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Originally Posted by prdstmnky36
Maybe I should just email Matt, but perhaps someone here is a numbers wizard and can figure it out.
I get the gist of the rarity index (I think)...basically it’s measuring the rarity of all the songs you’ve seen collectively. But what does it take to move that number? So speaking for me personally, I saw a big chunk of the D&F tour which I assume is what gives me such a low rarity index (I’ve seen like half of the total plays of things like Up & Away, Too High, Grey Blue Eyes, etc). So if any of those were to be played my rarity index would increase (cause they get more plays thus less rare)? Is SUAD being played moving its rarity index that much?
Actually, now that I’m looking at the rarity index for individual songs I have no clue how it works! So let’s take two cover songs - Sex Machine and Friend of the Devil, both only played once like 15 years apart. Sex Machine has a user rating (me) of 1.64% and overall rarity of .08%. FOTD has a user rating of 11.11% and overall of .28%. Can anyone tell me how that works?
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There's a lot going on here, so this is a great question/discussion. I'm constantly trying to improve the usability of the site, so I've been adding more and more "tool tips" - but I realize those aren't too effective on a touch device. So a glossary page might be in our future as well. Anyway, per the tool tip on any show's page:
"Each song's rarity index represents how often a song is played historically since its debut. If a song has a rarity index of 25, that means it has been played at 1 out of every 4 shows since its debut. This show's overall rarity index is an average of each song's overall rarity index. It indicates how common a show's setlist is historically."
Now, key points about any song's rarity index:
--Yes, it's only counted from its first performance. Shows before it can't be counted, as it's unfair to consider a show to be a missed opportunity when the song hadn't been invented yet.
--Rarity indicies exclude teases. The shows are counted but the tease is not counted as a true performance of the song.
--While a song being "rare" doesn't necessarily make it *good*, one would typically consider it desirable to see a show with more rare songs than one with songs played all the time. Thus, the lower the rarity index, the more "rare" a show is, because the rarity index represents a percentage.
For your personal stats, we treat songs very much the same way, as it depends on when you first saw the song. This can certainly be confusing, because while a song may have existed in your early shows (but gone unplayed), the clock only really starts the first time you have seen the song. So in your case, you've been to 78 shows (hey! so have I!), but if they played FOTD during that 78th show, you would currently have a user rarity of 100% for that song. If they didn't play it at your 79th show, it would go down to 50%, and so on.
This is a great concept to talk about, because having written it out for the purpose of this topic has caused me to think on it more, and that might not be the optimal way to do it. Perhaps I'll switch it to start counting all shows you've been to since the song's debut, rather than just *your* personal debut of the song, as it is now.
In recent days, I've also built in the feature of a song's "point in time" rarity index, as well as its tour index! I know, more data, but I'm hoping to make it clearer going forward. A song's overall rarity index is as I described above: from the day of performance #1 until present day, what percentage of shows was that song played at? Point in time rarity is that same metric, but instead of "present day" - it's any given day/show you happen to be looking at. I've also got graphs built that show the point in time rarity over the course of time, compared to the (constant) overall rarity as it is now. (Not yet public but will be releasing hopefully soon)
There's also a "tour" rarity index, and that's the same concept, but with the boundaries of the current tour put on it. For example, IBYU was played a couple of shows ago. There have been 19 shows played. 1/19 = ~5.55%, so that's its tour rarity thus far, which is actually *even less* than its historical rarity of 7.75%. (You can see that sort of stuff on the Live Show page or the
Tour Song Stats page.
I really hope that sheds some light on the feature. I'm actually putting a lot of time into both new and existing features of Tour Central and the greater site, hoping to put out more interesting data and make it more consumable. Then my attention will once again turn to the DMB Hub app. So far this tour, I've put a ton of new stuff in (Deep Search, Point in Time rarity indicies, Divergence Factor, DMB Hub Stubs on Ants, Live Setlist standings on Ants, point in time liberations, countless fixes and tweaks) in addition to migrating to new servers and juggling life in general. I've got a couple of really cool features around ShowFlow data that will hopefully be useful as well, as you'll really be able to see which songs you like, or dislike, over time!