Anticipating Growth

I’m playing my annual game of “Guess How Many People Are Coming To Chimera This Year!”

(2008 vs 2009 vs 2010 vs 2011)
Friday Night: 33 vs 55 vs 77 vs 111
Saturday Morning: 43 vs 53 vs 83 vs 109
Saturday Afternoon: 39 vs 45 vs 71 vs 104
Saturday Night: 69 vs 81 vs 95 vs 115
Sunday Morning: 35 vs 41 vs 66 vs 104
Sunday Afternoon: 35 vs 46 vs 70 vs 100

On the one hand, there are a lot of new people in the community. On the other hand, we might start seeing a drop off in the old hands as they decide to skip a year/move onto other interests/go overseas. What does the community reckon? Is Chimera still something that attracts a lot of new people, or has it reached a plateau point?

Graph says still going up :slight_smile:

In fact on closer inspection, not only have the numbers increased every year, the rate at which those numbers are increasing is increasing as well :mrgreen:

There’s still a lot of positive energy around the con, so I don’t think you’ll see a plateau. New larpers have also come in via Teonn and the new player promotions, and may bring friends, so the expanding network effect is still in play. The network effect will be slightly dampened by having had a cap on the flagship last year, but probably not a lot unless you were turning away a lot of people.

Looking at Matt’s graph and just running your eye up the line (which is pretty much how I guessed at previous years), it looks like you could cap the flagship larp at around 140/150 and expect it to fill (or concurrent flagships of 70/75), while getting a bit less than that in the other rounds. Overall attendees would presumably be a bit higher than that, like 160+ (last year was 130, right?), but I imagine that number doesn’t much effect planning.

The flagship this year can cope with anywhere between 140-160 players (it’s two concurrent runs of the same game, with 70 essential characters and 10 non-essential characters each), it’s anticipating the round size that’s the tricky part.

Friday night and Saturday morning are our biggest rounds traditionally.
Saturday and Sunday afternoons tend to be the same size.
Sunday morning is the smallest.

Currently looking at scheduling (number in brackets indicates growth compared to last year):
Friday Night: 120 (+10)
Saturday Morning: 130 (+20)
Saturday Afternoon: 120 (+15)
Sunday Morning: 100 (+5)
Sunday Afternoon: 110 (+10)

Edited to add: Viperion did some maths and worked out, with the disclaimer that he’s not a statistician, that the numbers we’re looking at for this year are:

Fri Night: 134
Sat Morning: 132
Sat Afternoon: 125
Flagship: 139
Sun Morning: 126
Sun Afternoon: 121

It seems you’ll run into space constraints before you have a lack of warm bodies.
Most businesses would kill to have growth figures like those. :slight_smile:

You picked up a few more peeps from the Great Exhibition last year that you ran before Chimera. (An awesome day) I know this because I was one of those that you converted.