I wanted to see how many people have found and played this wonderful game. The leaderboard provides a few metrics to review for this.

Left: I placed a red line on October 15, 2015 when the app was publicly released. There area some users who were beta-testers and joined to the left of that line. There was a huge amount of users who joined in the immediate days after release, but that rate was not sustained. There seems to be around 10 users joining per day in the past year.

I placed a red line on October 15, 2015 when the app was publicly released. There area some users who were beta-testers and joined to the left of that line. There was a huge amount of users who joined in the immediate days after release, but that rate was not sustained. There seems to be around 10 users joining per day in the past year. Middle: Once users join, they also tend to play a few games then drop off. I have played in 34 games (note that 80 users have played in more than 45 games but I removed them for the sake of the visualization).

Once users join, they also tend to play a few games then drop off. I have played in 34 games (note that 80 users have played in more than 45 games but I removed them for the sake of the visualization). Right: This graph tells the same story as the middle graph; users tend to play a game, and assuming 1 week per game, not play soon after finishing the first one. See later on for more analysis on the rate of games played per week.

Unfortunately, it looks like the developers were right not to spend more resources on Subterfuge. After the initial boom of downloads, there hasn’t been another sharp rise and users tend to not play multiple games (which is a shame, in my opinion).

Subterfuge Experience

My first assumption was that as you play more, you get better. You learn how to combine specialists to attack well and how to defend against other specialist combos. And most importantly, you learn how to chat and make allies.

Distribution of All Player’s Ratings

First, I needed to look into the ranting system. The developers decided to use an ELO scale, meaning your rating will increase or decrease if you win or lose, respectively. Everyone starts with an ELO of 1200. The magnitude of change to your rating also depends on the rating of your opponents after a game. On the left is a distribution of every rating for every player. It is a fairly standard bell curve, with a majority of players to the left of 1200. Perhaps players lose or resign ni their first game, then abandon the app. It should be noted that all of the observations are for Registered Users, meaning they paid $9.99 to access the rated games.

But let’s look to me. As of February 19, 2017, my current rating is 1329 and that places me at 905 of 7712 total players. Look me up, my username is Baer.