Ok Ladies & Gentlemen, sorry, I'm a bit late to this thread
Right now I have not the time to answer in detail to every post in this thread, but let me explain some general things about the numbers I presented.
On the method:
The number of players (and their names) I have simply taken from the plane stats page, going through each plane and gathering all names. This gives me all pilot ID'S that had killed or been killed at least once during a tour. A player who only jumped into an empty arena, did fly a uneventful sortie and never was seen again is not included.
Problems with that data specific to AvA:
There are two reasons why I didn't bother with any further analysis and did not present additional conclusions/opions of mine, and none of them is because I do not have any interest in this arena as a player.
The first one: lack of data consistency. On the past there had been repeating "problems" with the scoring and stats recording. We had occasional glitches on some tours meaning that data wasn't recorded entirely. In some tours, score had been disabled deliberately. As a non-AvA player, I'm not always aware of those issues, and identifying all of them in retrospect is very difficult. So I saw the data I presented in my main stats thread more like giving a very general assessment for AvA activity in the bigger multi-arena context, mainly to show how "dominant" the LW arena is compared to the special interest ones.
Th second one: Even if I'd assume the gathered data is consistent and complete for the period presented, it's very difficult to draw any simple & direct conclusions from it. More like any regular MA, both game settings (for example ack strength, icon settings) as well as game setup (map, planeset) are constantly varying ind happen in different combination. Some setups/maps are very much more popular than others. And in an arena as small as this one, with a small core of very dedicated players having a much greater share in overall activity even personal circumstanced can have some noticeable effects on kills & played hours for the arena in toto.
All those factors combined make it very difficult (at least for me) to trace apparent changes in numbers/activity back to any single change in settings. In other words: I have a hard time "proving" anything here, so I do not try
It's a different thing with the three "regular" mains, which are much more stable in settings as well as population, much more reliable in terms of data consistency and are being monitored by me not only by data scrounging or reading forum talk, but by playing there and observing things.
And a private word beyond the stats talk: I have seen (though often only from the outside) many ebbs & flows in AvA activity over the years. Some settings had been greeted with great enthusiasm, resulted in great numbers and participation for a while... and then the numbers were falling again. There may be better & worse setting, but I don't think there is any setting for this arena which really is "it".
