DndBeyond published an article "2023 Unrolled: A Look Back at a Year of Adventure" and I thought "Cool, stats!" - until I found they messed with axes of the only graphs they put in there and now who the hell knows what they say. What the hell guys - 60, 80, 100, 200, 500, 700...? Where did you get that number sequence from? I showed this to the in-house testing team and they were similarly baffled.
Le freaking sigh. Ok. Let us see if we can salvage anything from this mess. I think this is what the Species numbers are.
But comparing them to other cuts from D&D Beyond we've got a chunky anomaly at the Dragonborn and Tiefling who are inbetween one of the weird graph elements (can't make a log scale fit, it isn't that). Has there been a rush to play dragonborn and tieflings recently? I doubt it - I'm not reading the numbers off right.
Pfah. Useless. What is the freakin point of giving us a graph like this? Put numbers on it, or make the scale useful, or don't bother! This is hardly trade secret stuff! Nobodies going to crash the share price because we know how many tiefling players there are. What nonsense, share the data or don't - this half-assed bull is just that.
Let us take a look at the classes, perhaps something can be salvaged there - at least the steps seem to be regular and then 'below 100k' which is only artificers.
So this one looks more in line with what we would expect and also fits to previous patterns though there is a little bit of shift. Taking the total off this we should be looking at something like 3.1 million characters in all of D&D Beyond which is a fair few and says that 1.2 million data sheet scrobble that we got to see a while ago is relatively representative covering 40% of them all.
This is how that shapes up against what we see elsewhere. I offer no commentary, this is a fools errand.
Why, why go to the trouble of twiddle the graph scales - it is more freaking trouble than just leaving it alone in a useful state. Who's going to freak out? Why did someone put the effort in? Make the graph, whack it in the slideshow was the path of least effort - what on earth did they spend this time fiddling the scales for? Even if it was a deliberate attempt to obfuscate the data - why share it at all in that case?
I confess to being baffled. What little we can discern says we probably got a good view of what the patterns are from other big sets of data we've seen over the years - the places where the pattern is bad are places where the scales twiddling is in strongest effect. Whatever the intention, it transformed what should have been a fun little exercise for me to see if we could spot change over time into a drag.
Pity, it would have been cool to spot some changes and know they were real - or even to see that species/class preferences had remained so rock solid the same over time as a testament to the constancy of our preferences, however the rules may change.
Anyway, use the above at your own risk.
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