Great read, and I'm very glad Jagex is open about these kind of statistics.
Reading through this thread I see a lot of people mocking the statistics because:
1. People lie about age.
2. Their friendslists have more/less girls in them.
3. They didn't get a survey themselves.
I wonder if you guys know how surveys work. You never ask all people, because that's virtually impossible due to hefty amounts of data. After all, you have to manually investigate all outliers (such as people claiming to be 1 year old, and/or answering the most extreme opinions to every question). This is why you take a group of people that is large enough to be generalized to the whole group.
Lying about age? Of course people do. That's why you don't ask them their age, but their birth date instead. Only few people lie about that, and you can sort out the "1-1-2014" trolls out soon enough if you looked at your data.
Reading this thread I see about an equal amount of people criticizing that they have more, or less, girls in their friend list and claim the data is biased too high, or too low. With both sides having an equal amount of criticizers, is probably prove enough that the data is accurate.
There are plenty of statistical tests to see if your data is accurate or not, but when you are working with statistics concerning humans, almost all data is normally distributed. It looks like a hill, with the majority around the center, and the further away from the center (average) you get, the lower the hill gets. If you were to see that data in graphs, that is how the graphs of Jagex look like. The three odd spikes in the level/year of account graph are new players, and shows that EoC is far from dead. Even the 2014 spikes fit the profile, but the 2012 spike is odd.
Enough with the nerd talk now. All I can say is thanks for the statistics, and keep up the good work! I have been playing RS for a very long time, and I've never enjoyed the game as much as I do now. I am confident it will last.
11-Apr-2014 12:06:57
