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Riding the Failure Cascade
An anonymous reader writes "The Escapist has up an article looking at a curve that represents the dissolution of large social groups, like online guilds. Called the Failure Cascade, it's essentially a way of examining the dissociation of members of an organization predicated on a culture of success. They primarily explore this phenomenon using descriptions of EVE corporate alliances. 'These are the two forces at work in [an] alliance's failure cascade: the individual and the guild ... This happens because the failure cascade is the inverse of a network effect. Websites like MySpace define their value by the people that use the service just as guilds define their quality by their members. As bad events cause players to leave or become inactive, the quality drop leads others to do the same in a spiral that rarely stabilizes, until no one is left.'"
Anyone here? Where did you all go?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The article could be summarised as so:
People leave guilds.
More people leave guilds.
No one is left in guild.
Guild dies.
November 20th, meet December 14th.
I wonder if the RIAA and MPAA will figure out that DRM and huge lawsuits with huge awards simply results in a cascading decline of their products as customers become upset and leave.
The truth shall set you free!
I never thought I'd see a failure cascade, let alone create one!
Unless you're talking about being able to predict the rate of failure reliably, what's the point? I don't think that's possible because you'd need to be able to predict specific events that lead to a significant improvement or drop in quality.
Associations, cultures, empires all come and go. That's not something that's new or poorly understood. People have been applying empirical measures of success to all of the above for quite some time.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I feel so topical and current! I just wrote the same thing about Microsoft, detailing the spiral pattern affecting the company's entire consumer product lineup, from Zune to Windows to Office to Xbox to WinCE/Windows Mobile. Will the last person left please turn off the lights?
Soviet Microsoft: How Resistance to Free Markets and Open Ideas Will the Unravel the Software Superpower
Somewhat ironically, one of the most financially successful capitalist companies of the 90s has positioned itself as a modern counterpart to the old communist Soviet Union. Microsoft's ideological contempt for and resistance to free markets and the open expression and propagation of fresh ideas and technologies is not only a close parallel of the old USSR, but also a clear reflection of why Microsoft is currently failing and why its troubles have only just begun. Here's a comprehensive look at why this is the case.
What happens when Republicans lose the White House in 2008? As a brand, Democrats didn't decline in popularity after their 2004 defeat (or after 2000). But Republicans did decline after their 2006 losses - though they'd started after their 2004 victories, and regained some shortly after the 2006 upsets. Maybe political parties act different.
--
make install -not war
We have formed a player association (the equivalent of guild in star wars galaxies) in 2003, just 1.5 month into the game.
despite it starting up with only 2 members in rebel side, and many mishaps and failures, went on to grow to 120 members (a major number for the bigges server in the game) and established one of the biggest player cities on the server. the group still continues today by hopping from game to game.
the idea is that it was a democratic pa with a solid constitution after the fashion of the republic, now in rebel alliance. was built on the idea of freedom, and all members had been recruited on these ideals and nothing more.
Read radical news here
When the internet gaming wasn't mainstream yet, there were alot of people theorizing in EDGE about how game play can work when anyone can just disconnect at anytime. This is basically the same thing just at a massive scale what happens if key persons in your web of trust[1] just leaves, or if things get boring.
;-)
So the question is what keeps people go, from my own experience nationality is very important, and web site communities. But that's all in the article too..
[1] miss use of buzz words bingo
Mercenary Coalition: "If you cant play with us for 16 hours a day, you're kicked out." I played in eve for 3 years (since beta 6 for those keeping score) and went with the same group of people from failed corp to failed corp, alliances that rose and broke (the OLLDDD Stain Alliance, before the MC existed) and the into the MC which had its own people who left (TC), the problem is that its hard to draw a solid line between "hardcore" gaming for people who have the time to do so, and "casual" gaming for people who play when they have time to do so and want to do so. That being said, both mindsets usually collide at some point and the "hardcore" people go one way, and the "casuals" go the other. You keep seeing these splits as peoples lives/jobs/relationships change. Some group that is good for several years will all of the sudden change when for example, someone gets a new job, or a leader almost loses his family, or school. That being said, it will probably always keep happening. History repeats.
Maybe because their politics at CCC in Indonesia[1] is dooming us all.
[1]not the other one
Sometimes it's due to some guild members joining a guild early on, specifically to loot it, and then /gkick out members after they loot it, out of some twisted desire to create problems and be a jerk.
