming mass dump ahead of schedule or something like that.

[Baldrick]

17 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

I've been saying for a long time now that there is physically no way they'll ever get through all of the characters without an occasional mass dump of characters into the low-rarity summoning pool. If they are planning on getting to all of the characters, then there is guaranteed to be a mass dump at some point. If no mass dump is planned, then it's clear that the developers have no intention of ever getting through all of the characters.

In other words, it doesn't matter how slowly they add characters my means of Tempest Trials rewards because that's never going to make a dent anyways. You can think of this as getting a few characters from an upcoming mass dump ahead of schedule or something like that.

Hopefully a mass dump is planned, then. Recent history suggests TT rewards are going to be popular characters from now on.

[Ice Dragon]

1 minute ago, Baldrick said:

Hopefully a mass dump is planned, then. Recent history suggests TT rewards are going to be popular characters from now on.

Recent history is Marisa, New Year Corrin, Masked Marth, Joshua, and Arden in reverse chronological order (that's also half of the total Tempest Trials so far). That literally suggests nothing unless your recent history is one data point or ignores everyone not named Marisa, Joshua, or the Black Knight.

[Baldrick]

37 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

Recent history is Marisa,

53rd in CYL1

37 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

New Year Corrin,

41st in CYL1

37 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

Masked Marth,

52nd in CYL1 (technically 2nd as well)

37 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

Joshua,

34th in CYL1

37 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

and Arden

93rd in CYL1 (At this point, I feel obliged to point out that CYL2 has only just finished and so didn't have any influence in deciding the existing TT reward units, because you'd probably make that argument otherwise.)

Is that enough data points for you?

Source: https://events.fire-emblem-heroes.com/vote/result?overall=1

[Ice Dragon]

36 minutes ago, Baldrick said:

(At this point, I feel obliged to point out that CYL2 has only just finished and so didn't have any influence in deciding the existing TT reward units, because you'd probably make that argument otherwise.)

You seem to think me some sort of swindler who tells white lies and half truths and cherry-picks his evidence. I haven't even looked at the CYL2 results yet other than the results images on the FEH Twitter and honestly have no idea where anyone placed outside of those images.

 

36 minutes ago, Baldrick said:

Is that enough data points for you?

No, it actually isn't. I suppose I should have made my point more clear, which I slacked on due to being at work.

I'm going to split the Tempest Trials into the first and second halves because otherwise the buckets are obviously too small to analyze. The first half included Masked Marth, Tobin, Clive, and the Black Knight. The second half included Arden, Joshua, and Marisa. I'm excluding Masked Marth from the second half due to being a repeat (and obviously being the filler for when they don't have anyone else planned to take the spot), and I'm excluding New Year Corrin for being a seasonal character.

The first half is split in half with Masked Marth and the Black Knight as popular characters and Tobin and Clive as less popular. The second half is also split in half with Joshua and Marisa as popular characters and Arden as less popular. There is no way to draw a conclusion on trends with so little to work with.

So guess what? The buckets are still simultaneously too small to analyze and too few to analyze even split everything into only two buckets. We're going to need another four or so new Tempest Trials rewards before we can get an accurate trend line going.

 

EDIT: One more thing from a marketing standpoint: Adding popular characters as free rewards is a good way to miss out on revenue. It's good to throw a bone now and then to keep the free players on board and handing out good reviews and advertising by word of mouth, but doing so repeatedly is going to both lose revenue from whales and alienate them by making favored characters less viable for their use. A free guaranteed +0 5-star character is great for free players, but nothing special to dolphins and whales, who generally expect to be able to get four or five copies of a character they want at the minimum.

Edited February 8, 2018 by Ice Dragon

[Baldrick]

Even though this isn't the mafia subforum, I'm making wallpost anyway.

Quote

I'm going to split the Tempest Trials into the first and second halves because otherwise the buckets are obviously too small to analyze. The first half included Masked Marth, Tobin, Clive, and the Black Knight. The second half included Arden, Joshua, and Marisa. I'm excluding Masked Marth from the second half due to being a repeat (and obviously being the filler for when they don't have anyone else planned to take the spot), and I'm excluding New Year Corrin for being a seasonal character.

