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About that telemetry
Gordy
Posts: 3,022 Member
What do you guys think about it? I noted how simmers have created less aliens than they have mermaids, despite aliens being around four years longer, while mermaids have been around for less than a year. The total amount of aliens is less than a 4th of the total amount of mermaids.
We also got 173 thousand toddlers. I wonder if these results are talking about what Sims made in CAS, or sims born into the game?
There have also been almost as many WooHoos as there are sims being created.
I dunno, just found this infograph interesting and wanted to know what you guys think about it.
The Sims 4 hasn't introduced a new musical instrument since 2017
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I wonder HOW they find this out...
While things like these are interesting as heck...
I can't help but think they are pulling numbers out of their butt...
Fortunately, that's not how telemetry works. Unless you turn off data feedback in your Sims settings, this is general info they can collect from all players. Lots of software has this kind of feedback so the company can understand how users are using it, including what they're not doing anymore, etc.
Unless you turn it off, the game sends this sort of information back to Maxis just in the course of play. So the numbers are off by a bit because they don't account for those who have disabled this "feature" and those who play only off line.
That said, I'm curious about the toddler number too, since if it's both CAS and born, it gives some creedence to the "most simmers don't play families" argument. Or at least, don't play with toddlers.
I always go in offline mode when playing, so maybe my creations are not involved. I'm probably not the only one going offline. But well, my handful of aliens created will not make a difference, and I never created a vampire, and never any mermaids either.
Ooooh did not know this...very interesting.
I'm really happy to see the huge population of Vampires. A chunk of those are probably just mine, lol.
Mermaids look like they're going to be a Thing for a while too. I've certainly made my own fair share because when I was playing last night at a festival by Planet Honey Pop, six Mermaids showed up. It was like a Merfolk attack, lol. I think they just like Karaoke because, you know, all of the singing. What divas!
I sort of feel that the counts are off o_o
maybe they didn't count in sims born in game?
also to explain lack of aliens maybe its because they are harder to get?
like with mermaids and vampires its easy to turn your sims into them anytime but alien u sort of have to birth sim or create them separately?
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gameplay. I know I don't normally create them in CAS, but surely other player do?
The problem with telemetry is it doesn't say "why," it just says "what." So they see that far fewer aliens are made but they have no knowledge as to why that is.
My favorite telemetry story when it comes to this. Dragon Age: Origins (sorry for people who have read this 1000x). Leliana was by far the most popular romance NPC. The devs were stunned over her popularity with over 90% of all games ending with the player in an active romance. They made decisions on DA2 and DA:I based on this. The problem is they didn't look at *why* everyone was ending the game with her in a romance. The issue was a couple of bugs regarding her, where starting the romance was flagged incorrectly in a friendship answer and breaking it off with her in a common confrontation that happened when she got jealous of the other romance partner (and this happened a lot as the player often was unaware of the romance) also had a bug where it didn't remove the romance flag even when breaking it off with her. Players had a term for this -- Leliana ninjamanced, and people who didn't want to use mods to fix it how to avoid getting her romance cards and such at the end of the game.
Telemetry only tells one narrow part of the story. You have to dig much deeper to find out why. If, say, toddlers are very poorly done, of course people will age their toddlers quickly because they're not fun. Now, if in the next game you leave toddlers out entirely because of this, deciding that no one likes playing with toddlers, you haven't correctly analyzed the data. It's because you just don't have enough data to analyze. Gaming companies rely far too much on telemetry. They need to hire at least one competent statistician to help them figure out what those numbers actually mean.
I wonder do they only count vanilla woohoo or woohoo via that mod that won't be named? lol The vamps and aliens, sadly I haven't contributed. And mermaids, I've only made two.
You say that like they are watching your sims woohoo
Unless....
For example, why do the alien & toddler counts are so low? Have they figured it out that they've done nothing to make it more playable & interesting?
Why do we enjoy letting our Sims to Woohoo? Perhaps, that is one of the most enjoyable things to do, since we always been given a new location to Woohoo in almost new packs that have been released.
Wedding count is quite low in comparison to the household counts. Why? Perhaps, there's nothing interesting to get our Sims to wed. No perks, no prenuptial, etc. Plus, the guests are just everywhere. Eloping is much easier.
One thing for sure, they missed out how many Sims that we've been killed. Perhaps, that's made more sense.
If they can extract this data just for this occasion, I wish that they could make use of it to improve the existing & new contents that they're going to release. Survey is great, but with this data, it gives more in-depth of how we play the game, not only on how we want to play the game.
Unless...
I found it fascinating too, I enjoyed reading it.