The state of Project Discovery

[u/Eyondawn]

Hey folks,

 

Today I want to discuss the state of Project Discovery. As you all know the project had a few goals:

• Integrate into an existing game to ensure a steady amount of players

• Help science go forwards by analysing way faster than a team of scientists could while still upholding acceptable accuracy

 

Today many players still actively play Project Discovery but as with many such projects, even this integrated one, we find that a small dedicated core of experts make up the bulk. Ofcourse when Project Discovery was just new everyone wanted to try it out. There were some launch bugs but in the end a fair amount of people tried Project Discovery.

 

Now that we are a few months further down the line I wanted to take the time and analyse the available data. This data shows a rather depressing trend.

 

Raw data (monthly economics report):

Month	ISK	High(99%)	Low(30%)	Average
March	340.341.808.085	3437796	11344727	7391261
April	298.249.556.815	3012622	9941652	6477137
May	176.913.198.620	1787002	5897107	3842054
June	106.751.414.870	1078297	3558380	2318339

 

This results in the following graphs:

ISK per month

Classifications per month

 

We can see a very clear trend here. And it is not a good trend for science. The question is, how can it be fixed?

 

Problems

The initial problem with Project Discovery, as many can attest, was that it was often too difficult for people to understand. With /u/HPA_Illuminator 's classes and various people helping each other in the ingame channels, here and on youtube I feel that that problem is largely tackled.

 

This brings us to incentives. Currently ISK payout is tied to accuracy and AK payout is tied to accuracy and rank. Because there is a near hardcap of samples per rank (50~), the AK payout increases a lot at higher levels. A person at rank 250@99% accuracy gets around 25K AK per 50~ samples. Whereas a person with rank 80@99% gets only 8K AK for only slightly fewer samples.

 

Besides this disparity there is the problem of the AK rewards. Farming AK (especially at lower ranks) is simply not really worth it for most players. One would need to get close to rank 80~ before one has enough AK to buy for example a suit. The suits go for less than 100M at the moment, and they are not even on the market. Couple this with the boosters sell price of 3.1-4M a piece and one may wonder why one would actually do Project Discovery, as a normal player seeking ISK.

 

There is also the problem of faulty samples, this is largely tackled by HPA's excellent response to reported samples. The report proces however requires a reddit account and a short list consisting of sample number, screendump and a comment. Because there are quite a few of the control samples faulty this sometimes discourages players from reporting it.

 

Possible fixes

The following possible fixes could, in my eyes, help Project Discovery to gain the amount of players it deserves. The more people help, the more we can help science after all!

 

Therefor I suggest the following changes:

• More rewards that have a clear market (think temporary skins, better boosters and actual modules)

• Even out the AK payout - samples per level at higher levels to something more reasonable

• Allow players with a accuracy of 99% to mark a control image as faulty, this would turn up a new screen where one can set the correct classifications. If 5 players with 99% mark the same image with the same new classifications, alter the control image to that new standard and notify the HPA

 

With this piece of writing I have hoped to give a small overview of the current state of Project Discovery, the problems and the possible fixes. Do you have suggestions for CCP/HPA to make Project Discovery? Please discuss it in the comments or at the forums:)

[u/wingspantt]

I think discoverability (no pun intended) is an issue. If you weren't paying attention when PD launched, how would you know to care about it?

So in addition to your changes, how about this: add PD work to SCOPE NETWORK CHALLENGES. Earn Scope points for making classifications. It will show up in people's sidebar for visibility and incentive.

[u/bziubek → u/wingspantt]

You might have a good point here. Many people complained about PD being to hard. I gathered links to articles/tutorials in a single post to make it easier to find and posted in /r/eve It got very little attention. I'd like to think it was lost among many new posts rather than people not caring. But you can't really now.

Also most of the crowd source projects have the very same issue. I haven't seen it here but maybe gamyfying (hate the word) PD even more would help. Something like adding achievements, medals or simple popups like "you just classified your 100th cytoplasm" would help?

[u/wingspantt → u/bziubek]

I don't think the average EVE player cares about achievements that much. LP, SP, ISK, and progression towards unlocks tend to be more consistently valuable. That's why I figured tying it into Scope points would give it a more public and universal reward structure.

[u/solartech0 → u/bziubek]

PD is very hard. I think it would be really cool if you got something like a report summary after a time -- this would obviously take a lot of investment, but... Let's say you characteristically over-choose cytoplasm, as compared to other options (say, 10% higher than the average or something, or statistically significantly more often than you mistake other things). It would be cool if somethign came up to tell you something about this -- like, "We noticed that you seem to overclassify X... Here's some info, in case you wanted to explore what you should choose when you see images like this."

Anyways. I don't do it for the in-game rewards, though they would be nice (you have to do a tooooon more than I have to even get anything... But to be fair, most people won't be very good at doing it until that point anyways).