Note: Updates post on Sundays at around 9AM FR Time.
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Latest Weekly Update
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I'm not putting these on the front page anymore, please see the latest page of the thread!
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Average Weekly Growth
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(open in new tab to view better)
This is the average growth of each flight by year. Some interesting things of note:
- The gaps between the mid-tier and small flights have been steadily closing. If you look at 2013-14, the clusters of flights were quite distinctly separated, but if you look at 2022-23 so far, the difference between the general flights and the small flights like Water/Fire/Earth are not actually that big.
- Ice has gone from mid-tier to larger flight briefly in 2014-15 and it is now approaching small flight with regards to growth.
- Plague has clearly gone from a mid-tier flight to one of the very large ones, while Wind went from one of the very large ones to a mid-tier flight.
- Earth's growth has stayed fairly stable.
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Growth Visualizer (2021)
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I put the population data in a bar graph race / visualizer program, so now you can visually watch the flights increase in size and change and grow over time. It's much easier to see than a big unwieldy line graph and is quite fun to watch. I added some random historic events to keep it interesting.
Check it out here :3
I highly recommend taking a peek at it, it's fun to see.
I put the weekly change in as well. The app for some reason doesn't support negative numbers, so I did add a +100 to all of the change and put a line where it shifts to flights shrinking
You can also take a peek at that here :3
This one doesn't start until I begin weekly tracking September 2014. You can clearly see:
- cyclical nature of growth around flight fests and shrinking just after.
- arcane & shadow grow during registration periods, ice & light grow outside registration periods, it's a whole roller coaster until open reg[/quote]
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Map Update: Glimpse into Lair Sizes
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This is the spiciest glimpse of information we've ever gotten on flight populations. I managed to open the map as soon as the site came back, so my map showed the populations as they were when only a small number of users had moved. (I only counted THREE users outside of the starting locations, so I can confirm few had moved.)
What this means, is that we now have data on how many users in each flight were in each lair size on March 1, 2021.
First, some basic numbers:
Total Populations - Largest to Smallest
Shadow - 82363
Arcane - 75272
Plague - 59669
Wind - 54207
Lightning - 52445
Nature - 51037
Ice - 50688
Light - 47653
Water - 35275
Fire - 31780
Earth - 16979
Ancient Lairs - Largest to Smallest
Light - 2702
Ice - 2271
Shadow - 2197
Arcane - 2166
Nature - 2131
Wind - 2125
Lightning - 1972
Plague - 1927
Water - 1441
Fire - 1190
Earth - 1093
Venerable Lairs - Largest to Smallest
Shadow - 3938
Arcane - 3722
Light - 3664
Ice - 3489
Wind - 3343
Nature - 3089
Plague - 3021
Lightning - 2921
Water - 1935
Fire - 1635
Earth - 1097
Mighty Lairs - Largest to Smallest
Shadow - 9102
Arcane - 8665
Ice - 7104
Wind - 6892
Plague - 6833
Light - 6784
Nature - 6601
Lightning - 5868
Water - 4202
Fire - 3430
Earth - 1921
Lesser Lairs - Largest to Smallest
Shadow - 67126
Arcane - 60718
Plague - 47888
Wind - 41847
Lightning - 41684
Nature - 39216
Ice - 37824
Light - 34503
Water - 27697
Fire - 25525
Earth - 12868
I also grabbed a sum of all the non-lesser lairs because we know these people played a good bit.
All Non-Lessser Lairs - Largest to Smallest
Shadow - 15237
Arcane - 14553
Light - 13150
Ice - 12864
Wind - 12360
Nature - 11821
Plague - 11781
Lightning - 10761
Water - 7578
Fire - 6255
Earth - 4111
I then grabbed what percent of the flight's total population was at each lair size stage.
% of Population in Ancient Lairs
Earth - 6.44%
Light - 5.67%
Ice - 4.48%
Nature - 4.18%
Water - 4.09%
Wind - 3.92%
Lightning - 3.76%
Fire - 3.74%
Plague - 3.23%
Arcane - 2.88%
Shadow - 2.67%
% of Population in Venerable Lairs
Light - 7.69%
Ice - 6.88%
Earth - 6.46%
Wind - 6.17%
Nature - 6.05%
Lightning - 5.57%
Water - 5.49%
Fire - 5.14%
Plague - 5.06%
Arcane - 4.94%
Shadow - 4.78%
% of Population in Mighty Lairs
Light - 14.24%
Ice - 14.02%
Nature - 12.93%
Wind - 12.71%
Water - 11.91%
Arcane - 11.51%
Plague - 11.45%
Earth - 11.31%
Lightning - 11.19%
Shadow - 11.05%
Fire - 10.79%
% of Population in Lesser Lairs
Shadow - 81.5%
Arcane - 80.67%
Fire - 80.32%
Plague - 80.26%
Lightning - 79.48%
Water - 78.52%
Wind - 77.2%
Nature - 76.84%
Earth - 75.79%
Ice - 74.62%
Light - 72.4%
We will never get this data again, because soon everyone will scatter about based on aesthetic, so this truly is an amazing opportunity.