....) become too unwieldy, or guild members start feeling they are operated unfairly.
Sometimes it's because the guild leader - who usually is someone who invests a large fraction of time making sure it runs smoothly, and probably bankrolls many important events (guild tabard, guild bank vault, special items), getting sick of all the time demands.
Sometimes it's because recent guild members seem to think it's fun to spam guild chat with useless comments and childish sex talk.
Sometimes key officers who were part of the glue that kept it together no longer think the guild serves their purposes.
Sometimes large groups (usually calling themselves Army of
All these things are risks.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I used to describe the discovery, advent, blowoff, collapse, rebirth (elsewhere) of online communities (from BBS forward) as the Online Cycle of Life, or similar phrases that indicate cycles...It looks like Failure Cascade would cover the blowoff/collapse phases. This would apply to just about any socially-oriented group nowadays, whether we're talking websites (/., Fazed.net, etc.) or MMO groups (as mentioned in the article).
I figure, it's at least a matter of group basis (what is everyone doing/coming here for?), and triggering effects (mutual distrust, site sellouts, etc.) that determine the angle and likelihood of descent.
You Fool!
Don't alert them to their faults!! They might actually pay attention! Then they won't shrivel up and die and go away!
Your words make baby Tux cry!
I disagree. Social networking tools aren't within a competitive environment, where a collective can "attack" and "disband". People can subscribe to multiple, and often do. For the most part, social networking sites are slipping from the "ease of contacting friends afar" to the "amass a myriad channels to communicate". We will arrive at saturation quite quickly I believe. Face-To-Face, hand-passed-notes, letter-through-post writing, telephone calls, cell phone, voice-chat, text-chat, email, Forums, Usenet, IM, SMS, ICQ and now Social networking "links". Whew!
There are certain aspects to each type of communication that are interesting (voice inflection, record-keeping, time-delayed, etc) - but there is no one method to rule them all,
Yeah, I knew you were thinking that.
The 'culture of success' is no simple analogy, and can have adverse effects as well. There was a Weapons Factory clan that was founded on success at all costs (they went by the symbol "$"), and they managed to claw their way to the top (mostly through questionable and 'slight' game modifications that weren't exactly botting, but weren't exactly fair play, either - e.g. setting the client binds so that a normally silent cloaked spy player would have nice, loud footsteps to the defending player's ears... meaning they're much easier to locate. Just one of a mountain of examples).
This eventually killed off the entire MOD... folks didn't want to have to deal with outright cheaters (not bot-users, just cheaters), so the clans died off one by one, since most of them were only in it for the fun. Once the clans left, the cascade took down a lot of public servers with it (it didn't help that the Quake 3 MOD's main coder eventually became a member of that same clan, and actively implemented changes as suggested by same...) It had been bad enough that the shift from Quake 2 to Quake 3 had done quite a bit of damage to the MOD's player base, but the clan's modus operandi were eventually too much for the community - they still survive as a small shadow group, and occasionally play on a part-time server. Compared to the days when literally thousands of players could be found on hundreds of servers? Just a faint shadow.
Nowadays, most games are fairly cheat and bot-proof (I said fairly, not mostly or certainly). But the same dynamics are at play - a clan/guild/whatever that makes success their only goal will invariably attract the kinds of players you don't want on any server/world/etc, and tends to ruin the gameplay for everyone else while they're at it. While yes they do set themselves up for failure more readily than those who form just for fun, they also tend to start getting desperate when normal gameplay doesn't offer them the success they need to stay alive. This means they may start looking at 'alternatives' to try and keep the mojo going.
IMHO, the best organizations are those who simply do it for fun, and have a cadre of players who are really into the game. Again at the Weapons Factory example, the Quake2 version had a clan that were the friendliest and most respected guys in town... Population Control Incorporated (PCI). These guys had ISDN connections when the vast majority of players were on modems, but they always played fair, and the matches (at that time) were tightly regulated and fair. The funny thing is, this particular clan did it just for the fun of it. They'd go out of their way to mentor new players on a public server, and to make it fun for the whole pile playing (for instance, if more than one were playing on the same public server and it was full of unknowns or newbies, they'd automatically split themselves among the two teams). They were a stand-up group of people, and it showed in their playing style. It's still a pity they disbanded during the Quake 2/3 shift, but as they themselves said - they held the top slot for too long, many members got burned out from playing the game for literally years, and they pretty much came together and decided that it was time. Most stayed played on for fun (but never joined a clan again) in the Quake 2 version with the occasional fun meet-up matches, until the Q2 version of the MOD finally died a quiet death around 2002 or so... 3 years after Quake 3 came out.
