Rant on Greeter Games

I'm sure I'm bitter, so please excuse me.  When I joined I agree to play greeter games, and wasn't too happy about the lack of interest by new members.  So I put my profile to no greeter games.  Then I read some posts about the goodwill of being a greeter game participant, so I changed my status back.  Now I'm back to where I was before.  Greeter games, non-rated, and new members making one move and then not even following through?  What's the dealio?

No reason to be bitter.  What you are describing is the same reason i quit playing greeter games.  Just uncheck and dont play them. 

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If you don't count as valid members those who only play once and then are inactive, then that seems to imply that total activity of members is a more accurate measurement of chess.com's success than total membership count.

Then I guess a couple alternate ways to think about it would be by defining (rather arbitrarily) what the minimum amount of activity was necessary for a given member to 'count'. Or instead of counting members, define a unit of average membership activity and then measure the success of the site in terms of those units.

So if you graphed a bell curve in which the majority fell somewhere in the middle 3 standard deviations of the unit of average membership activity, with the right tail skewing towards always being online at chess.com, and the left tail skewing towards only opening an account and making a single move, then after plotting all of the units of membership activity represented by the 2.5 million registered members, you could then calculate the area under the curve.

After all of that.... you would probably still have a value somewhat equivalent to 2.5 million average activity units anyway and so it boils down to not mattering and the 2.5 million members is still a legitimate number and not mere bragging.

Only 1/10 of my greeter games ever goes beyond 3th move.

I think when I first came here, the greeter I played ran out of time.

I've played a few greeter games through.  One of the guys that I play with most from my friend list is someone who I played a greeter game with.  Yeah, lots of the games are going to time out, but when they don't you can play with some interesting people.  I probably wouldn't enjoy 10 greeter games at a time though, so I have it set to 3.

What you're doing there is rather convoluted. When you're summing the activity per member over all members (calculate the area under the curve, as you put it) you just come back to total activity, which already known or at least easily established, without recourse to Bell curves. However, the idea of measuring the succes of the site in total activity is interesting and certainly more revealing than counting members. We could just look at total forum posts per day (or week or year, if you want to boast about large numbers). Or, for those more interested in playing chess, rather than talking about subjects of a most peripheral association with chess, you could look at total games finished (perhaps other than time-outs) in a period.

Of course, Erik's measure of total membership is not devoid of information itself, it's just easily misinterpreted (That's the essence of advertising and propganda: easily misinterpreted statements). We could use a very rough form of Timotheus approach to guess total daily activity form the members involved in this discussion. I looked at your point totals and I guess that, if we except Tonydal, who is clearly off the charts, we come for the members here at perhaps 2,5 posts a day. Correcting for the bias that we're more likely to encounter active members, I'm going to assume (big assumption here) that 10% of all members achieve this level of activity. That allows us to calculate total activity if we know total membership. Because I don't, I'm going to assume a gazillion members, which yields 2,5 x 1/10 x a gazillion= 1/4 gazillion posts every day.

That's probably what Timotheus had in mind, more or less.

Everyone knows that 1/4 of a gazillion is a bazillion.  Elementary trigorithams aka rythmic gymnastics!

That's probably a metric system issue.

:shrug: I have been a greeter for well over a year and yeah I'd guess 50% at least of those games just die from people never responding.

But then some people have shown no intetest in them, some just blow me off and some well I don't know but they never respond back

Not sure if it is the correct interpretation, but the only interpretation of this that results in it making any sense is if it was satire.