2x Media Voucher
Abstract.
On joining the ISFL, I was thrown into a world of a lot of different currencies. Actually, just two: TPE and money. I don’t know what TPE stands for, but it works like experience points and the money just works like money. Except when it doesn’t. When trying to figure out how much money I needed to be the best phoenix I can be, I looked into the training and equipment costs. It was a lot of money. So I asked about how to earn it. I was told that there were a few different ways to earn money:
There’s doing Twitter every week, which is easy for most people, but a bit difficult for me because I already run so many Twitter accounts. So I decided against doing that.
There’s making graphics, but I’m not very good at that sort of thing. The picture I made for my rookie task was graded at a 2/7, which is weird because you would expect a scale to be out of 5 or 10. Either way, it wasn’t very good. So I won’t be making money that way.
There’s making media, which I think I’d be good at, but I don’t really have the time that often to sit down and write something good. Today I was lucky and got a break from work, but I’d much rather spend my free time watching HoloLive streams. So I can do this, but not very often.
There’s getting a job, but those seem to be incredibly hard to get. You have to apply and talk about your experience, of which I have none. Also, some of these jobs take a lot of effort and talking to people, which I’m not good at. So it would be nice to have the right job, but it probably won’t be available to me.
There’s the casino and stock market. I’m not good at betting and I don’t understand how a fake football league calculates stock prices and overall I’m just uncomfortable with any sort of gambling. I don’t have enough money and I’m trying to make it in a sensible way. So I’m not making money that way.
Finally, there’s salaries, which is what I’m going to talk about in this article. With a lot of these avenues to get money blocked off for me, I will likely be getting almost all of my income from my salary.
Body 1.
I decided to see how everyone else earned their money. I copied all of the “Players” tab in Player Balances and started to pull data from that. Then, I added another column to signify if that person had a job or not. As I was going down the list of jobs, I noticed that there were a lot of users with multiple jobs, so instead of simply marking that they had a job, I entered the amount of job titles they had. Since each job is paid differently, I assume that they’re being paid for each job title. If that’s not the case, I’m sorry. There might be a lot of mistakes in this piece.
Another part that could be causing some mistakes is the section I called “named”. If a user didn’t have a player name, I assumed that they weren’t on the site anymore and therefore not a part of the player population. I did find a few users with jobs that didn’t have names attached, so I had to move a few numbers around to accommodate them.
For these first few charts, I’m tracking how many users are No-Names, Unemployed, Employed to One Job, or Employed to Multiple Jobs. This is that distribution along the total users and then just the named users:
There are a majority of No-Name Users as well as a majority of Unemployed Users. This is to be expected as the amount of jobs on the site appears to be limited. This follows my initial impression. Not in those graphs is the total amount of employed users/names. The proportion of Employed Users compared to Total Users is 10.9% and the proportion of Employed Users to Named Users is 17.4%. It’s still just 134 total users who are employed. But how much are they making?
Well, that’s a multi-tiered question. I could just go through the list of job payouts to find what each position is paid, but I think a better scope of the user’s total buying power could be seen from that user’s total bank account. So I need to find the average amount of money in specific user strata. And since “Averages” can be swayed by outliers, I’ll also calculate the median bank account. I did these calculations per User, per Named User, per Unemployed User, per Employed User, and per Multi-Job User:
Now that’s a massive difference between the average user and the average employed user. It’s a difference of almost $22.5 million on the median. But there’s also a notable jump from Employed to Multi-Job, a little less than $20 million. How many of these Multi-Job people are there and how many jobs do they hold? I said earlier that I don’t know if users get paid per job title, but continuing that, I show here the distribution of job titles between those who hold just one job and those who hold multiple jobs.
More than half of all jobs are held by Users who hold multiple jobs. So remember, that’s 51 users who hold multiple jobs and they hold 115 jobs total. That’s an increase in power by around 225%. I think it’s about time to look at how much of the league’s wealth is actually held by these multi-job users. Here is a chart of the shared wealth between all named players, so you can see those who are Unemployed, Employed, and Multi-Job.
If you remember the chart from earlier, a little under 80% of all named users are Unemployed. Here you see that those unemployed users hold a little less than half of the wealth on the site. A majority of the wealth is held by those with multiple jobs, less than 10% of the total named population.