There aren't enough data points, so you're going to remove data points? That's good logic... in Opposite Land!

Sorry, but your earlier post identified five units as "half the total Tempest Trials so far" so I'm not going to let you shift the goalposts. It's especially egregious how you're excluding Corrin: at first, you had him in the unpopular units category, but now that he's no longer helpful to your argument you want to exclude him. Repeat characters also allow for higher merges, so they're not just for filler.

Quote

The first half is split in half with Masked Marth and the Black Knight as popular characters and Tobin and Clive as less popular. The second half is also split in half with Joshua and Marisa as popular characters and Arden as less popular. There is no way to draw a conclusion on trends with so little to work with.

Putting Arden, who ranked in the top 100, in the same popularity category as Tobin and Clive, who ranked outside the top 600, is one hell of a swindle. So is the fact Arden is apparently two characters.

I did say recent history, but if you think we need to look at all ten data points as a whole in order to draw anything meaningful, I can do that. Two of the first three TT rewards were units outside the top 600, then the next seven rewards were units inside the top 100. This suggest a trend towards using more popular characters, but on its own it's not long enough to suggest that they definitely won't use less popular characters. However, there's context to look at; both the units outside the top 600 were featured in a remake that had been recently released, so we can speculate that they were included to advertise the new game to Heroes players to didn't follow the mainline series.

My conclusion is that TT units will be popular characters until a major event, like a remake, happens.

 

Quote

 

EDIT: One more thing from a marketing standpoint: Adding popular characters as free rewards is a good way to miss out on revenue. It's good to throw a bone now and then to keep the free players on board and handing out good reviews and advertising by word of mouth, but doing so repeatedly is going to both lose revenue from whales and alienate them by making favored characters less viable for their use. A free guaranteed +0 5-star character is great for free players, but nothing special to dolphins and whales, who generally expect to be able to get four or five copies of a character they want at the minimum.

Yeah, Marisa could easily have been a banner unit.

If Gleipnir!Eirika is any indication, their strategy is to put as many marketable characters in as possible. You'd be in a better position to judge how that affects the community, so whatever.

Edited February 8, 2018 by Baldrick

[Ice Dragon]

4 hours ago, Baldrick said:

There aren't enough data points, so you're going to remove data points? That's good logic... in Opposite Land!

Whether or not you have enough data points doesn't matter when you're deciding to remove data points. Using data points that are invalid results in junk conclusions. If you don't have enough data points, you don't have enough data points. Making up data or including invalid data is called bullshit in science and fraud in accounting.

 

4 hours ago, Baldrick said:

Sorry, but your earlier post identified five units as "half the total Tempest Trials so far" so I'm not going to let you shift the goalposts. It's especially egregious how you're excluding Corrin: at first, you had him in the unpopular units category, but now that he's no longer helpful to your argument you want to exclude him. Repeat characters also allow for higher merges, so they're not just for filler.

Then I'll add Corrin back into the unpopular category because he is still unpopular, not like I need to because of the next paragraph. But that still makes 2-2 and 2-2, which tells us nothing.

As for repeat characters, they are still filler. The relevant definition of filler here is "doesn't add to the character list" or "doesn't reduce the size of the list of characters that aren't yet in the game". Which is exactly why Corrin was also removed.

 

4 hours ago, Baldrick said:

Putting Arden, who ranked in the top 100, in the same popularity category as Tobin and Clive, who ranked outside the top 600, is one hell of a swindle. So is the fact Arden is apparently two characters.

2-to-2 and 2-to-1 are not statistically different from each other. In terms of counting statistics, those two ratios are "2±1.4 to 2±1.4" and "2±1.4 to 1±1", which is one hell of an overlap. That is why they are both "split half and half".

Arden is still in the "less popular" category. He's in exactly the same situation as Wrys, who placed 120th. Furthermore, Tobin and Clive were both riding on the heels of the Echoes release. Furthermore on top of that, "100" is a pretty damned arbitrary cutoff. I can just as easily say that Arden placed outside of the top 64 because I like powers of 2 more than powers of 10. That doesn't make me any more right than you to set the cutoff there.

