Jump to content

The non-trading community's views on unusual effects


MeFigaYoma

Recommended Posts

So Cosmic Afro made this new video about the results of his 1,797 response poll which asked his viewers on their opinions of the best unusual effect from each series. The video itself isn't that interesting, but I thought you guys might be interested in the results, since it doesn't exactly line up with the views of the "average trader." I've also included a summary in words of the answers and the most SHOCKING [GONE SEXUAL] YOU WON'T BELIEVE NUMBER 12 data.

 

Direct link to the results: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TDOGE-Z9b1jOvgn3Hwdp2XOmvNl3JBOFlwJ-cNvtao8/edit

 

Main gen:

1st gen: A lot of people really like TF Logo...it's the top non-god-tier effect

2nd gen: About as expected, Blizzardy > Stormy > Orbiting Fire > Planets > others...blizzardy at the top may be due to a "Mr. Paladin bias" or maybe just because it's more visible.

3rd gen: Exactly as expected, Disco Beat Down > Miami Nights > everything else

 

Halloween:

2011: Cloudy Moon, duh

2012: Secret > Knifestorm = Harvest Moon > others

2013: Spellbound > Pentagrams > Bats?!? :thinking: If you consider all three pentagrams they're about equal to Spellbound + Arcana, but Spellbound is apparently 3 times as popular as Arcana?...and nobody likes bats?

2014: Bonzo lul (probable ArraySeven bias, but I'm sure bonzo would win even ignoring that)

2015: Death by Disco > Eldritch > Trail > Mystery/Puzzle

2016 (including taunts): Tesla Coil > Neutron Star >>> others, with Infernal Flames at the top

It's important to note that when there's a choice between multiple of the same effect with different coloring, purple is always the winner by far, while green and orange are usually tied.

 

Robo:

Time Warp / Green Black Hole >>> Anti-Freeze / Roboactive >>> everything else

 

All taunt effects:

Infernal Flames is top, nowhere near the other halloween effects; again showing that purple is the clear favorite.

 

End of the Line:

Frostbite > Death at Dusk > Molten Mallard > Morning Glory :thinking::thinking::thinking:

 

Invasion:

...

 

Unusual Weapons:

Isotope > Cool > Energy Orb > Hot - yes, Cool is 3 times as popular as Hot...

 

This information may be useful to see what could sell to non-traders (i.e. full buyout in pure B)), and in general to see what effects at the same price range are considered "better" by the non-trading community. Thoughts?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

28 minutes ago, MeFigaYoma said:

Robo:

Time Warp / Green Black Hole >>> Anti-Freeze / Roboactive >>> everything else

Heheheh time to triple the B/O on my Timewarp Hat

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This is soo weird and unexpected , I've traded a shit ton of hats and molten is not better than morning glory from any view point , a lot of these results have surprised me 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, MeFigaYoma said:

This information may be useful to see what could sell to non-traders (i.e. full buyout in pure B)), and in general to see what effects at the same price range are considered "better" by the non-trading community. Thoughts?

 

^^

For the most part, the results came out like I expected (disco best 3rd gen, blizz/stormy best 2nd, ext) but I found it super weird how mallard would beat morning glory or that time warp/gbh would beat anti-freeze or roboactive. One thing I do think is worth pointing out is that the poll only asked for people's favorite effect, not top 3 or whatnot, meaning the data is skewed in the direction of the obvious runaway. For example, abduction could be super popular but it comes out doing horribly simply because nebula is vastly considered the best invasion effect by a longshot. (This is also obvious with the bat effects, as halloween 2103 is stacked af) If you are trying to use this data to know what hats will sell for pure for example, it also is skewed as it, unlike people looking to buy unusuals, doesn't take into account the prices and availbility of the effects. Again, even though nebula ran away with the victory in the invasion category, when you factor in prices, I bet abduction/atomic would easily beat it out. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

25 minutes ago, Apo said:

The "non-trading" community. 

So, F2Ps? People who will never trade..?

 

Irrelevant for trading.

 

not really. This is a good snapshot of the people who would buy unusuals to keep, not to try and make profit with, which is still super useful in knowing what effects sell well.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

You can't poll 1800 people and say that's the "non-trading community's" opinion. That's not how statistics work. Admittedly, I don't give a crap about TF2 but i know how math works and I know that there are still around 50,000 users who have the game open at any given time. If you're going to make a mathematical statement on here and try to cite statistics they better be damn accurate. Yours aren't.

