+- International Simulation Football League (https://forums.sim-football.com)
+-- Forum: Community (https://forums.sim-football.com/forumdisplay.php?fid=5)
+--- Forum: Media (https://forums.sim-football.com/forumdisplay.php?fid=37)
+---- Forum: Graded Articles (https://forums.sim-football.com/forumdisplay.php?fid=38)
+---- Thread: *S22 user retention (/showthread.php?tid=37593)
*S22 user retention - Troen - 02-14-2022
A (depressingly) long time ago, I wrote an article on the S22 draft class's impact on league expansion. I explored a bunch of scenarios for what the huge influx of new players might cause the league to look like a few years down the line and, seeing as it is a few years down the line I thought I'd take a look back.
I'll be going over two aspects: first, the percent of the S22 class that has remained active; and second, the average change in active users since 2020 or so.
S22 Activity
I'm going to split this into 2 parts: How many S22 players got into the league enough to hit different TPE milestones, and how many are still around.
There are 276 retired S22 players (plus some GM bots that I am excluding) and 18 non-retired. Breaking players into different categories:
* 93 clearly not active players - these players never earned TPE beyond the 50 for player creation and clearly weren't active
* 35 tried out the rookie guide but didn't hang around - these players never got more than the 7 TPE you get from rookie free training and an activity check. I'd guess most didn't come back after their updates were processed but I'm not going to check.
* 42 showed reasonable effort by getting to the 58-100 range. That requires a bit more work, possibly coming back for a couple weeks and getting some tasks graded, but not breaking 100 shows that it didn't become a habit.
* 29 showed decent retention and are in the 101-250 range. Getting there requires either hard effort for one season or low effort for a couple seasons. It's also possible some of these players left and came back or retired after realizing they didn't like the player; I'll explore that in the "how many are still around" part later.
* 11 got to plausible ISFL starter by getting in the 251-400 range. That can't be done in just one season (well just over 250 maybe with an all-in first year but the DSFL cap still seemed like a natural break point), but not getting over 400 suggests that either the player only kept up earning for another year or was a lower earner for a couple years.
* 34 were clearly active and are in the 401-1000 range. Sure, getting to literally 401 can be done in two seasons, but players in this range puts you solidly in a starter role on most teams.
* 52 were active for a long time and are 1000+. Clear starters, includes a ton of well-know award winners, etc.
I'd say all the 86 400+ players count conceptually as successfully active and the 11 251-400 players might be, depending on the reason for topping out there they did. Some of those players were recreates rather than recruits and so wouldn't count for any kind of "new" account tracking. Looking at the actual creation dates, 18 accounts were created before 2/15/20 (historical note: the r/NFL post recruitment post was on 2/16/20) while 68 were created after that. 59 of those were created on either 2/16 or 2/17 while the other 9 were created later. Those that were created on 2/15 or earlier I will break out as "recreates" in the next section.
Of the 86 accounts to have earned over 400 TPE:
* 12 users (1 recreate) last visited the site in 2020 (including 2 players in the 900-999 TPE range)
* 22 users (4 recreates) last visited the site in 2021
* 8 users (4 recreates) last visited the site in 2022 but not in the last week
* 44 users (9 recreates) last visited the site in the last week
From that data, I would conclude that there was between 35 and 39 net new accounts who have remained active for the ~2 years it's been since the 2020 r/nfl recruitment post. That falls between my low and medium retention numbers (25-63) from the previous article, but definitely on the lower side. The 18 users who stuck around for 10+ months sway that towards the higher side, but not wildly so.
The other notable information is that 5 of the recreates have not been seen on the site this year. Of course, recreating once doesn't guarantee that a given person will always and forever continue participating in the league. So, having between a quarter and half of the older accounts not returning 2 years later is note able when thinking about overall length of participation.
Active account trends
Next, I'm going to look at overall trends in activity by looking at the number of posts in the activity check threads since the beginning of 2020 (with the assumption that it's roughly 1 post per active user per week). For reference, activity check 138 is the first one posted in 2020.
![[Image: 6l6r2yZ.png]](https://i.imgur.com/6l6r2yZ.png)
The spike in activity from the S22 class is hilariously obvious in the graph. Interestingly enough, that wasn't actually the peak (by 5 posts). I'd say that the trend was positive in the first year with a downtrend in the last 2-3 months. That makes sense to me as possibly related to retirements. S22 players started hitting the really rough regression seasons recently, so it makes sense that players would retire and either leave entirely or take a break in posting due to not having an active player. I know that was true for me personally - I posted in week 239, retired, and then didn't post again until week 245 after recreating post-trade deadline. It will be interesting to see if activity picks up again - the S34 class has 70 players while the S35 has 42 so far with 17 having updated to more than the 57 point.
And as a side note, not that I'm on the recruitment team, next weekend seems like it would be a great chance for an r/nfl post - as with S22, it'd be one week after the super bowl and (I think) at the same relative point in the league season
Model review
So which model was right? I'd definitely say it's an anomaly on the long term trend from what I've found here and, as I said above, the S22 retention seems to be right in the middle of my low and medium estimates. There hasn't been a continuing upward trend in overall activity though the league is solidly larger than before the post. With the average number of actives hovering around 270, that works out to right around 14 teams of 20 players each (ignoring the DSFL teams) and so it seems to me that the expansion decisions played out well from a league health perspective.
RE: S22 user retention - Crodyman - 02-14-2022
This is a great write up, man.
RE: S22 user retention - Pat - 02-14-2022
Troen, I love your articles like this. They're so informative and just all around great.
RE: S22 user retention - qWest - 02-14-2022
We're pretty lucky no one listened to my dumb ass on expansion
RE: S22 user retention - Troen - 02-14-2022
(02-14-2022, 02:40 PM)Crodyman Wrote: This is a great write up, man.
(02-14-2022, 03:27 PM)Pat Wrote: Troen, I love your articles like this. They're so informative and just all around great.Thanks! I like looking into these kinds of things.
(02-14-2022, 03:33 PM)qWest Wrote: We're pretty lucky no one listened to my dumb ass on expansionIt's definitely an interesting question - would more teams have kept people more active because of more chances to be starters? Or would the weaker talent pool make things more lopsided and cause people to stop caring? Something else entirely?