Hello everyone! I hope that you all had a spooky, crisp, and otherwise lovely October! On Warrior Cats of the Forest, we’ve had a particularly exciting month as out-of-character we welcomed in many new members and held the fifth annual StarClan and the Dark Forest Halloween Event. In-character, we solidified the MoonClan-EarthClan and SunClan-EclipseClan alliances following an eventful Gathering. We are currently solidifying where we want to take the plots over the next couple of days, so be sure to check out the new Planned Events update and share your thoughts on where you think we should head from here!
My community-building tip of the month is to send in some ideas. Many of the best parts of this website started out as member ideas, from the History Page, to the maps, to public records and even this newsletter. If you have an idea that you think would make the website better, no matter how small, please share!
This Monthly Meow is part one of a two-part demographics series. Today we will go over some basic demographic information such as clan populations, age distributions, and trends in character gender. In December, we will do an in-depth look at more fine grained aspects of demographics, including naming style, trends in cat appearances and origin, and personality types. We are still gathering data for next month’s Monthly Meow and would appreciate any help we can get. If you’d like to offer a hand, please read over this document, which explains how you can help gather data. If that doesn’t appeal to you but you’d like to help out around the website, please reach out to me-- there are a lot of little tasks here and there that could use some attention.
This Monthly Meow belongs to a long-established series of demographics overviews, starting in March 2014 and extending to December 2018, March 2017, November 2016, May 2016, December 2015, August 2015, and December 2014. Before we continue, please note that the data for this Monthly Meow was gathered on October 18th and doesn’t fully represent what the clans look like now.
The two graphs below show clan populations from the beginning of our records in 2014. The top one includes the overall clan populations, while the bottom graph shows the individual clans in more detail. The primary thing that I take from these two graphs is that clan populations are frequently cyclical, but MoonClan is frequently the most populous clan while DawnClan and SunClan are frequently the least populous. The most interesting thing about this graph is that you can correlate some dips and rises in populations with in-game events, such as the spike in MoonClan’s population during Weepingstar’s rule in 2015 and the rise of EarthClan in 2017. It’s also interesting to look at how NightClan and DawnClan populations dramatically shrunk as most of their cats joined together as EarthClan, but small rebel forces lingered for months before being disbanded in February of 2018. As well, you can also see the current dip in clan populations, which I will discuss in further detail with the next set of graphs.
This next set of graphs are the same as the ones above, but only show the past year in-game and so allow us to focus on recent events. There are two trends worth noting here: EclipseClan’s foundation and a simultaneous rise in the populations of the other clans during 2017 and the overall drop in clan population since May 2018.
EclipseClan was founded by a lingering group of NightClan rebels in December 2017 (see the History Page section titled “The Cougar and the Eclipse”), which marked a return to four clans for the website as a whole. While this alone would have increased clan populations, we also see an increase in other clan populations at the same time. While I can’t say this definitively, it’s likely that this boost is due to increased member recruitment and retention following the particularly well-liked plot.
This boost to member counts continued until May of 2018, when several older members decided to leave the website in a relatively short time frame and our old host, Webs, experienced a long-lasting glitch that prevented new member recruitment. As I was doing field research abroad for much of June, we were not able to change to our current host, Wix, until early July. In this time, accumulating glitches that made the old website all but unusable and a lack of recruitment and plot interest that only served to further decrease member counts resulted in a dramatic decline in membership.
In July, the current website was built and I began devoting hours a week to advertisement. By August, WCF’s activity was stable. Activity rose, but with it I began enforcing activity guidelines more closely so the clan counts have appeared to drop, despite there being more forum posts. This effect shouldn’t last and from here, I expect both member and character counts to rise fairly steadily over the next few months.
In all, despite the low clan counts, there’s plenty of reason to be hopeful: our active roleplayer count continues to grow, both with new members and members who left during May and June, and we have plenty of exciting plots in place for the next couple of months. I expect that we’ll be in a strong place in January, for the site’s tenth anniversary.
Next up are the clan age distributions. The main story that I take from the first, an overall age distribution for all cats on WCF, is the one I told above of a sharp decline in members followed by a steady rise in new and returning membership. This has resulted in some fairly uneven age distributions, with high numbers of young warriors (ages three to five), apprentices (ages one to two months), and a small handful of kits (age zero).
When you dive into the individual clans’ age distributions, things get a little more interesing. MoonClan and EclipseClan are fairly unsurprising, as they show a large spike in new warriors -as I would expect from a wave of new members- but EarthClan and SunClan are very oddly shaped. This may be a function of those clans being smaller and having an older member base than MoonClan and EarthClan, who tend to appeal more to new members. Even so, I don’t think that’s the whole story. Do you have any ideas for why their shapes are so oddly?
Finally, we have the overall demographics chart. There is a lot of information here, so I'm only going to focus on parts that are either important or unexpected.
The clan populations are small, as noted before, but also very skewed toward MoonClan and EarthClan. These clans are usually more popular with roleplayers, particularly new roleplayers, so this fact is primarily interesting in-game. MoonClan alone has twice as many cats as SunClan and EclipseClan combined which, paired with their EarthClan alliance, makes them a force to be reckoned with. If we want to keep EarthClan and MoonClan from dominating, we'll have to make plots to weaken them and strengthen SunClan and EclipseClan. The History Page and Plot Planning Page were just updated so if you aren't caught up on all the happenings in-game, be sure to check those out and share your thoughts.
The average age doesn't stand out to me- the clans are young, with the exception of SunClan, which generally appeals to a smaller segment of older members. The average age is also reflected in the percentages of working (leaders, deputies, medicine cats, warriors, queens, and apprentices) and nonworking cats (elders and kits). Most of the cats on this website are warriors, which means that there is a much higher percentage of working cats than there has been historically.
There is a strong female bias in characters, which is frequently the case because most of our roleplayers are girls or women and people tend to roleplay characters who are more like themselves. More interesting, there's been an increase in the "other" gender category, which likely reflects improving societal tolerance toward nonbinary genders.
Finally, I've included the number of roleplayers per clan and the average number of cats per roleplayer. This is a new category, so I can't fall back on previous demographics overviews to look for a trend. Overall, roleplayers have an average of four characters and for the roleplayers who have cats within a given clan, each has an average of two characters in that clan. Most members have at least one MoonClanner, while less than a third of members have an EclipseClanner. Interestingly, this presents an opposite trend than I usually expect to see: SunClan has relatively few characters, but those members don't have very many characters. EclipseClan, in contrast, has an even smaller number of active members, but those members have, on average, more cats in that clan. This indicates that EclipseClan has a smaller member base, but those members are more devoted, which is usually something I expect to see with SunClan.
This is all, of course, very surface level analysis and I haven't done any statistical tests to back up the trends seen in the raw data. If you are interested in seeing my raw data, feel free to reach out and I can send it your way. If you're content with the graphs and everything else at face value, do you think my explanations are off? Am I overlooking a possible explanation or even just an interesting trend? Is there anything that I should be sure to look into in next month’s in-depth look? Please share your thoughts below.