Let’s look at the total population, adding in the No-Name Users to the chart.
No-Name Users make up almost 2/3rds of the total population and still hold almost 40% of the wealth. This means that there is around $10.5 billion of ISFL money in circulation that has not been used and will never be used. It feels weird to have that much money just lying around, but at the same time Users may come back to claim it.
But the main part of the chart is seeing around 3% of the population owns over 15% of the wealth. That’s still a dramatic increase, but not by that much.
Body 2.
All this talk of “wealth shares” got me thinking of actual economics and how they would be defined in our ISFL world. So I decided to try to stratify an Upper, Middle, and Lower class out of all users.
First, I need to decide on where the cut-off point is for each level. First, I decided on the Wealth Line, which is the line between being Middle Class and Upper Class. I think that the concept of being “wealthy” on this site is being able to pay for an entire season’s worth of training and equipment. That comes out to $21.5 million, which will be our new benchmark for the Wealth Line. If you are able to pay for all of the available purchases that improve your player, then you are considered wealthy.
Next, I need to decide on what the Poverty Line is. Anyone below this line will be considered Lower Class, at least in terms of financial strength. It was here that I found out that there are actually a portion of users in debt, which may have skewed the earlier data somewhat. But if they are in debt, that means that it is a certain amount of money no longer in the system so it should work out somehow. The Poverty Line in the real world is the point at which a person can no longer afford basic necessities. Taken in ISFL terms, that would be someone unable to pay for equipment throughout the season. So that would put the ISFL Poverty Line at $8 million.
It should be noted that this isn’t the base salary for any user. The standard salary in the DSFL is $6 million and the highest base salary in the ISFL belongs to those at 1000+ TPE with a base of $5 million. This is something that I hope to analyze at a later time.
For now, let’s look at the distribution of total users based on Population, stratified into Upper, Middle, and Lower Class:
And the distribution of wealth along those same lines:
As some may point out, why doesn’t the poor, the larger of the groups, simply eat the rich? I don’t know either, I think it has something to do with the lack of mobilization within the Middle Class, who only had a drop of 10 percentage points from population to wealth. Also, there may also be a larger amount of No-Names among the Lower Class. So it’s time to use that same stratification again, only excluding those who were not named within the player balance spreadsheet.
Here we see an almost perfectly balanced population, with about a third in each class.
And then we find a vastly different image here with the wealth distribution. About a quarter of the population with over three quarters of the wealth. Not only is the Lower Class barely visible anymore, but the middle class is significantly impacted by the removal of No-Names.
But users of any level can still get a job, right? That’s something that anyone on this site can do, if it opens up. So let’s see the distribution of jobs across the three classes.
While not quite as jarring as the wealth distribution, there is a significantly greater number of Upper-Class users who hold jobs. In fact, that chart doesn’t even count multiple jobs, which I accommodate for here:
Conclusion.
There are two different conclusions to come to here:
First, you can take it as a motivator, an incentive to pick up a job when it comes available in the ISFL. Those with a job are already so much better off than those without a job and if you pick up a second, you will almost immediately be a member of the elite on the site.
But you can also take it as a sign of inequity. While anyone can apply to a job, you must be selected for the job and many of the highest paying jobs require further experience. Also, over half of those with jobs already hold other jobs, meaning that they will be receiving extra income and someone unable to get a job will be put that much more down. There’s also the idea that someone who already has multiple jobs will be less likely to drop either of them, meaning that the total 115 job titles taken by those with multiple jobs are less likely to become available to an unemployed user.
I think that I’d want to go through a few more different levels of classification before drawing a total conclusion on what should be done, since there’s other things to consider. There’s players who actually do earn over the poverty line, but have recently spent what they needed to spend on equipment for the year. There’s the consideration of league inflation, graphics and media pay, as well as on-site gambling. I’d also like to add salaries and TPE numbers into the mix as well as see if there is a similar cycle there.
This is not the whole story, but a piece of the puzzle to unlocking how best to create a more equitable league for those unable to find a steady enough form of income on the site. I’ll continue working on researching this whenever I find a free day to do it.
