Peak Playing Times

fwiffo · Post by **fwiffo** » Fri Jun 29, 2012 10:57 pm

ok here's backtrak's latest nifty javascript enabled version: http://spathiwa.com/cgi-bin/tz_mpp2.pl
i cant say i fully understand the reasoning behind it but here's his reasoning for the implementation of the above:
QUOTE Looking at Juckto's explaination it struck me that it's not 'sunday' that's important, but 'squad game peak' that we want to call out. In that light, I am treating 19:00 UTC on Sunday as midnight, and adjusting the graph labels accordingly so that if Juckto looks at the graph at UTC+13:00, he's going to see that the best time to login is 9:00am on monday local time, which I think is optimal. I also added a timezone dropdown that auto sets to your local time, and lets you client side shift the graph and the squad game time on change.[/quote]

and this one is my latest hack that auto picks timezone by doing a page reload and calling my program with the appropriate (hopefully) timezone: http://spathiwa.com/pp/
if it doesnt pick the right timezone for you, just go and change the url to say the right timezone, ie. change the last number(s) to reflect your timezone offset. this version is the one that adjusts the timezone on the input data.

Spunkmeyer · Post by **Spunkmeyer** » Fri Jun 29, 2012 11:47 pm

Nicely spotted BT.

You could think about it in two ways: why do we want separate average graphs? The answer could be either:

1) I want to see how things shake out when I can play during the day. Feeding the TZ as an input and mapping Sat. and Sun. accomplishes this, case closed.

2) I want to increase accuracy by splitting out days when patterns wildly diverge. This is true about the squad game peak, which BT's update handles. But it's not true about weekends in general - it's probably true only for US players. For the rest of the world, most of the Saturday probably looks just like the rest of the week.

So, and I'm not suggesting this be implemented, don't get me wrong, just thinking aloud

but ideally you would look for consistently divergent behavior in the data, and specifically split those out. They will not fall on regular day boundaries either.

juckto · Post by **juckto** » Sat Jun 30, 2012 1:13 am

QUOTE Looking at Juckto's explaination it struck me that it's not 'sunday' that's important, but 'squad game peak' that we want to call out.[/quote]
I'd rather see the Sat/Sun curves, than the Sun/Mon curves. Because I work Monday.

So I prefer the version in post #48, rather than the version in post #51.

Post by **BackTrak** » Sat Jun 30, 2012 3:25 am

But for you Juckto, Saturday is just another weekday for everyone else. There's only interesting data on Sunday and Monday (local NZ time), unfortunately your employer is just too narrow minded to let you play when everyone else is on. Bastards.

juckto · Post by **juckto** » Sat Jun 30, 2012 6:04 am

Oh I see. If I want to figure out what the best time for me to log on during a Saturday, when I can play, I should just look at the weekday average?

Cause, you know, the Saturday line on post #48 graph is exactly the same as the Weekday line on post #51 graph. /sarcasm.

Post by **BackTrak** » Sun Jul 01, 2012 4:32 am

That's right, because Saturday for you is Friday for the majority of players which you are interested in playing with.

Looking at either graph, you should just get on at 2pm your time, any day of the week, and get a couple of games while the gettin' is good. If you'd like, when the timezone is UTC+4 or greater we could change the weekday label to Tue - Sat Average, which would be more accurate.

Arkof · Post by **Arkof** » Mon Jul 02, 2012 4:32 am

BackTrak wrote:QUOTE (BackTrak @ Jun 30 2012, 03:25 PM) But for you Juckto, Saturday is just another weekday for everyone else. There's only interesting data on Sunday and Monday (local NZ time), unfortunately your employer is just too narrow minded to let you play when everyone else is on. Bastards.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but our Saturday (US Friday night) is not just another weekday.

Friday is a bastard child, half weekday/half weekend.
As such it is full of interesting data.

Such as:
Did you know on Friday nights lots of people have a drink (or more) after work before heading home, as a result prime time starts ~1 hour later on Fridays compared to other week nights.
People also play later as they don't have to get up for work in the morning.

Quite clearly shown http://spathiwa.com/cgi-bin/tz_mpp3.pl?0 Look at the start of the Saturday line which will be US Friday night and compare it to the weekday line.
You can see it picks up later and lasts longer.

So the interesting data is:
Friday night
Saturday
Sunday

Anyway, we're drifting from the original purpose, which was to create an easy way for people to see when they can login and find a game.
http://spathiwa.com/pp/ fulfils this purpose nicely, its even time zone adjusted so people see data relevant to their time zone.

I don't see that there's any need to be doing any more development work on it.
Its at a point where it performs its purpose, is easy to use/understand.
Time to get it integrated into the landing page.

Post by **BackTrak** » Mon Jul 02, 2012 4:39 am

No worries, but do you guys want a dropdown on it to pick alternate timezones instead of changing them at the query string? Or, is it good enuff for who it's for? If it's an iframe integration to the homepage, then a standard user won't be able to change the timezone on the current version. If you guys want it, I can add that to http://spathiwa.com/pp/ and have it post back pretty easily.

Holla!

juckto · Post by **juckto** » Tue Jul 03, 2012 7:16 am

Drop down instead of query string would be good. Which version are you refering to as the "current" version?

fwiffo · Post by **fwiffo** » Tue Jul 03, 2012 5:42 pm

here are the current versions:

(adjusted at input)
http://spathiwa.com/pp/

(centered on sg)
http://spathiwa.com/cgi-bin/tz_mpp2.pl