Re: Player stats
In reply to Elim6394 (msg # 8):
I get what you're looking for...but there are so many variables beyond what you're suggesting...
Number of active games? Well...is the player working multiple jobs, or is the player retired/disabled and has loads of time? Those have a tremendous impact. So does player health...one of my fellow players suffered a stroke several weeks ago, and is still working on recovering. She posts as often as she feels able, but considering that she still only has partial control of one hand, ANY post is a major undertaking for her right now. Should she be penalized for that? I've had fellow players who are still in college...their posting rate/activity rate plummets at the end of every semester when finals are oncoming, over spring break, and sometimes during the holidays (since they go home to visit family and don't have the same kind of freedom to post that they did at school, for various reasons.) They've all been solid players that, were I a GM, I would be absolutely thrilled to have in my game...but your suggested stat-tracking would flag them as problematic on some level.
Number of bans? To the best of my knowledge, there is no formal 'ban' protocol on RPOL, unless someone egregiously and repeatedly violates the TOU, in which case the only ban that matters is the ban from the site (which means you wouldn't have to worry about them trying to get into your game.) GMs may ban or not ban as they see fit, and as a result, with no hard criteria for why someone got banned, this could be a useless stat to track, as well (if there was any sort of way to track it). It could represent, just as easily, a player with a really difficult personality or a player with really poor judgment who keeps applying to games with really difficult GMs (which DOES happen), or a player who had an unfortunate event crop up in their life that made them unavailable online for an extended period that triggered a lot of GMs banning them for ghosting. Without solid criteria for a ban that accounts for peripheral issues, it doesn't give you the kind of information you seem to be expecting from it.
Others have already addressed the average daily posts, so I'll just leave that one alone.
It's a little different for GMs...they create and own the games, so they are responsible for keeping them running. But if a GM lets a game languish in inactivity for months or even years, that inactivity would also be reflected in the players' (hypothetical) stats, even though that situation is entirely out of their control. And even with the GMs' situation being different, it's still a pretty widely held stance that you have to take those stats with a grain of salt, because there are so many potential exceptional situations that the stats don't really account for. But a GM allowing their game to founder into inactivity would also impact the stats of all the players in that game...to borrow an example from my own history, should I be counted as 'ghosting' the three games I have on my "Games You Play In Or Peruse" list that have gone inactive because the GMs didn't have time to keep running them, due to Real Life issues? I haven't posted in them in months (or even years, in at least one case...I still have them listed because I have had GMs give up on games for RL reasons in the past, only to return to them a couple of years later when those reasons had been resolved).
By the time you start trying to count up all the potential exceptions to be accounted for, you're talking about some extensive coding, for something that's of extremely limited value to the vast majority of users on the site. It's a pretty limited 'bang for your buck' exchange, to do something that most GMs who seem to care about it have already figured out how to do on their own, to some extent.