State of the Market

[Tad Carlucci]

It's been a LONG time since I last looked. Here are my estimates for the current state of KittyCatS:

Total boxes produced: 5.1 million
Average boxes produced per day: 2,125
Estimated breeding population: 30,000 cats (7-day average cycle).

These are based on a 6-month trend analysis. Confidence in the trend analysis is 99.98% over this period.

In general, production rates appear to be relatively insensitive to the introduction of new traits or collections. When I examine closely, I see some slight variation in the daily production. This can be attributed to the appearance of new Collections. This variation, however, only seems to move the daily box production numbers by only +/- 10 boxes/day and seems to disappear within a few cycles as breeders adjust the overall programs.

Also, production rates appear to be insensitive to player retention. Players come and go, and individual cattery sizes shift up and down. But, on average, it all appears to even out to have little effect upon the breeding population.

Basically, it looks like KittyCatS, as a whole, is quite stable and chugging along, without any major swings in the over-all metrics.

The breeding population estimate does not attempt to account for churn, nor does it include cycle-errors, youngsters who are not yet able to breed. I'd estimate (with low confidence) that, if I included those factors, the population could be as high as 50,000 lives, not including too-old and pets.

Using an average cattery size of 10 lives, this gives a (low confidence) estimate of 3,000 active breeders, but this could be as low as 2,000 or as high as 5,000 or even more. There's just no good way to nail this down very closely from the available data.

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EDIT: After math check I find the total production should be more like 5.1m instead of 3.5m

[JC Aferdita]

Where do you get the numbers from?

[Tad Carlucci]

KittyCatS web site; mainly the Cattery page.

I collect Charm's cat data and extract the sequence number (which is just a counter) and date-of-production, then run some analysis on them to come up with a best-estimate of daily production, over time, which leads to the number of breeding. From the raw numbers I can estimate the number of boxes.

You can see the sequence number on the URL when you click on any of YOUR cats to see their pedigree page. I don't wait for that, though, and simply pull all of them directly from the Cattery Box tab, along with the date of production.