 

Not everyone has TF2 at open all times this poll gives us no insight. I'd estimate it's at best 2% of the size of actual size of the non-trading community as a whole. I bet there are still 200,000 people who say they are tf2 players. Not to mention people who boot up the game once a month or whatever.

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, Rosalina said:

You can't poll 1800 people and say that's the "non-trading community's" opinion. That's not how statistics work. Admittedly, I don't give a crap about TF2 but i know how math works and I know that there are still around 50,000 users who have the game open at any given time. if you're going to make a mathematically inaccurate statement on here and try to cite statistics they better be damn accurate. Yours aren't.

 

Not everyone has TF2 at open all times this poll gives us no insight. I'd estimate it's at best 2% of the size of actual size of the non-trading community as a whole. I bet there are still 200,000 people who say they are tf2 players. Not to mention people who boot up the game once a month or whatever.

 

 

 

1,800 player's out of 50,000 absolutely counts as a representative sample, at least from a pure numbers standpoint.  Now, if the entire sample consists of 12 year old Koreans, that's obviously not representative, but assuming it's random, it's representative.  Many quantitative studies are done on much lower sample sizes than this. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

53 minutes ago, Gren said:

 

1,800 player's out of 50,000 absolutely counts as a representative sample, at least from a pure numbers standpoint.  Now, if the entire sample consists of 12 year old Koreans, that's obviously not representative, but assuming it's random, it's representative.  Many quantitative studies are done on much lower sample sizes than this. 

Those 1800 people are going to be mostly comprised of Cosmic Afro's fans. It's not "random" from the entire playerbase.

I'd argue that most of the non-trading playerbase don't watch Cosmic Afro. Meaning the 1800 players is not only miniscule, compared to the (probably) 200,000+ monthly unique players.... (I'd say at least half, probably more, would count as "non-trading" users) But, it is also representative of a smaller sub-community.

I'd also argue that some traders responded to the poll, skewing the results as well. Who moderated the responses to make sure no traders responded?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Who even is Cosmic Afro? Is this tier list somewhere definitive or did you just make it up? Even if I did, have you ever studied statistical analysis? I don't care about any tier list, does that make me a "non-trader" to you? Is there a graph? Checks for double-votes, ways to define how many voters actually trade? Uncertainties numerically and/or represented visually (error bars)? Better hypotheses than citing "favor for purple" and more people I haven't heard of? 

8 hours ago, TheVirtualEconomist said:

 

not really. This is a good snapshot of the people who would buy unusuals to keep, not to try and make profit with, which is still super useful in knowing what effects sell well.

For somebody named TheVirtualEconomist you should know this isn't really a good snapshot of anything. 1800 people out of tens of thousands of possible people who would buy things to keep? No relevant data on which ones will ever even buy anything? This is only based on taste anyways, what about all of the other non-price determinants for demand like price of substitutes, complements (gotta have a full cosmetic set), income (everybody gets Christmas money?) (Supply though not necessarily determinant-wise is relevant, a huge influx of supply such as double percentage unusual unbox or a lot of people selling the same hat?) ? Another reason why this is a horrid representation is because you have to take into account things like the (in)elasticity of each effect's supply curve (whether or not you can still unbox it and how many of each one there are regardless of taste). What about marketing? Most of those higher-tier effects have no way of reaching the average "one-n-done" buyer, they're likely to use a service like scrap.tf which doesn't often stock them, so they're even less relevant. You'd have to do things a lot differently to get a "good snapshot" if you ask me

Link to comment
Share on other sites

11 hours ago, Gren said:

 

1,800 player's out of 50,000 absolutely counts as a representative sample, at least from a pure numbers standpoint.  Now, if the entire sample consists of 12 year old Koreans, that's obviously not representative, but assuming it's random, it's representative.  Many quantitative studies are done on much lower sample sizes than this. 

 

You didn't even read my post. If you look at the current "in game count" you will see there are about 50,000. At its daily peak TF2 typically has 63,000 - 69,000 in-game users. Due to timezone differences and other things it's clear that there are far, far,  far more than even 70,000 people who play TF2.  If you think TF2 has only 50k users you're absolutely crazy, lol. Even saying 200,000 users is likely a slight underestimate. 