Also, obviously, the CYL results are invalid for characters from Gaiden.

 

4 hours ago, Baldrick said:

I did say recent history, but if you think we need to look at all ten data points as a whole in order to draw anything meaningful, I can do that. Two of the first three TT rewards were units outside the top 600, then the next seven rewards were units inside the top 100. This suggest a trend towards using more popular characters, but on its own it's not long enough to suggest that they definitely won't use less popular characters. However, there's context to look at; both the units outside the top 600 were featured in a remake that had been recently released, so we can speculate that they were included to advertise the new game to Heroes players to didn't follow the mainline series.

I can just as easily argue that the popularity-over-time curve is sinusoidal. We started at ~50, dropped to ~600, and came back up to ~50, meaning we're due to drop back to ~600 for the next few. This conclusion is no more or less valid than yours (which is to say, it's not valid at all).

[Baldrick]

7 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

Then I'll add Corrin back into the unpopular category because he is still unpopular, not like I need to because of the next paragraph. But that still makes 2-2 and 2-2, which tells us nothing.

#41 is unpopular, #52 and #53 are popular?

7 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

2-to-2 and 2-to-1 are not statistically different from each other.

lol

7 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

 

In terms of counting statistics, those two ratios are "2±1.4 to 2±1.4" and "2±1.4 to 1±1", which is one hell of an overlap. That is why they are both "split half and half".

So you are saying 50%=66%??????????

7 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

Arden is still in the "less popular" category. He's in exactly the same situation as Wrys, who placed 120th.

Characters are popular for lots of reasons. Characterisation, gameplay, appearance. Who are you to say Arden and Wrys' popularity is less valid?

7 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

Furthermore on top of that, "100" is a pretty damned arbitrary cutoff. I can just as easily say that Arden placed outside of the top 64 because I like powers of 2 more than powers of 10. That doesn't make me any more right than you to set the cutoff there.

I could say top 200, top 500, top literally any number between 100 and 600 and it would be valid.

Regardless, you're the one who started the arbitrary cutoff in this post

7 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

Also, obviously, the CYL results are invalid for characters from Gaiden.

"It doesn't fit my narrative so it's invalid".

7 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

I can just as easily argue that the popularity-over-time curve is sinusoidal. We started at ~50, dropped to ~600, and came back up to ~50, meaning we're due to drop back to ~600 for the next few. This conclusion is no more or less valid than yours (which is to say, it's not valid at all).

lol

A sine wave is continuous. The CYL rankings for TT units are discrete.

[Ice Dragon]

2 hours ago, Baldrick said:

#41 is unpopular, #52 and #53 are popular?

CYL1 is obviously not an accurate measure of popularity, even if it's the best estimate we have.

 

2 hours ago, Baldrick said:

So you are saying 50%=66%??????????

It's obvious you don't know enough statistics to be able to discuss statistics.

 

2 hours ago, Baldrick said:

Characters are popular for lots of reasons. Characterisation, gameplay, appearance. Who are you to say Arden and Wrys' popularity is less valid?

Being a meme is none of those, and it shows. Meme-powered popularity with nothing of substance behind it drops like a rock once the joke gets old or people have any reason to care about something else (like getting special versions of characters they actually like). The fact that Arden's, Wrys's, Lot's, and Dorcas's placings all predictably dropped significantly, while nowhere near conclusive, at least supports this viewpoint.

 

2 hours ago, Baldrick said:

"It doesn't fit my narrative so it's invalid".

Are you living under a rock, or are you just trying to sound dumb? The release of Echoes obviously bumped up the visibility of Gaiden characters who were virtual unknowns during CYL1. Gauging the popularity of characters in Echoes relative to characters from other games based on a poll from before the release of Echoes is obviously flawed no longer how you look at it.

 

2 hours ago, Baldrick said:

A sine wave is continuous. The CYL rankings for TT units are discrete.

Lol. You clearly don't know what a regression function is.

I seriously advise you actually do some research before you continue to try to make snide comments at my arguments. You are simply making a fool out of yourself.