Statistics

Here are some of the statistics I have collected for the Epic Clouds for my own curiosity. All of these were collected from Flightsim.to.

Statistics for MSFS 2020

At the time of writing there have been a total of 81.7k downloads with an accumulated star rating of 4.97 (99.4%).

The vast majority approve of the Epic Clouds and some are quite enthusiastic, mostly giving 5 star reviews and even donations. As good as these are, donations are few and far between. There were only two reviews falling short of a 5 star review. The complaints were:

• The earliest release was criticised by -1.5 stars because the image and name were said to be not helpful. I have two things to say about that:
  • The set stated to be intentionally similar – so the criticism was void from the outset. Even with the names and images the set is supposed to be fairly similar.
  • I was already working on adding images for the next release. Its annoying that this casual put-down still affects the flightsim.to score after several years and releases. Flightsim.to does not provide a way out of this dilemma.
• The later 1 star deduction was a bit harder to fathom, since it was accompanied by a large donation as well (thank you). When I asked what the thinking was behind it, he said that the clouds were good but not the best he’d ever seen. By this I think he meant in all games for all time. I don’t think its fair to compare work that isn’t from the same rendering engine. But its sort of a compliment I guess.

The Epic Clouds have been received well, but in actual fact its real score is misrepresented. It seems wrong that 93 individual ‘5 star’ reviews out of 95 total is given a 4 star rating by Flightsim.to as shown in the their ratings box at the lower-right of the image. It doesn’t even use a half of a star although though the user ratings do, so that’s inconsistent as well.

Even better accuracy can be calculated by counting total stars vs max stars:

472.5 stars / 475 total stars = 99.473% total score
(99.5% using one decimal place)

As you can see from the rating box, Flightsim.to has a pessimistic rating method. The accumulated star rating is 4.97 which is displayed as just 4 stars even though the score is only 0.03 away from 5.0.

Similarly, the two less positive ratings which are roughly 0.3% each are both rounded up to 1% then subtracted from 100% to give a rating of 98% to make it look right with integer arithmetic.

In my opinion it would make a lot more sense to add some decimal places and even more sense to use rounding towards the nearest value as most mathematics normally does.

Flightsim.to’s Rating System

For all the creators out there, there is an inherent but partially avoidable issue with their ratings. If a user decides there is a problem when there isn’t, or maybe is just in a bad mood, the creator can get stung with a permanent downgrade that is amplified by the negative mathematics of their scoring policy. That matters when all you are getting out of making a free addon are a few kind words and some numbers.

There are a few things that would help:

• Changing the maths of the scoring system to round up or down to the nearest value rather than truncating downward so the star rating is not misleading.
• Use a couple of decimal places in the review chart so its not misleading. All it would take would be to shorten the width of the bars, which is a trivial thing to do.
• Offer a statistic that reflects how users have responded over a time window (for example the last 12 months).

Early Statistics at Launch

This screenshot (right) shows occupation of the Featured section, the Trending Right Now section (the third time back on top) and the This Week’s Best section. Those were exciting times with a lot of hype, which also caused a few problems.

After release 1.1 the Clouds entered the Trending Now section for the 4th time after 1000+ were downloaded in 24 hours.

Statistics:

• Downloads: 9586 at the time of measurement.
  • No comment: 9542 (99.54%)
  • Comments: 44 (0.46%)
    • Positive comments: 28 (64%, 0.29%)
    • Neutral comments: 11 (25%, 0.11%)
    • Negative comments: 5 (11%, 0.05%)

The most common request and complaint was that the Epic Clouds don’t drive the live weather system. A handful of users decided that was an error and gave the clouds a low star score. I objected to those as it was outside the scope of the project, and that objection was upheld (and the score removed). I think it happened because there was a lot of hype, including several videos, and this led to unrealistic expectations.