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RE: State of the Market
The market is controlled by a number of forces. One of the primary forces is the sheer number of specimen for sale .. the Supply. While it's not possible to segment supply by trait, it's fairly easy to get a rough estimate of the gross supply.
The downward trend cites in the original post was a regression test based upon the population estimates I had available at the time; which indicated that populations were extremely stable.
The numbers I most-recently collected are a different data set. They're still relatively stable, but the boxes-per-day estimate came out different.
How do I get the numbers?
First, go to your Cattery. For a BOX, note the date shown. Click on the box and examine the URL in the web browser bar. The cat ID number there is a sequence number. Repeat for many boxes. (Which is why my data set changes every time I look .. Charm will, of course, have a lot of new boxes, and she often goes through and Menageries a number as well.)
What you'll notice is the numbers don't SEEM numbers (there's a letter) and they don't seem sequential. That first character is a hexadecimal digit (0 to 9, and A to F) so it has 16 values. What I did was sort the data by the date in the Cattery, then compare the order of the cat ID, for each of the hex digits. You'll note that, for a given hex digit, the remainder of the cat ID is sequential over time. Therefore the cat ID number is a sequence number with a 1-of-16 "salt" value. That "salt" digit is probably deterministic .. meaning I can probably determine what it encodes and could come up with a true sequence number for each cat and box. I've not because, for my purposes, it doesn't matter (and it'll take a bit more data than I can capture from the Cattery and Pedigree View pages I have available.)
So, I plot the values for each of the 16 sequences, average the plots, and do some analysis. To convert from the numbers my charts work in to the full population, I simply multiply by 16.
Another market force is Demand. Demand is almost certainly related to the number of players. You can get those numbers from these Forums. What you can't do is determine if the player is actually playing. So, when I look at Demand (the number of players) I simply presume that any player who has not accessed the Forums (that means, also, accessed a Pedigree View) in the past month is "not playing" and those who do "are currently playing".
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State of the Market
