NationStates

I just kinda thought it didn't make as much sense to have the stats show as percentages. I think units would be a more comprehensive representation of change :)

Well, it's true that percentages can fool. A huge percentage increase means nothing if the stat was at an all time low.
However, numbers wouldn't be practical either, since scales are not standardized. You've got infinite scales, scales that tend to 0 instead of going negative, scales that rarely go past single units, scales between 0 and 100... You can't know the real meaning of a variation if you don't know what scale the stat uses, and it's painful to check every stat to see that.

Scales need to be standardized to remove decimals, except for some like Lifespan, the Trend Trio, etc. But then you've got a ridiculous amount of Stalins (if you think of it as an upscaled version of the "Hitler SI unit") for Authoritarianism if you do that. That's a tough issue.

My own comparison script lists both the old value, new value, and absolute (additive, not multiplicative) change, in the format "-1.95 Civil Rights (73.28 -> 71.33)", which is generally enough to give a clear picture of how much any change is worth, at least if you're looking directly at it. (The more sensitive stats since the update mean that there's often a plethora of tiny changes to sift through to find the important ones, and my script doesn't currently do the convenient green/red thing of the game's own report page.)

Percentage-based changes are useful for a few stats like Average Income, Average Income of Poor, and Average Income of Rich, which actually seem to be computed as a product rather than sum of factors, and so often change by the same percentage (but completely different absolute values). But for the vast majority of stats, absolute changes are way more informative. Especially the stats which are measured on a 0-100 scale, which really have no business being treated multiplicatively.

It was tried both ways in development. The problem with units is that the scales are wildly different: +1 Stalins is a big change while +100 to Average Income is nothing. So unless you can keep 80 different scales in your head, the raw numbers are pretty meaningless.

It is possible to display both, though, and we do this internally for Editors, so that could possibly be a setting.

[violet] wrote:It was tried both ways in development. The problem with units is that the scales are wildly different: +1 Stalins is a big change while +100 to Average Income is nothing. So unless you can keep 80 different scales in your head, the raw numbers are pretty meaningless.

It is possible to display both, though, and we do this internally for Editors, so that could possibly be a setting.

Perhaps a button to toggle between the two freely?

King Nephmir II wrote:

[violet] wrote:It was tried both ways in development. The problem with units is that the scales are wildly different: +1 Stalins is a big change while +100 to Average Income is nothing. So unless you can keep 80 different scales in your head, the raw numbers are pretty meaningless.

It is possible to display both, though, and we do this internally for Editors, so that could possibly be a setting.

Perhaps a button to toggle between the two freely?

i think this would be best.

Probably. No joke, just today I saw my IT industry skyrocket by 12,890%. I checked the graph, and it only showed a tiny bump up, which was because apparently there was almost no IT industry to speak of.