I believe that all organizations begin, they (might) rise, and they (certainly) fall. Some do it short, some take awhile. Some end by mutual agreement. Most are benign, some are poisonous. A precious few even shift from one game to another together.
It's a complex dynamic in any organization, but I kinda like how TFA articulated at least one aspect of it...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
The mathematical study of this process could be potentially quite interesting, analogous to the study of critical points and phase transitions in statistical physics. By systematically studying the rise and decline of stable structures in online communities like guilds it could give some insight into a real life version of psychohistory. Indeed, these online groups are microcosms for the real world, but where certain parameters could be controlled and studied. Unfortunately, this article has nothing to do with that and simply seems to be a personal lament about how sometimes online guilds fall apart. It is a bummer for many-a-gamer, but not exactly groundbreaking stuff here.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
Or
Life, as shallow as you like.
Deleted
All the infighting and divisiveness caused talented people to leave. Further fighting caused fragmentation and duplication of effort among dozens of competing kernels. When the talent like Mike Smith and Jordan Hubbard finally departed, all which remained were 2nd and 3rd tier wannabees.
With a power vacuum, oddballs like Theo De Rat became defacto "spokesmen" and embarrassed what was left of the legitamate BSD community. Inevitably, this scared away what little remained of bona fide skills. It's a damn shame.
Okay, does anyone else think would be an awesome guild name?
I think Wikipedia is a prominent example of this. Assholes(deletionists) are driving away the people who made it great in the first place(content creators) with their elitism and petty power grabs. And now, Wikimedia is only able to achieve 1/4 of their fundraising goal because a lot of the content creators were probably money contributors as well.
Congratulations asshole deletionists. You may finally achieve the ultimate deletion-the entire encyclopedia.
you are so goony.
Watch highly touted stocks when they hit a wall. A lot of stocks are bouyed by the push to love them and nothing else. Once the push stops, the bottom falls out.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
I think cultural groups only last 10 years on average before braking up normally or changing into something else, but with a global war on culture going on this process of attrition is accelerated... until nobody breeds above ground.
Awaiting moderation in 5... 4... 3... 2... 1... And you're outta here!
... and then they built the supercollider.
"An SAP implementation."
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'm leaving!
Don't blame me -- I voted for Roslin.
kind of applies to a lot of groups.
People just get tired of them and when a few most vocal persons leave or are kicked out everyone else leaves too. Woow.
I'm sensing a foreigner trying to pretend he cares about the US.
Idiot.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
why does anyone have to think in terms of who's side you're on. results of that mindphuking hypenosys distributed by the fauxking life0cidal execrable no doubt. do we even have a clue whois yOUR real 'enemies'?
it will become much clearer to all when the lights come up again. see you there?
The idea that membership will generally grow or decline in spurts is nothing new. While this subject could be grounds for an interesting analysis in the context of an MMO social organization and how it affects the community of a specific game, but when no specific examples are given with supporting data, why exactly would someone write an article, or more importantly, why would anyone want to read it? The Escapist has long suffered from filler articles, written by people who claim to be game designers, but in reality many of the contributors have only plotted out a D&D dungeon back on graph paper. This article is no exception. By reading the article, it's fairly clear the author is a member of this so-called "Great" organization, the Goon Fleet, and like most of the kids who bounce around in the Something Awful crowd, they seek attention without really justifying it. Come on Escapist, get some quality control. You need to fill a set amount of pages each week, but please avoid publishing articles that don't offer an interesting subject or conclusion.
Gee, I always figured the "Failure Cascade" referred to Internet Explorer's interpretation of the Acid2 test.
In one case, the catalyst was the company being sold. In the other case, it was near-criminal behavior of a newly added team member.
Nevermind, I thought it said 'Resonance Cascade'.
Slashdot: Where opinions are just opinions until you have mod points.
I've seen this often in real life, going back as far as 21 years ago.
