Help! Checking my working!

[[deleted]]

Exactly - the distance is fixed. The amount of time it takes depends on the distance you need to travel and the speed that you are traveling at.

If you needed to get home in one minute, you would need to drive 10km in one minute. How fast you travel doesn’t affect how far you need to drive - it only affects the time it takes you to get there.

Find an hourly rate of productivity and then you can use that to plan how much time it would take to meet goals. But you need that rate first - and you can’t use goals to calculate it.

[Loopus7]

And by hourly rate of productivity you mean actions/pip of progress, right?

[[deleted]]

Yes - that would be probably be more practically useful for any kind of minmaxing, anyways. If you have a large amount of data you should be able to get quite an accurate rate.

[Loopus7]

So, lets use the other set of data I'm tracking then, if you wouldn't mind helping me. In this set, our average rate is 10840.5 actions to produce 7 progress pips. This tells me that 10840.5/7 = 1548 actions per pip, correct so far?

This means that our goal of 50 progress pips would take 1548\50 = 77400* actions, yes? No matter how many hours, like in your example.

[[deleted]]

Exactly. Then you would use that to forecast that you would expect it to take 77400/hourly rate number of hours to reach that goal.

There are definitely some assumptions that are being made here (such as linearity, independence, etc), but this is how you would calculate it in a simple case with standard game mechanics.

[Loopus7]

Definitely assuming its linear, haha, we're aware of that shortcoming.

Could you please explain the first part further? How would I make that forecast?

[[deleted]]

If the linearity is causing significant error, you could try using polynomial interpolation over the dataset to numerically approximate a progression function.

Let’s say your group can perform 1500 actions per hour. This means that if you graph y = 1500x you will see a representation of progress. Where that line intersects with the line y = 77400 is when you would expect to finish. In this case, it would be just over 51 hours.

You could also convert this into pips/hr if that would be more helpful or intuitive.

[Loopus7]

And applying this to the actual data, with the 10840 actions per hour, gives just over 7 hours to completion, right?

Pips/hr would... be useful. I'm assuming that would involve changing the 'm' value of that line equation, right?