I haven't had time to really sit down and think about this, and what it implies, but it lines up very well with our pre-open-registration trend of ice & light gaining so many transfers.
Super exciting, thanks for coming to my ted talk haha
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Quarterly Site Growth
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Here you can see the growth of each quarter since the site has opened. Years were split into Summer (June/July/August), Autumn (September/October/November), Winter (December/January/February), and Spring (March/April/May).
The number of colors in each bar corresponds to the number of registration periods. Welcome Weeks started in Autumn 2016, so you can see that there was a very Slight increase in growth being open more often but not entirely substantial or long-lasting. You can also see Spring 2018's little open registration boost!
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10k User Survey: 8/20/2017
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Thank you so much to everyone who helped me with this project. As a re-cap, I took a random sample of 10000 user IDs and checked what flight they were in and whether or not that were active*. Do keep in mind that 10000 users is less than 3% of the flight rising population, so obviously the results are to be taken with a grain of salt.
*Activity was defined as to whether dragons were fed at all, because fed lairs were guaranteed active. All others were counted as inactive even if they might not be because there's no guaranteed way to tell except by checking forum activity - which is time consuming and most FR users don't use the forums anyway. For this reason, all activity numbers are likely slightly higher than indicated in this survey.
User Activity
Of the 10000 users, 1632 of them were still active, for a total of about 16.32%.
If we break this down by flight, it looks like this:
Light: 182/853 (21.34% active)
Earth: 50/267 (18.73% active)
Ice: 175/969 (18.06% active)
Nature: 155/885 (17.51% active)
Plague: 181/1036 (17.47% active)
Fire: 105/620 (16.94% active)
Water: 99/590 (16.78% active)
Wind: 167/1002 (16.67% active)
Arcane: 194/1260 (15.40% active)
Shadow: 206/1397 (14.75% active)
Lightning: 118/942 (12.53% active)
Of all the flights, Light and Ice have the highest percentages of their population indicated as active. This is no surprise, considering the transfer numbers. Shadow, Arcane, and Lightning have the lowest active percentages, with Lightning as the lowest by quite a bit. While I expected Shadow and Arcane, I did not see to expect Lightning among them - so that was definitely a surprise.
FR Active Populations
If we were to assume that these active percentages were accurate, we could estimate the active users on site as follows:
Shadow: 6692 (out of 45379)
Arcane: 6527 (out of 42390)
Light: 6203 (out of 29071)
Wind: 5776 (out of 34655)
Plague: 5752 (out of 32922)
Ice: 5628 (out of 31162)
Nature: 5210 (out of 29746)
Lightning: 3971 (out of 31703)
Water: 3446 (out of 20535)
Fire: 3246 (out of 19164)
Earth: 1687 (out of 9010)
This is not far off of the actual order for the flights from largest to smallest - except that Light is actually much larger in active population than total. (I've speculated for a long time that Light may be one of the largest flights with regards to active users.) Additionally, Lightning may be much smaller than we would have thought.
FR Retention Rates
I broke the numbers down further to try to figure out when active users joined. As you can see in this graph, activity drops off very quickly to to around 15% in the first 6 months, with less than 40% of users making it beyond the first month. After that, though, it remains relatively steady. It's safe to assume that most people who make it through the first 6 months are in it for the long haul.
Flight Newbness
Since the retention rate is pretty much a big drop-off, I decided to define newbs as users who are 3 months old or less and split the users in half to see what percentage of a flight's population is made up of newbies.
Arcane: 39/194 (20.10% newbs)
Plague: 34/181 (18.78% newbs)
Water: 16/99 (16.16% newbs)
Light: 29/182 (15.93% newbs)
Lightning: 18/118 (15.25% newbs)
Nature: 23/155 (14.84% newbs)
Wind: 24/167 (14.37% newbs)
Shadow: 28/206 (13.59% newbs)
Earth: 6/50 (12.00% newbs)
Ice: 15/175 (8.57% newbs)
Fire: 8/105 (7.62% newbs)
There's... some parts of this that I would expect (for example Arcane having a lot of newbs and Ice having very few), but the rest is kind of unexpected. Light has quite a lot of newbs, while Shadow doesn't have so many. To me, this seems to mean that the transfers are happening faster than 3 months even. I almost set the border at 6 months, but I thought that that was a little too long to call someone a newb.
I pulled the numbers for around 1 month old newbs out of curiosity, but these numbers are too small to really be even the slightest bit trustworthy and... were pretty much in line with the numbers for 3 month olds so the transfers might be happening even faster than that? A mystery for sure...
Anyway... that's all I've got for now!