Boycott Statistics

Share:

I paid a visit to AllFacebook.com today to check out the Daily Active Users Application Statistics for the general time frame over the weekend.  As I explained in my article Mafia Wars Statistics: The Past 30 Days little is known by me about the actual numbers reported by Facebook for the various applications.  I simply use these for purposes of comparison.  Obviously they aren't accurate or that truck would have blown up a long time ago and we would all be hammering away at District 6.  I also mentioned that the time frames seem to be off a day or so.  This may be due to time differences around the world of maybe it's a reflection of when the data was collected.  Regardless, we can still gain some insight as to how many people play Mafia Wars and look for trends that reflect ongoing events.  One such event was the No Play, No Click, No Trade Boycott which happened this past weekend.  From The Daily Active Users Statistics, I compared two drops on a standard users verses time plot.  A common trend seen in most Facebook applications is a decline in weekend usage.  The two drops that I circled below are about a week apart and most likely correlate to the past two weekends.  As explained in the article referenced above, we saw a few spikes last month that I attributed to the launching of Las Vegas (Beta and then everybody).  I would expect to see a linear regression back to or below the standard baseline as time goes on.   
(original underlying images are from allfacebook.com)

I took the the two points before and after a major drop in Daily Active Users and calculated the exact number of players this drop represented.  Regardless of the exact time frame, it's very significant and shows that the upward momentum of Daily Active Users has had a plateau and is starting to digress back to normal.  It's impossible to say what percentage of this digression can be attributed to the boycott.  There are too many other variables to isolate data for one event. 

I had planned to analyze the statistics from the Vegas Visitor counter and the Las Vegas Community Job to get what I felt at the time a more accurate reflection of how many played this weekend.  Pistol Pete captured the following image so I lost all faith that these numbers would provide any useful insight.  Here we see the counter on the banner promoting the event has a higher value then the actual counter.
(image from The Spockholm Mafia Tools Fan Page)

While I was visiting allfacebook.com, I read the article titled Zynga Runs Guerrillia Mafia Wars Campaign in Hermosa Beach, CA by Dani Manor.  This article describes what Zynga is doing to promote their "Mafia Wars is Blowin' Up" Event.  Was it a coincidence that this type of stunt was pulled right before a scheduled Boycott?  I'm sure whoever keeps Hermosa Beach clean didn't appreciate all the Mafia Wars stickers littering the area. (images from allfacebook.com)

Whatever the reasons are, Zynga continues to claim that they are opening the lines of communication with the players regarding the gifting system.  Blue Eyed Nate, Community Manager, made the following post, titled Gifting/Trading Chat Continued, today on The Zynga Forum Boards. 

Because of the Zynga Forums Rules of Conduct, Blue Eyed Nate was unable to post any of the transcripts of the talks in question.  Check out all the rules there are for the Zynga Forum Boards.  God only needs 10 and he runs the whole world!

There is also a rule against mentioning any third party tools on The Zynga Forum Boards which Nate points out in his message.  He did a great job of describing The Chucker as a "popular third party tool".  Hopefully this post will have better results than the one Al Catraz, Super Moderator made in early June titled Gifting Feedback.  Gifting got progressively worse after this post was made and many players were angry that they took the time to provide any feedback at all.

The No Play, No Click, No Trade Event was a venue to open up a few doors for representatives of the trading community to have a voice with Zynga and The Mafia Wars Community as a whole.  For this reason alone, I believe it was a success.