Army of Club Penguin

EXCELLENT POST BOOMER!! ONE OF YOUR BEST THIS WEEK !!!

I originally posted this on the other privated post, but the edit got so long I just made it it’s own post…

I’ve been tracking the stats for the site recently to try to get a better sense of where we are so I thought I would share what I came across. I’m really into statistics, especially with baseball, so this is kinda my thing, plus its 3 am and I’m bored.

I saw someone mention in the comments that January’s hits were higher than December’s (by just under 3,000), which is true. However this statistic is deceptive, because the first 3 days of January (which were included in the massive 53rd week of 2009 (marked with the arrow), were consecutive days of over 6000 hits, which included the final round of the End of Decade Tournament, as well as my retirement on January 3rd. While these massive hits days inflated our hits total for the month quite a bit, they mask the statistic I posted below. This is a graph of our hits by week, with the 40,000+ hits week being the 12/28 – 1/3 week that ended with my retirement. The next week was still very impressive, but probably due to the changing of the leaders and more things going on. Since then though, you can see our hits have gone down steadily each week since the end of the Decades Tourney, my retirement, and the end of Winter Break, which all happened roughly at the same time. Hits aren’t the only thing that make an army though, as you can see by the fact that ACP was perhaps bigger than ever in December when our hits were still not that close to where they were at our peak in the end of my first term. Don’t use overall hits as the only basis for progress, as ours especially are tied to the activeness of other armies.

Hits by Week:

These statistics usually don’t get a lot of attention, but they are very important. This shows hits from the Chat page tracked over a month’s span. Because overall hits are tied to other armies, I always used the Chat page as my basis for determining the activeness of the army. The more soldiers are going on chat, the more active they and the army will be, so this seemed like a good barometer to me. As you can see, obviously we were most active in the summer because everyone is off from school. I took over starting in October, and got the hits nearly to where they were at the end of the summer. January was solid, relatively no change, however as you can see from the arrow, they are way down this February. If you break it out by week and even day, you can see that with the exception of last week, the hits of the Chat page have decreased each week since the beginning of January. I outlined in particular our Saturday hits since this is the main day for army activity, and you see it has dropped consistently each week. Obviously battle attendance is still more important than being on chat, but this is still not a good trend that has been developing.

Chat Page Hits:

This page looks similar to the previous one, except this one is analyzing the Join page. This statistic is more closely associated to determining how well we are doing at bringing in new soldiers. When I became leader I started with a new Join page, so I didn’t go back to retrieve statistics from the previous months, but Join page hits were very low in October primarily because under the leadership prior to that, we had not been active enough on Club Penguin, and our reputation declined so that not only were many people searching us because we weren’t on Club Penguin, but less and less had heard of us because we were not there consistently enough. December was a strong month for recruiting, particularly at the end with the massive Tournament, and as it was above, January saw relatively no change. February once again however has an alarming drop in Join page views, nearly in half. Also please note these statistics are an Average per Day, so the fact that February is not over has no effect on this statistic. If we look at the average number of hits per day per week, you can see in the Change column that they have also been steadily decreasing. Obviously when your recruiting slows down, you begin to have problems, so this should be taken into consideration as something we need to fix.

Join Page Hits:

The final one, unfortunately cannot be checked on WordPress’s statistical graphs anymore, but I looked back and went day by day to see how many search hits we were getting on the Saturdays and Sundays of each week (the two biggest recruiting days). As expected, the week after of the Tournament produced massive search hits, although for the most part our search hits have declined since then. This can be mostly attributed to lack of recruiting. One thing I would like to point out though, is that recruiting sessions do not actually yield the largest search hits. A large practice battle (provided that you say ACP enough that onlookers get the point) yields the highest search hits because you are the only army present, therefore the only one they will look up, and its much more likely that soldiers want to join a huge army that is running around a server and clovering like crazy than one sitting in one place saying the same thing repeatedly. That’s a big reason I had one really big practice battle with just ACP each weekend. This statistic could be worse though, it’s not falling that sharply, we just need to start building up our presence on Club Penguin more, which starts with the soldiers’ dedication.

Search Hits:

From looking at all of this, my analysis is that the main issue is not necessarily inactiveness, but possibly soldiers are becoming less motivated to fight for you. I’m seeing mod ranks on chat less and less, the site hits haven’t dropped that much, but comments on posts are way down, which means soldiers don’t really care enough to say they will make an event or express their opinion. They just kind of show up to the event so they can hopefully get promoted. Ideally, you want soldiers who are motivated enough to be on Club Penguin all the time without being asked, and I don’t see this happening except for a few leaders who make a good effort. The strength of an army is in the soldiers though, and if the soldiers aren’t doing work unless they are being told (and sometimes not even then), you have a problem. This would explain our current decline in all three individual hit breakdowns, the lack of interest in being on chat, as well as not being on Club Penguin with other ACP soldiers, which brings down our search hits, and therefore our Join page hits. That then leads to a lack of recruits, and eventually it begins a decline in troop count, which is what we have seen over the past month. We are still the largest army, but our troop count is about half of what it was a little over a month ago. I wouldn’t say it’s time to panic, however these are trends that need to be reversed or we will only continue to decline in size.

I’m not completely sure how to go about fixing this, from personal experience, I just did what I did and ACP was successful, it’s hard to say exactly how I did it but I guess I was doing something right. Here are my best guesses at what might help:

• An ACP only practice every weekend. Make it regular so soldiers know to expect it, and it becomes something they look forward to. At these practices you should work on tactics and moving from room to room. End with recruiting.
• Emphasize the importance of activeness on Club Penguin and urge everyone to be on Club Penguin as much as possible. Leaders need to get everyone on Club Penguin as soon as they are on chat.
• Pay really close attention to who is active, and make sure to promote those who have been working hard. Promotions are the single best way to keep recruits in your army and fighting for you. Remember that they are the strength of the army, and make sure they are happy.
• Keep things fun. Try to loosen up sometimes, not everything is a serious matter. It’s nice to do something fun once in a while.
• Enough chat fighting. It seems like every time I come on chat, people have been demodded for speaking out and I’ve been asked to settle it. The best thing you can do is forgive and forget, and move on. No grudges, no comments, no posts.
• Keep the morale up. This means keeping everything on the site positive, make sure to say you were impressed with the soldiers for the job they did and compliment them when you can. Don’t be critical unless you are going to use it to explain a better way of doing things.
• Try not to do anything controversial like *major demotions* (we demoted 3 leaders in about a week), banning people for opinions, etc.
• Fix the dictatorship thing on the Nation page, I don’t know where it came from but it’s kinda pissing people off.

Anyone else with ideas go ahead and add to my list in a different color, otherwise I guess we can use comments.

~Boomer

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