As much as TF2 is dying (which it is... you can look at the decreasing activity size). It's the trading community that's dying more than anything. People are still playing the game. It's a F2P game on steam. Sure it's smaller than overwatch but not everyone can afford to play overwatch, right now.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

19 hours ago, TheVirtualEconomist said:

 

^^

For the most part, the results came out like I expected (disco best 3rd gen, blizz/stormy best 2nd, ext) but I found it super weird how mallard would beat morning glory or that time warp/gbh would beat anti-freeze or roboactive. One thing I do think is worth pointing out is that the poll only asked for people's favorite effect, not top 3 or whatnot, meaning the data is skewed in the direction of the obvious runaway. For example, abduction could be super popular but it comes out doing horribly simply because nebula is vastly considered the best invasion effect by a longshot. (This is also obvious with the bat effects, as halloween 2103 is stacked af) If you are trying to use this data to know what hats will sell for pure for example, it also is skewed as it, unlike people looking to buy unusuals, doesn't take into account the prices and availbility of the effects. Again, even though nebula ran away with the victory in the invasion category, when you factor in prices, I bet abduction/atomic would easily beat it out. 

All good points. The "favorite" bias is definitely obvious in some of these cases, especially the 1st gen effects (I'd be inerested to see what people's "2nd tier" opinions of first gen effects are), some of the Halloween effects, and Invasion. Price information and availability information is deliberately not included as this is supposed to be a sample of what effects people would choose if they could choose any. I've seen hundreds of "tier lists" posted on various forums over the years, but this is the first fairly large-scale (i.e. not just people reading a certain post on a trading website) poll I've seen so far on this subject.

 

@Rosalina @Apo @HarryG I'm not writing a research paper. I'm merely showcasing the results of an informal poll conducted by a youtuber. Of course there are statistical innaccuracies, and of course Cosmic Afro's fanbase doesn't map perfectly to the entire TF2 community. I'm not presenting this as the definitive tier list you should use for all occasions. I just found a video that piqued my interest, and I thought I would share it with you guys in the hope that you would find it useful, informative, or entertaining. Judging by the other replies to this thread, I have succeeded.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, MeFigaYoma said:

All good points. The "favorite" bias is definitely obvious in some of these cases, especially the 1st gen effects (I'd be inerested to see what people's "2nd tier" opinions of first gen effects are), some of the Halloween effects, and Invasion. Price information and availability information is deliberately not included as this is supposed to be a sample of what effects people would choose if they could choose any. I've seen hundreds of "tier lists" posted on various forums over the years, but this is the first fairly large-scale (i.e. not just people reading a certain post on a trading website) poll I've seen so far on this subject.

 

@Rosalina @Apo @HarryG I'm not writing a research paper. I'm merely showcasing the results of an informal poll conducted by a youtuber. Of course there are statistical innaccuracies, and of course Cosmic Afro's fanbase doesn't map perfectly to the entire TF2 community. I'm not presenting this as the definitive tier list you should use for all occasions. I just found a video that piqued my interest, and I thought I would share it with you guys in the hope that you would find it useful, informative, or entertaining. Judging by the other replies to this thread, I have succeeded.

First of all, it looks to me like the replies are largely negative. Secondly, I was more talking to the self-christened "Virtual Economist" 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 hours ago, Rosalina said:

 

You didn't even read my post. If you look at the current "in game count" you will see there are about 50,000. At its daily peak TF2 typically has 63,000 - 69,000 in-game users. Due to timezone differences and other things it's clear that there are far, far,  far more than even 70,000 people who play TF2.  If you think TF2 has only 50k users you're absolutely crazy, lol. Even saying 200,000 users is likely a slight underestimate. 

As much as TF2 is dying (which it is... you can look at the decreasing activity size). It's the trading community that's dying more than anything. People are still playing the game. It's a F2P game on steam. Sure it's smaller than overwatch but not everyone can afford to play overwatch, right now.

 

Even if there were a million active users, 1,800 would still be representative, provided the sample was truly random (which it isn't).  Numbers wise though, it checks out. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, MeFigaYoma said:

 

@Rosalina @Apo @HarryG I'm not writing a research paper. I'm merely showcasing the results of an informal poll conducted by a youtuber. Of course there are statistical innaccuracies, and of course Cosmic Afro's fanbase doesn't map perfectly to the entire TF2 community. I'm not presenting this as the definitive tier list you should use for all occasions. I just found a video that piqued my interest, and I thought I would share it with you guys in the hope that you would find it useful, informative, or entertaining. Judging by the other replies to this thread, I have succeeded.

Well;

On 9/1/2017 at 11:21 AM, MeFigaYoma said:

This information may be useful to see [...] what effects at the same price range are considered "better" by the non-trading community. Thoughts?

This isn't a personal attack.

You asked for our thoughts, we gave our thoughts.