Personally, I'm a risk-taker, but not a long term responsible individual. My failures in business or projects have generally come from a lack of finding responsible people who can carry the long term needs after the risk I take starts earnings its rewards. I ran a succssful BBS 2 decades ago, and I saw many failures due to there being a risk taker who took off, leaving the responsible ones with no "leader."
I think the same is true in social groups, although maybe it isn't the factor of having a risk-taker, but having a natural leader who others look to for support even if it is purely "spiritual" in nature.
I run a not-for-profit that works with hundreds of churches, and I see the same thing. The leader leaves, retires, dies, whatever: the church falls apart. Recently a large client of mine went under after 25 years of being in business. The boss left, leaving his responsible managers but no leader/risk-taker.
There's nothing to see here. These are proven truths over millenia that have surfaced in every area of life: politics, businesses, faiths, even families. If there isn't a new leader to move the group in a direction away from complacency, the group will fail. Sometimes a responsible individual finds a natural tendency to lead/take new risks in new directions, but I'm not sure its a matter of nurturing those skills. I do believe firmly that there is a natural propensity to either being responsible, or being risky. A very rare few have both talents, although I personally have never met anyone like that. It's either one or the other, generally.
The majority, though, seem to have neither. They want to follow in hopes that some day they will lead, but in the end they're driven to neither. They follow long enough until it is obvious that they'll never lead (because they don't push to become an obvious leader/risk-taker), so they fall away from the project. In this case, though, I don't see many failures, because a natural leader has a tendency to attract others to the project. When that risk taker gets bored, runs out of money, or gets caught up in something else, the project fails.
Every project I've worked on that has failed has been my fault, and no one else's. Usually it boiled down to getting bored, but sometimes it was pure irresponsibility. Sometimes it was a lack of trusting another person to take over for me, at which point I put too much burden on the future leader, and they left. Life lessons.
I just love all the zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Sounds like a failing startup to me.
Dunx
Converting caffeine into code since 1982
It sounds more like an episode of TOS to me.
This article is way better than the one linked in the story: http://shacknews.com/featuredarticle.x?id=564&page=1/
My VO guild is still alive. Probably. I haven't actually logged in for over six months...
-:sigma.SB
WARN
THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM
Corrupt government and corporate minions promoted to ineptitude
merrily wrecking successful companies and nation's economies;
then rewarded for gross failure with golden handshakes and fat
retirement packages - whist the rest get hit with life shattering:
redundancies,
'credit crunches' and
depressions -
all created by insane greed.
RR
The model is broke(n). Let the banksters freeze in the dark!
SHEESH! Foxy Knoxy's drivel splashed across the world by the MSM - interpreted, re-interpreted
and regurgitated was beyond surreal; hence participation in SOCIAL-ist (re-engineering)
Networks, playing on vapid ego, seems rather foolhardy - at best.
Notwithstanding ID THEFT, the fact that those black-holes re-sell YOU
to the highest bidder, while YOU foolishly give away the rest 'to belong',
somewhere, which is just plain stupid.
"Oh, but, we live in a 'global village'," well, until the bloody lights go off.
Frankly, it is looking more and more like DotCON Bubble Mach II.
No? FIND: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2007/12/15/cnbanking115.xml
RR
its an eve thing to thoughs who dont get it.
Tell me, who is a foreigner on "teh intarwebs" anyway?
Does slashdot represent US soil?
...a funny definition of "permanent"... ;P
So, I give your article a readthrough, and I have to take issue with some parts of your analysis (I am sticking to the Xbox comparison, because that's where I have something of a clue):
You write: "The PS3 has sold better out of the gate than the PS2 did in its first year (PS2: 6m in 1 year; PS3 6m in ~5 months)."
- The PS3 didn't sell 6 million in 5 months - they shipped 6 million from factories in the first 5 months. Sony have now shifted to the more conservative "shipped to retailers" estimate. (The same that Nintendo and Microsoft have been using) That's why they report 5,59 million shipped worldwide in their latest financial report (through 2007/09/30).
(See: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=202533)
- The PS3 released at the same time in the US and Japan (november), and in Europe in march, and was not supply constrained for a significant amount of time. The PS2 had serious supply issues initially and launched as follows:
Japan: March 4 2000
US: October 26 2000
Europe: November 23
(See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_2)
Hence, comparing "first year sales", with vastly different launch schedules in various territories does not give a terribly accurate picture.