Abstract.
On joining the ISFL, I was thrown into a world of a lot of different currencies. Actually, just two: TPE and money. I don’t know what TPE stands for, but it works like experience points and the money just works like money. Except when it doesn’t. When trying to figure out how much money I needed to be the best phoenix I can be, I looked into the training and equipment costs. It was a lot of money. So I asked about how to earn it. I was told that there were a few different ways to earn money:
There’s doing Twitter every week, which is easy for most people, but a bit difficult for me because I already run so many Twitter accounts. So I decided against doing that.
There’s making graphics, but I’m not very good at that sort of thing. The picture I made for my rookie task was graded at a 2/7, which is weird because you would expect a scale to be out of 5 or 10. Either way, it wasn’t very good. So I won’t be making money that way.
There’s making media, which I think I’d be good at, but I don’t really have the time that often to sit down and write something good. Today I was lucky and got a break from work, but I’d much rather spend my free time watching HoloLive streams. So I can do this, but not very often.
There’s getting a job, but those seem to be incredibly hard to get. You have to apply and talk about your experience, of which I have none. Also, some of these jobs take a lot of effort and talking to people, which I’m not good at. So it would be nice to have the right job, but it probably won’t be available to me.
There’s the casino and stock market. I’m not good at betting and I don’t understand how a fake football league calculates stock prices and overall I’m just uncomfortable with any sort of gambling. I don’t have enough money and I’m trying to make it in a sensible way. So I’m not making money that way.
Finally, there’s salaries, which is what I’m going to talk about in this article. With a lot of these avenues to get money blocked off for me, I will likely be getting almost all of my income from my salary.
Body 1.
I decided to see how everyone else earned their money. I copied all of the “Players” tab in Player Balances and started to pull data from that. Then, I added another column to signify if that person had a job or not. As I was going down the list of jobs, I noticed that there were a lot of users with multiple jobs, so instead of simply marking that they had a job, I entered the amount of job titles they had. Since each job is paid differently, I assume that they’re being paid for each job title. If that’s not the case, I’m sorry. There might be a lot of mistakes in this piece.
Another part that could be causing some mistakes is the section I called “named”. If a user didn’t have a player name, I assumed that they weren’t on the site anymore and therefore not a part of the player population. I did find a few users with jobs that didn’t have names attached, so I had to move a few numbers around to accommodate them.
For these first few charts, I’m tracking how many users are No-Names, Unemployed, Employed to One Job, or Employed to Multiple Jobs. This is that distribution along the total users and then just the named users:
There are a majority of No-Name Users as well as a majority of Unemployed Users. This is to be expected as the amount of jobs on the site appears to be limited. This follows my initial impression. Not in those graphs is the total amount of employed users/names. The proportion of Employed Users compared to Total Users is 10.9% and the proportion of Employed Users to Named Users is 17.4%. It’s still just 134 total users who are employed. But how much are they making?
Well, that’s a multi-tiered question. I could just go through the list of job payouts to find what each position is paid, but I think a better scope of the user’s total buying power could be seen from that user’s total bank account. So I need to find the average amount of money in specific user strata. And since “Averages” can be swayed by outliers, I’ll also calculate the median bank account. I did these calculations per User, per Named User, per Unemployed User, per Employed User, and per Multi-Job User:
Now that’s a massive difference between the average user and the average employed user. It’s a difference of almost $22.5 million on the median. But there’s also a notable jump from Employed to Multi-Job, a little less than $20 million. How many of these Multi-Job people are there and how many jobs do they hold? I said earlier that I don’t know if users get paid per job title, but continuing that, I show here the distribution of job titles between those who hold just one job and those who hold multiple jobs.
More than half of all jobs are held by Users who hold multiple jobs. So remember, that’s 51 users who hold multiple jobs and they hold 115 jobs total. That’s an increase in power by around 225%. I think it’s about time to look at how much of the league’s wealth is actually held by these multi-job users. Here is a chart of the shared wealth between all named players, so you can see those who are Unemployed, Employed, and Multi-Job.
If you remember the chart from earlier, a little under 80% of all named users are Unemployed. Here you see that those unemployed users hold a little less than half of the wealth on the site. A majority of the wealth is held by those with multiple jobs, less than 10% of the total named population.