If you disagree, feel free to give a rebuttal. Alternatively, you may already agree, otherwise, we can agree to disagree.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 9/1/2017 at 0:21 PM, MeFigaYoma said:

This information may be useful to see what could sell to non-traders (i.e. full buyout in pure B))

Full buyout in pure will not happen. They are non-traders, why would they have pure? If anything it would be item for item.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

13 minutes ago, V1nce said:

Full buyout in pure will not happen. They are non-traders, why would they have pure? If anything it would be item for item.

You get this around Christmas time. I sold a couple of unusuals for full pure from people who bought the keys with their Christmas money.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...
On 9/1/2017 at 8:15 PM, HarryG said:

Who even is Cosmic Afro? Is this tier list somewhere definitive or did you just make it up? Even if I did, have you ever studied statistical analysis? I don't care about any tier list, does that make me a "non-trader" to you? Is there a graph? Checks for double-votes, ways to define how many voters actually trade? Uncertainties numerically and/or represented visually (error bars)? Better hypotheses than citing "favor for purple" and more people I haven't heard of? 

For somebody named TheVirtualEconomist you should know this isn't really a good snapshot of anything. 1800 people out of tens of thousands of possible people who would buy things to keep? No relevant data on which ones will ever even buy anything? This is only based on taste anyways, what about all of the other non-price determinants for demand like price of substitutes, complements (gotta have a full cosmetic set), income (everybody gets Christmas money?) (Supply though not necessarily determinant-wise is relevant, a huge influx of supply such as double percentage unusual unbox or a lot of people selling the same hat?) ? Another reason why this is a horrid representation is because you have to take into account things like the (in)elasticity of each effect's supply curve (whether or not you can still unbox it and how many of each one there are regardless of taste). What about marketing? Most of those higher-tier effects have no way of reaching the average "one-n-done" buyer, they're likely to use a service like scrap.tf which doesn't often stock them, so they're even less relevant. You'd have to do things a lot differently to get a "good snapshot" if you ask me

 

I know I'm a few days late, but you are taking this waaay too seriously. This was a cool poll. Nobody said it was a perfect representation of the TF2 playerbase and it certainly wasn't meant to be a statistic major's capstone project. Take it as it is. Also, I don't understand why you have to insult me on the basis of my YouTube name. I don't have to be objectively, without a doubt,  100% "right" all the time to call myself what I do, and it honestly just sounds like you don't like me because of who I am. In the end, I said some things you disagreed with. It is what it is.

 

On 9/2/2017 at 7:41 AM, MeFigaYoma said:

 

@Rosalina @Apo @HarryG I'm not writing a research paper. I'm merely showcasing the results of an informal poll conducted by a youtuber. Of course there are statistical innaccuracies, and of course Cosmic Afro's fanbase doesn't map perfectly to the entire TF2 community. I'm not presenting this as the definitive tier list you should use for all occasions. I just found a video that piqued my interest, and I thought I would share it with you guys in the hope that you would find it useful, informative, or entertaining. Judging by the other replies to this thread, I have succeeded.

 

Another way of saying what I just said.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

15 hours ago, TheVirtualEconomist said:

 

I know I'm a few days late, but you are taking this waaay too seriously. This was a cool poll. Nobody said it was a perfect representation of the TF2 playerbase and it certainly wasn't meant to be a statistic major's capstone project. Take it as it is. Also, I don't understand why you have to insult me on the basis of my YouTube name. I don't have to be objectively, without a doubt,  100% "right" all the time to call myself what I do, and it honestly just sounds like you don't like me because of who I am. In the end, I said some things you disagreed with. It is what it is.

 

 

Another way of saying what I just said.

A statistic major? Everything I provided was high school level economics. Secondly, nobody 'insulted you on the basis of your Youtube (?) name' (If you have a Youtube I've never heard of it, TheVirtualEconomist is what your name on here is which is why I referred to you as such) or 'doesn't like you', I'm just pointing out that the aforementioned data doesn't really mean anything, like many others in this thread have done, while citing some ways that somebody could look into analyzing data in an economic point of view, as a reply to you, somebody who I assumed would be able to see that point of view given your name, TheVirtualEconomist. Thirdly, nobody said you had to be 100% "right" all the time, that just seems like you're being unnecessarily defensive in reply to something that wasn't an attack. Fourth and finally, I don't have a clue "what you do", I don't even know what that statement means so I can't really address it. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 9/1/2017 at 8:15 PM, HarryG said:

Who even is Cosmic Afro?

