User:Butternutbamboo

	butternutbamboo
About
Known as	butternut / butter
In Freedonia
First joined	5 September 2020
First building	Blue Hill mayor's house
Donor level	*** Donor III
Kit level	**** Gold
	View profile and statistics

Hi, welcome to my user page! Feel free to leave a message on my talk page :)

I'm named after the butternut squash and the lucky bamboo plant (dracaena sanderiana). At the time, butternut squash was my favorite vegetable and lucky bamboo was my favorite plant.

I can usually be found AFKing to collect items from farms. If I'm not responding, feel free to /mail me!

Projects

Name	Type	Started	Note
Blue Hill	Category:Towns	2020-09-20
Primrose	Category:Cities	2023-08-05
Item farms	Category:Howto	2023-09-15	Directory of public farms and guides on how to build your own
MCO Case Book		2023-10-12	Review of scenarios of uncertain legality
Freedonia Public Library Network	Category:Organisations	2023-11-28

Player homes

#	Location	Coordinates / Map link	Contribution
1	Blue Hill	4352, -14622	Built, along with the surrounding town
2	Shackcity	15693, -9695	Built
3	Computia	-18569, -2851	Furnished (built by Headmate)
4	Sandy Shades	14455, -2843	Built
5	Georgetown	-2404, -2997	Empty
6	Newport Tower apartment 29 (floor 11)	-10688, 18905	Furnished (built by snakyman r9q Darkerfly
7	Obsidian Town Butternut Ranch	8199, 15697	Built

Interesting links / places

Yannapurna National Park, or more generally, builds by YugRekooh: Super interesting builds that play with scale and gravity.
The very tall chunk in the Mosaic Mansion is super interesting to traverse and explore! It really feels like an adventure to start at ground level and work your way up through all the different areas and builds within - I haven't experienced anything similar on the server. You'll need a kit with at least /thru or a lot of ender pearls.
A cute + peaceful little fountain area built by RainBd in the North Borderlands, at 4658, -18137.

Research

Impact of early gifts for new players

Background: The impact of giving gifts such as iron or diamond tools or armor to new players has been debated, with some arguing that early assistance can help ease players into the server while others argue for a tougher approach. However, knowledge has been limited to anecdotal evidence and no formal analysis has been carried out to research the impacts of early assistance.

Research questions:

How do different gifts given to new players affect their relationship with the server and its community?
Do different gifts have different impacts?

Hypothesis: In general, early gifts will not have an impact on player survival or citizenship, as these will mostly be driven by external factors upstream of character and personality, or by mentorship from more experienced players.

Study: Do early gifts affect survival or activity? (WIP)

Data: Chat logs were obtained for one year covering September 1st, 2022 to September 1st, 2023.

Timestamps of advancements were extracted from these chat logs; advancements were detected by searching for advancement messages such as "[player] has made the advancement Cover Me With Diamonds" chatted by McObot. Specifically, the following three advancements were searched for:

Suit Up (iron armor)
Isn't It Iron Pick (iron pickaxe)
Cover Me With Diamonds (diamond armor)

Among users with at least one of these advancements, timestamps of first and last seen and time played as of December 6, 2023 were obtained from the server's Web Scripts.

Additionally, the following cutoff points were used to create indicator variables:

Early gift: If a player received an advancement within 45 minutes of joining (polled from ingame chat)
Left server: If a player was last seen more than 30 days ago

Methods: A conceptual framework is shown below. The causal path of interest is shown in green and is biased by confounding paths in red through who is online, reflecting who can provide gifts or help in general, and personal characteristics. It is hypothesized that how friendly a new user is may affect the propensity of other players to give gifts or help, though this requires further study.

The following methods are used to investigate the relationship of interest:

Crude analysis: In the crude, unadjusted analysis, a robust Poisson model was fit to estimate probability of having left the server due to having received an early gift.
Cluster analysis (TODO): In the cluster analysis, players were matched to each other by clustering based on similarity of online player lists at the time of joining the server. The cluster IDs were then included as dummy variables in the same robust Poisson model.

Results: A total of 775 player joins were detected over the study period. The table below shows the characteristics of these players relevant to the study. The accompanying figure also shows the relationship between time-to-first-gear vs. overall time played among the different gear types.

Characteristics of players
Variable	Median (IQR) or Count (%)
Banned	4 (0.52%)
Received an early gift	135 (17.42%)
Left the server	TODO
Time played (hours)	0.34 (1.20)
Time since last seen (days)	444 (45)
First gear = iron armor	52 (6.71%)
First gear = iron pick	40 (5.16%)
First gear = diamond armor	43 (5.55%)
First gear = none	640 (82.58%)
Time-to-first-gear, if any (hours)	0.5 (2.4)

Discussion: TODO

The following are potential areas that this study could be improved upon:

An opportunity to close the second biasing path through personal characteristics may be available by using sentiment analyses or mixed methods to quantify and adjust for personal characteristics.
Early gifts have been identified using a simple cutoff value which is prone to misclassification. Future work can review the chat logs before each advancement to determine manually if it was an early gift or not.
Left server has been identified using a simple cutoff of 30 days. It's possible that people could rejoin the server again after this time.

Factors affecting propensity to donate

Background: TODO

Methods: TODO

Results: TODO