Estimating Powerplay merits

[Ian Doncaster]

One of the unannounced bug fixes for this week is that we now get a message at the end of the week telling us what leaderboard reward we got for our Power progress. Here's mine.

The interesting thing is that with just this piece of information, plus knowing how many merits I got last week, plus the contents of my Power's top 10 leaderboard I can estimate the total merits earned by Kaine as a Power - very roughly 40-50 million

Using Inara's pledge numbers at https://inara.cz/elite/galaxy-statistics/ it's even possible to extrapolate that to the total merits for all powers (about 700 million) - which, divided by four (about 175 million) to get control score movement, is of the same order of magnitude as the estimates I was getting for that from weekly changes in held systems.

Now ... you might say that extrapolating all of that from a single data point is implausible - and that's true, I'm also making an assumption that merit earnings are distributed roughly like squadron leaderboard places or CG tiers.

But it's also true that I could make a better approximation with more data.

So ... if people are interested in this, what I'll need is:
- your own "weekly rewards" message (if you're just sending the numbers rather than a screenshot: which Power, what rank, and what reward tier are the crucial bits)
- how many merits you did to obtain that (if you can't remember exactly, starting digit + number of zeroes is all I really need)
- (optional) the numbers in the merits column (I don't need the rest) of the "top 10" leaderboard for your power
- (optional) if you can remember, a guess at roughly where in the reward band you were
Feel free to PM them if you don't want to say publicly.

Don't worry if you didn't do much Powerplay last week - the further outside the top 10 you are, probably the more useful the information is.

 

[St0rmFury]

314,788 merits

 

[Vedmo]

Think this should cover all requested, always appreciate seeing the results of your endeavors, might as well contribute what data I can.

Spoiler: 12-12 message over prior weeks leaderboard, 37068 merits for cycle

Spoiler: Current leaderboard

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

Archer, rank 915th with ~2320 merits (screenshot is a few days before the end so the bar might not be accurate)

Spoiler: pictures

Torval 4 merits, rank 171th, forgot an useful leaderboard picture there.

Spoiler: picture

From other sources I have 91st in LYR with 65k merits

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Thanks - that's certainly getting some useful data together.

- It's small samples so far, but the merits required to achieve a particular percentile in a power don't seem to vary much with whether it's a large or small power (though in the small ones top 10 will usually be a little easier), nor that much from week to week. That should be helpful in putting together a more detailed model
- the progression curve for power percentiles seems to follow the same as that shown by squadron activity - a fairly decent power law to start with, then it trails off quicker than that at the low end
- Inara's power proportion statistics aren't too far off the implied power active sizes, but there is a fair bit of variation (with LYR less active and Archer more, this week)

Here's the graph of the data points so far. The trend lines are maybe a bit over-influenced by the ends of the distribution (but really it's not either anyway) but between them seem to define a reasonably good envelope.

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

More info from asking other players

Grom:
338th for ~15k

LYR
923rd for 18

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Do you happen to know what rank the Grom player got? I'm guessing somewhere near the 25% boundary but it'd be interesting to know which side of it.

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

Do you happen to know what rank the Grom player got? I'm guessing somewhere near the 25% boundary but it'd be interesting to know which side of it.

High top 50%

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

Archer, 100 merits, rank 1304th
Torval, 4 merits, Rank 168th, I've improved my gaming skills .

Images/leaderboards:

Spoiler: Torval

Spoiler: Archer

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Thanks - the curve is definitely starting to take shape and look fairly normal, though if anyone has some more points in the 25-75% region those would definitely help pin it down a little more closely.

 

[CMDR Jimmy-2-Spoons]

I went from high in power rank24 to high in rank49 this week for Grom (not sure on the totals, but I was only a couple of 1000s short of rank50) . This gave me 16th on the weekly leaderboard.

 

[Vedmo]

Spoiler: 136720 Merits, forgot to grab screen shot of leader board, sorry

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

1449th on Archer with 992 merits.
173th on Torval with 12 merits.

Images/top10s:

Spoiler

 

[Vedmo]

Spoiler: LYR111,308

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Thanks - I managed to get a reasonable "top 75%" measure for Kaine this week at 12,390 merits. Might try to pin it around "top 50%" this week since that's still where the gap is.

 

[Vedmo]

I keep thinking next week I'll have some lower numbers, but then I repeatedly find myself enjoying all of the PP game play and do little else.

 

[Darkfyre99]

Last night I actually remembered to take a screenshot of my progress for Cycle Nine, so I can contribute to this thread. I took a couple of days off work this cycle, so I actually got quite a bit of time to play for a change. As a result, I helped advanced the cause of the Neo Abolitionist Movement (whose figurehead is Aisling Duval) of my current objective, undoing the harm the followers of Arissa Lagivy-Duval and Zemina Torval did last cycle.

I made a massive (for me) 170,964 merits last cycle, putting me solidly in the top 10%. For comparison, the last cycle I was struggling to remain in the top 20%.

Spoiler: I passed level 50!

This put me at position #126!

Spoiler: Cycle Nine Message

Spoiler: Aisling Duval Top Ten

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

180th on Torval with 4 Merits
1423rd on Archer with 3784 Merits

Top 10s:

Spoiler

Also this weeks Archer top 10 is a bit higher than usual, probably cause of all the fighting around Sol which I unfortunately didn't have time to take part in:

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Many thanks for all the data so far.

Having not done any Powerplay leading up to the new year, and having a nice easy set of assignments for quick bonus merits, I was able to measure most of the slope up to ~35% for Kaine on Wednesday - adding that to the recent contributions gives enough data points to put a proper model together.

There's two discontinuities in the model - at 4% and 75% - where the slope of the curve changes and it's not worth overcomplicating matters; joining together three separate power-law distributions for the different ranges is good enough.

This gives an approximate mean weekly merit count of around 40,000. Combining that with the approximate active power sizes implied suggests around 450 million merits earned a week - or just over 100 million control score. (Being less than 2x off that with the initial guess based on a single data point shows how predictably player activity is distributed!)

The approximate control score strength total [1] is still rising by 50-60 million control score each week: since there's not all that much new Acquisition going through at the moment, this implies at least a 4:1 ratio of Reinforcement versus Undermining (and it could be higher than that)


[1] How much control score it would take, starting from just the HQs, to recreate the current systems with all bars at their strength's midpoint.

 

[Vedmo]

Spoiler: LYR98104

Is there enough info to determine what percentage of total merits is being contributed by each of level of the weekly standing? Like the top 10% account for X% of total merits earned?