lukka
Gallente
The Scope
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Posted - 2006.09.19 21:16:00 -
[1]
 Originally by: Redundancy
I'm happy to take criticism on that one; I'm not formally educated in the area, and I don't have many sources to bounce off and help correct misconceptions and solidify any ideas I have. Either I take a chance that I'll take criticism and get some things wrong, or I don't post anything up at all, which I think would dissapoint a number of people who have an interest in this sort of thing. If you'd like to criticise the blog, perhaps you could write a bit about how and why it's wrong, and then I can confirm this with other people and either update the blog with corrections, or post another later. I think posting up dry numbers without any sort of commentary would be wrong, because it would put a number of things outside of their larger context.
First, in the blog you say this:
<<What does all of this mean in a more personal context though? Sure, it means that as a whole, the economy is "growing", but how does that affect people in their daily lives? usually, the GDP per capita is used as an indicator of the quality of life, but this isn't showing us if (perhaps) there's a disparity between different groups of people in Eve, and what does increased quality of life mean in the context of an MMOG?>>
Saying that Per Capita GDP represents 'quality of life' is such a loaded statement. Frankly, it doesn't describe quality of life any more than saying that the average household income in the US is $46,000 describes any particular individual's income. Without information regarding the distribution of wealth, the per capita GDP chart is rather useless in any practical sense. This is the classic problem with any average-style 'measure of central tendency'.
Ever hear the story about the Canadian gold mining company that had mountains and mountains of survey data? Instead of spending years trying to analyze it all, they made it public(!) and offered a $100k prize to whoever found the most likely sites to have gold. The prize went to a joint effort from a New Zealand and an Australian company and 4 or the 5 sites they recommended had gold.
The moral of the story is: PUBLISH the raw data that you have for the community to analyze. Yes, many of us have access to educational/university resources that can crunch the numbers on data sets of that magnitude. And even if you, Redundancy, don't have formal training in the subject(s), I'm sure there are many of us out here in the 140k member community that do. I, for one, would love to have the opportunity to analyze EvE from an economic standpoint. Then, with the collective efforts of the educated and talented members of the community, I suspect we'll see some real insights that any one of us (or you, the developers) might well have missed if we (or you) were the only ones analyzing the data.
lukka |