 

On 9/1/2017 at 8:15 PM, HarryG said:

Better hypotheses than citing "favor for purple" and more people I haven't heard of? [presumably talking about Mr. Paladin]

 

2 hours ago, HarryG said:

If you have a Youtube I've never heard of it

 

Sorry to derail your argument, but at this point I'm starting to wonder what youtubers you have heard of...you seem to believe that if you haven't heard of something it's not important. Not the best attitude to have in a thread with the sole purpose of sharing information I personally found interesting and that I'm hoping others have not yet heard about.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

14 minutes ago, MeFigaYoma said:

 

Sorry to derail your argument, but at this point I'm starting to wonder what youtubers you have heard of...you seem to believe that if you haven't heard of something it's not important. Not the best attitude to have in a thread with the sole purpose of sharing information I personally found interesting and that I'm hoping others have not yet heard about.

I only have heard of major TF2 Youtubers from when I started TF2 with the exception of names I pick up while actually playing the game or hopping on trade servers. I think it's important that certain background information is provided when you mention somebody in case people have not heard about them (the point of your thread like you said). That is true, if I have not heard of something, then it isn't important to me, obviously, because I haven't heard of it. If I learn of something's impact on the community (if any), then it becomes a factor in the data. That's what sharing information at its base is.  If you expect me to care about something, you can't just drop a name without explaining who they are or say something like "my Youtube name" when there's no link to your Youtube anywhere. That's just an obscure cultural reference to me at that point.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, HarryG said:

That is true, if I have not heard of something, then it isn't important to me, obviously, because I haven't heard of it.

If you dismiss anything you haven't heard of, how do you learn of anything new? I don't understand the logic here.

 

2 minutes ago, HarryG said:

If you expect me to care about something, you can't just drop a name without explaining who they are or say something like "my Youtube name" when there's no link to your Youtube anywhere. That's just an obscure cultural reference to me at that point.

Did you know that Michael Jackson died in 2009?

 

Alternatively, you could just, you know, google it...instead of expecting everyone else to give you refernces to every piece of information you haven't heard of (speaking of which, how is anyone supposed to know what you have and have not heard of?)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

33 minutes ago, MeFigaYoma said:

If you dismiss anything you haven't heard of, how do you learn of anything new? I don't understand the logic here.

 

Did you know that Michael Jackson died in 2009?

 

Alternatively, you could just, you know, google it...instead of expecting everyone else to give you refernces to every piece of information you haven't heard of (speaking of which, how is anyone supposed to know what you have and have not heard of?)

Because I stated in the thread that I hadn't heard of it, and I'm giving my feedback ambiguously in the thread asking what we think about what you had to say? This is kind of stupid, you're kind of just stabbing at air right now with bad and immature attempts at roasts, I was right, and I said what I had to say so I'm declaring this thread no longer worth the candle. I'm done here.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, MeFigaYoma said:

If you dismiss anything you haven't heard of, how do you learn of anything new? I don't understand the logic here.

 

Did you know that Michael Jackson died in 2009?

Eh, comparing a TF2ber to MJ is an unfair comparison. Way more people know who MJ is. Also, MJ has more significance to more people than any TF2ber does.

 

 

Something more fair:

Did you know X did Y at Z?

 

If the significance of the figure/event/etc. (X, Y, & Z) is unknown to someone, then it is not important to them (at that time). If the significance is explained, then that person may (or might not) find the figure/event/etc. important.

 

Per your MJ example:

1:Did you know that Michael Jackson died in 2009?

2:Who is that? (I don't know who this is, this information has no relevancy to me.)

1(Should say):Influential Pop Singer, "King of Pop," etc.

1(Should not say):Google it.

 

5 hours ago, MeFigaYoma said:

Alternatively, you could just, you know, google it...instead of expecting everyone else to give you refernces to every piece of information you haven't heard of (speaking of which, )how is anyone supposed to know what you have and have not heard of?)

5 hours ago, MeFigaYoma said:

Not the best attitude to have in a thread with the sole purpose of sharing information I personally found interesting and that I'm hoping others have not yet heard about.

The sole purpose of this thread is that you'd like to share information, which is respectable.

But if you're telling someone in that same thread to 'just google your questions about it,' then I'd say that completely defeats the purpose of a forum discussion thread.

 

You also asked (probably hypothetically) "how is anyone supposed to know what you have and have not heard of?"

But.. you're: "hoping others have not yet heard [of this obscure information]."

 

If you hope/expect people not to know what you're talking about, you should be prepared to explain said topic.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...