25 Jan 2018

Who's Playing What Right Now?

I'm planning on repeating my now-regular 12-monthly roundup of the state of UK Ancients 'big battle' competition play in it's usual April slot for consistency, however with the new year just about starting (with ADLG, DBM, MeG and FoG 3 at Godendag and the well-attended Milton Keynes 1-dayer for DBMM) I thought a snapshot of the 2017 calendar year in competitions might be interesting:

Numbers of players who entered at least one UK event for the following rulesets during 2017 were:
  • L'Art de la Guerre : 163 (up 27 since April 2017)
  • FoG AM : 89  (down 13)  
  • DBMM : 84  (unchanged)
  • MeG : 52 (up up 21)
  • DBM : 40 (down 8)
  • Swordpoint : at least 39 (up 10) - I'm missing the numbers from Derby
Tournament numbers and sizes
  • L'Art de la Guerre : 27 events held, average entry 18
  • FoG AM : 15 events held, average entry 18  
  • DBMM : 18 events held, average entry 15
  • MeG : 10 events held, average entry 16
  • DBM : 7 events held, average entry 13 (the majority of events are doubles)
  • Swordpoint : 4 events held that I have results for, average field 17
(ADLG and DBMM include 2 events where 15mm and 25mm were offered in parallel, with FoG numbers including 1 such event. This tends to depress the average entry size a tad).

And, here's a graph...

This shows the last few years and illustrates how player numbers have changed - each line represents a different ruleset, and each point on the graph represents the total number of players who've taken part in at least 1 event for that ruleset in the previous 12 months.

The data is a little "gappy" for some of the sets, but for both ADLG and MeG I believe every event held in the UK since June 2015 has been captured.

Interesting times!






6 comments:

Bob Blanchett said...

No data for DBA?
Surely it should be in there, regardless of the number of elements!

Vexillia said...

At face value it looks like your figures show an increase in participation in 2017 against 2016. Is this true?

Plus can you say how much crossover there is with people playing more than one rule set in agiven year?

Madaxeman said...

I'm looking to get the DBA data, but event results are not as easily accessible as for other sets - mainly as there is no published ranking system taht Ive been able to find.

There are relatively few people who actively "double-up" - offhand I can only think of quite literally a handful of people who are actively playing in two of these sets. The rest - which could maybe be 20 at a guess who appear twice - are mostly people who have stopped playing one system and picked up another, but they are lingering on in their "old" ranking system until it becomes more than a year since they played their last event.

The biggest crossover of this I think is FoGAM to ADLG. Now that the main Scottish event Schiltron has swapped to ADLG only I think there will be an 8-10 lurch downwards in FoG numbers after it takes place 9and drops out fo the FoG rankings completely). Anecdotally there may also be a similar lurch at Burton in a couple of weeks if the "only play one event a year" FoG community who have done Burton historically move to ADLG - which based on what I hear about advance bookings is an entirely feasible scenario.

Unknown said...

Since there's a reprint of ADLG in English due very soon I'd expect to see a bigger uptake in numbers. Course these figures only reflect "events" with rankings,for normal club games ADLG is getting huge. On TMP a fella was looking to buy the rules,I offered him my copy. Had 6 other folk wanting to buy contact me within 2 hours.

Madaxeman said...

Wow. 4th reprint I suspect will mean more than 6,000 copies in circulation, as I understand the first few print and reprints were 1,500-2,000 each set.

Unknown said...

Not all of it is ancients to ancients...I think there are the beginnings of quite an influx from Flames of War to MeG

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