http://www.almostrandom.com/dietbet/DBprizes-weekly1.jpg
http://www.almostrandom.com/dietbet/DBprizes-1.jpg
Note: to fully view these images, right click on it and choose "View Image". It should then be full-sized, but it will open in place of this blog post. So open a second window with this post in it to read them side-by-side. Or click on the links I've posted with the images.
A few weeks ago, someone asked me about whether I kept track of statistics about prizes and I hadn't really to that point. I tracked how many prizes are won in each game each week, and I had a general notion about what kind of prizes were available because I'd seen them each week. In the very beginning of the Transformers, it used to be that there was only one prize awarded each week. But as the games had a lot more than 1000 people (some games had 2000+ people) that was a very low probability of winning, so players asked DB to award more weekly prizes to games with more players. So they started doing that and I would track that. But I never really kept track of what the prizes were, etc. However, there wasn't any reason not to, so I started a new spreadsheet.
The first sheet I posted above is the raw data of what prizes are awarded in each game each week. There is one column per game with the starting date of the game at the top of the column. At the left is the list of dates I've tracked so far. And all the way over to the right is the key to the prize codes I've used. There is no grand method to assigning codes to prizes, I just didn't want to retype each prize name each time it was used. It clutters up the sheet and is hard to read. So I just gave each prize a new letter when I first saw it. The first few games have ended, so that's why you only see a few prize entries for those games. Likewise the columns to the right where the games have just started.
As you can see in this sheet there doesn't seem to be any pattern to what order prizes are awarded in a game. Prizes tend not to repeat week-to-week in the same game, and there are some games which see a repeat of a small number of prizes but never see any awards of other prizes. For example, the July 1 game is cycling around with the $75 Altheta and the $75 Zappos card, but hasn't seen any FitBits.
Entries where there are two letters means that two prizes were awarded in that game that week. This tends to be in games where there are more players, supporting DB's response to awarding more prizes in games with more players. But this doesn't explain why two prizes are only awarded sometimes. There is no way to know how many players bought tokens nor how many players actually submit a token weigh-in on a given week. I would suspect that more people do token weigh-ins leading up to an end-of-round weigh-in, and that is loosely supported by the data, but there are only 4 data points.
The second sheet I posted tallies up the prizes awarded by week. Here the columns are each week and the rows are each prize, using the same prize key. There are columns at the right for raw totals and weekly averages. Clearly there are 3 levels of prizes - frequent prizes ($75 Athleta, Polar HRM, $75 Whole Foods, and $75 Amazon), semi-frequent prizes ($75 Zappos, JM Body Revolution, and FitBit), and rare prizes (Insanity DVD, Food Scale, Nike FuelBand, Withings scale). However, I think we need more data to really refine these categories. The are weeks when one of the frequent prizes isn't awarded at all.
So, that's all I have to say about it so far. Let me know if there's other things you think this data could tell us. I'll probably post an update on these stats monthly, like I do with the big summary posts. But I was thinking about it now, so I decided to post this first one and get it started.
(Note: I write posts about the stats for all the games that are running, not just the ones I'm playing in, but my posts only appear in the feeds for my games. If you are in other games, feel free to post my blog there so people can see how they are doing. I'm currently in the Aug 12, Oct 7, and Dec 2 games. If you add me as a friend, you will get a notification about all the stats posts I make. You can also join the Transformers Data Nerds group: https://www.dietbetter.com/community/groups/7-transformers-data-nerds and our Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/DietBet.March/ ).