Let’s look at the total population, adding in the No-Name Users to the chart.
No-Name Users make up almost 2/3rds of the total population and still hold almost 40% of the wealth. This means that there is around $10.5 billion of ISFL money in circulation that has not been used and will never be used. It feels weird to have that much money just lying around, but at the same time Users may come back to claim it.
But the main part of the chart is seeing around 3% of the population owns over 15% of the wealth. That’s still a dramatic increase, but not by that much.
Body 2.
All this talk of “wealth shares” got me thinking of actual economics and how they would be defined in our ISFL world. So I decided to try to stratify an Upper, Middle, and Lower class out of all users.
First, I need to decide on where the cut-off point is for each level. First, I decided on the Wealth Line, which is the line between being Middle Class and Upper Class. I think that the concept of being “wealthy” on this site is being able to pay for an entire season’s worth of training and equipment. That comes out to $21.5 million, which will be our new benchmark for the Wealth Line. If you are able to pay for all of the available purchases that improve your player, then you are considered wealthy.
Next, I need to decide on what the Poverty Line is. Anyone below this line will be considered Lower Class, at least in terms of financial strength. It was here that I found out that there are actually a portion of users in debt, which may have skewed the earlier data somewhat. But if they are in debt, that means that it is a certain amount of money no longer in the system so it should work out somehow. The Poverty Line in the real world is the point at which a person can no longer afford basic necessities. Taken in ISFL terms, that would be someone unable to pay for equipment throughout the season. So that would put the ISFL Poverty Line at $8 million.
It should be noted that this isn’t the base salary for any user. The standard salary in the DSFL is $6 million and the highest base salary in the ISFL belongs to those at 1000+ TPE with a base of $5 million. This is something that I hope to analyze at a later time.
For now, let’s look at the distribution of total users based on Population, stratified into Upper, Middle, and Lower Class:
And the distribution of wealth along those same lines:
As some may point out, why doesn’t the poor, the larger of the groups, simply eat the rich? I don’t know either, I think it has something to do with the lack of mobilization within the Middle Class, who only had a drop of 10 percentage points from population to wealth. Also, there may also be a larger amount of No-Names among the Lower Class. So it’s time to use that same stratification again, only excluding those who were not named within the player balance spreadsheet.
Here we see an almost perfectly balanced population, with about a third in each class.
And then we find a vastly different image here with the wealth distribution. About a quarter of the population with over three quarters of the wealth. Not only is the Lower Class barely visible anymore, but the middle class is significantly impacted by the removal of No-Names.
But users of any level can still get a job, right? That’s something that anyone on this site can do, if it opens up. So let’s see the distribution of jobs across the three classes.
While not quite as jarring as the wealth distribution, there is a significantly greater number of Upper-Class users who hold jobs. In fact, that chart doesn’t even count multiple jobs, which I accommodate for here:
Conclusion.
There are two different conclusions to come to here:
First, you can take it as a motivator, an incentive to pick up a job when it comes available in the ISFL. Those with a job are already so much better off than those without a job and if you pick up a second, you will almost immediately be a member of the elite on the site.
But you can also take it as a sign of inequity. While anyone can apply to a job, you must be selected for the job and many of the highest paying jobs require further experience. Also, over half of those with jobs already hold other jobs, meaning that they will be receiving extra income and someone unable to get a job will be put that much more down. There’s also the idea that someone who already has multiple jobs will be less likely to drop either of them, meaning that the total 115 job titles taken by those with multiple jobs are less likely to become available to an unemployed user.
I think that I’d want to go through a few more different levels of classification before drawing a total conclusion on what should be done, since there’s other things to consider. There’s players who actually do earn over the poverty line, but have recently spent what they needed to spend on equipment for the year. There’s the consideration of league inflation, graphics and media pay, as well as on-site gambling. I’d also like to add salaries and TPE numbers into the mix as well as see if there is a similar cycle there.
This is not the whole story, but a piece of the puzzle to unlocking how best to create a more equitable league for those unable to find a steady enough form of income on the site. I’ll continue working on researching this whenever I find a free day to do it.
She/Her