-As for the PS3 having outsold the Xbox 360 "in every market outside the US", that is simply factually inaccurate. (It is certainly very wrong indeed in Europe's largest console market, the UK, as well as Canada. Spain has certainly gone Sony's way, Germany is still PC dominated, and France is pretty close according to what information one can get, although Sony will probably gain a lead pretty soon if it hasn't already.
Finally, looking at the actual numbers available from tracking agencies (MC / NPD) can be interesting for those who are geeky enough to actually care about these things:
Hardware LTD Japan: (MC)
WII - 4,060,486
PS3 - 1,467,083
360 - 482,568
Hardware LTD America: (NPD)
360: 7,862,151
WII: 6,019,685
PS3: 2,446,649
At the Tale in The Desert most of the comments in the article doesn't apply. Most ot the guilds is formed around student-teacher or friendly relationships. And since there is no enemies to kill or areas to conquer the guilds are dying slowly. When you fialed very slowly. A guild is dead when your old friends are leaving the game and that create a quit wave sometimes. But the curve are very slow and since you can be in may guilds you can survive.
So yet another boffin does a study of something everyone knew instinctively. Oy.
Who is this delectable creature with an insatiable love of the dead?
they still survive as a small shadow group, and occasionally play on a part-time server.
If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire... The A-Team.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Not having articles on subjects isn't necessarily something to be proud of!
Britannica doesn't know what "South Park" is. That's understandable, but it also doesn't have entries for obscure little films like ... "Star Wars". It agrees that the film exists, and is notable ... it has an entry for George Lucas and the film appears in the biography pages for lots of individual cast members ... but no page on the actual movie itself. Similarly, searching for "Casablanca" finds a lesser-known record company called Casablanca Records, and the Casablanca Conference, but no entry for the movie with Humphey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.
Margaret Michell earns a biographical entry for writing "the enormously popular novel Gone with the Wind" .. but the book itself (and the movie) aren't deemed worth an entry.
It seems that Britannica have decided, as a point of policy, that their encyclopedia will focus more on the biographical details of famous people rather than on famous works, presumably because it's easier to come up with a consistent format for famous people, and a way of limiting the number of entries, than if you start listing individual pieces separately.
So Brittanica will often tell you the personal details of an author, but not the details of the work that actually made the author notable in the first place (J.K. Rowling, yes, "Harry Potter", no).
Ironically, this means that the lofty Britannica is actually stuffed full of details that could easily be considered by a deletionist Wikieditor as being obvious trivia and pointless fancruft deserving immediate erasure (knowing about "Gone with the Wind" is arguably culturally important, knowing the author's precise date and place of birth arguably isn't).
So Britannica is missing articles on almost every culturally-important work of art (unless it's a place or building), except as footnotes in the biographies of people involved with them, or who created them.
Britannica has no article on Bach's "Brandenburg" concertos, or van Gogh's "Starry Night". They don't cover the "Watchmen" or "Sandman" graphic novels. They have Bob Kane but no "Batman". Siegel and Shuster, but no "Superman". The Sistine Chapel and its ceiling sneak in as architectural works, but Leonardo's iconic "Vitruvian Man" doesn't get its own entry.
Very few culturally-important pieces break through the Britannica "artwork" barrier. The Mona Lisa sneaks in as "Mona Lisa and other works", and Mickey Mouse is listed (and, strangely enough, "Oswald the Lucky Rabbit" has his own Britannica index entry), but contemporaries "Felix the Cat", and "Tom and Jerry" aren't deemed sufficiently important (although Britannica does see fit to include biographies of the "Felix" creator Otto Mesmer, and of Hanna & Barbera).
As for the example on your list of a newspaper, well, Britannica does seem to list the major national US and UK newspapers, but London's "Evening Standard" isn't listed. It also doesn't have an entry for New York's "Village Voice" (it prefers to "biog" Daniel Wolf, one of the founders, instead).
So Britannica's strength (to a journalist) is probably its reliable biographical info, which is probably really useful if you want to say something in print about a living person. It seems to be a decent biographical encyclopedia
On the down-side (for a journalist), its serious coverage of current news subjects is nowhere near as timely as Wiki's. Britannica does now cover Enron and the Enron crash and major players involved, but it doesn't yet list Northern Rock, which recen
Eric Baird