Sunday, February 13th, 2011
Issue: 68   Editor: Aldarionosaurus


Buzz- A Social Experiment BuzzPoison
The closest the Buzz has ever managed to get to going undercover has been in the crew of the week, where at least one of our writers visited a crew to gain an insight into how it works. The problem is that we physically can’t go underground when our names are published every week in the Buzz, even the Buzz Forum explains:

Quote:
As a Buzz writer, you are not anonymous to the public and thus going underground is not acceptable or allowed. If you wish to go underground you will have to leave the team. Fact is that you have chosen to become a member of the Buzz team. Being part of this team means you are visible to the general public, you are not a faceless player in the mass.



So seemingly this idea was going off the drawing board and into the recycling, but then I was inspired by our very own Andy Coulson in the form of recently departed Editor Mika*, who left in disgrace after the now infamous Buzz phone hacking where we recovered a rather lude message*, better not go into detail, of which he claims no knowledge (HE KNEW, HE KNEW)! If he can be so sneaky, so can we, we thought...

So here’s what we did..

It was a simple job really, I suicided my account and came back as DonOfMafia, breaking my pattern of Poison names, and therefore as long as I was done with my questioning before next Sundays issue of the Buzz, I would be safely undercover. So now that I was undercover; what to do? Simply we had decided to send out a range of questions to players to see how and indeed if they would respond and to see which factors would have an impact upon people’s decisions.

So over the next few weeks we will be publishing the results of this little experiment for your reading pleasure, some more interesting and predictable than others. So onto this week.

This week:
Begging


Poison, aka DonOfMafia sent out a message to 25 players asking them for money, it said:


Quote:
Hi there, I've just started playing again and I was wondering if you'd be able to send me some money to start back up? Thanks in advance.



So a fairly standard begging message, and the results were as follows:

Yes- 1
No- 3
Ignored- 21

This is shown below in graph form:



As you can see, the majority of people still go by the policy that beggars will be ignored but a couple of people took the time to respond and one even decided to send $50,000.

We then decided to send the same question but in a very different manner... I had to painfully cease my usual correct English and turn to less correct tones, although I’m told this is the same message:


Quote:
i jst gt plyin agin, cn u snd me sum mony plz?


So the question here is, just how much effect the manner in which you speak have upon people’s decision to respond to you, and in this case give you money.

The results were, sadly, fairly similar:

Yes- 0
No- 2
Ignored- 23

In case you don’t understand numbers, here’s a picture:



Although the results do show a fairly similar picture, marginally more people did choose to respond to the correct English rather than ignoring the message, and an infinite percentage more chose to give money to the message spoken in the Queen’s.

Before I end we have one person who out of the 50, felt the need to send $50,000 to a new player asking for help to get started in this game... the most generous of the 50 (who ironically included Bootleggers’ most generous player).

That player was Pleyade, well done and thank you. We felt you deserved a reward, so by sending that money you’ve managed to earn 20 times what you sent; $1,000,000 is winging its way towards you.

Overall though this week, a fairly predictable set of results we thought.... maybe not next week.

Next week:
Buzz Social Experiment- Just how helpful are staff?


*May be ever so slightly libellous.