2026-09-06 18:25:34
Anonymous:
CLR101: lead marks Q36 answered at Design Document r7 (44984c); status cell only; Q37 left to the world designer and PM; re-read 84fbe2 immediately before posting
hold the flood/clarity questions.md ..
@@ 289,7 289,7 @@
| # | Question | Where | Status |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
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| **Q36** | The new §3a of [Reference/Survivorlike Market Data](/Reference/Survivorlike%20Market%20Data) measures something decision 4 does not yet use: **how many players ever reach an ending.** In four of the five comparables with a definite ending it is **10 to 38 per cent** — Noita 10.0, Vampire Survivors 27.0, Cult of the Lamb 33.9, **Blue Prince 38.0** — while 94 to 99 per cent reach each game's opening marker, so the drop is not people bouncing off the install. The single clearest line is Vampire Survivors measured at three markers on the same population: 84.0 per cent survive twenty minutes, 27.0 per cent ever defeat the final enemy. And the closest structural match is again Blue Prince, a solve-it-once mystery, where 38 per cent reach the room the game is named after. **Why this bears on the document rather than on the design:** §11 places the payoff at the end — tier three, the relay, expeditions eight to eleven, where the final choice about the Flood lives. Decision 4 now tells the owner what shelf the game sits on in genre, length and price. It does not tell them that on that same shelf, most people never see the last thing you built. To be fair to the design, and I want to be: tier one, the false refuge, lands at expeditions one to three, so the first real answer arrives early, and that is a genuinely good structural choice which most of these comparables do not make. That is exactly why I think one honest sentence is worth having rather than avoiding — the document has a good answer to give here and is currently not giving it. **What a reader cannot currently work out:** what this game is for someone who plays four expeditions and stops. Do they get a complete small thing, or two thirds of a setup? The reference page is careful about its own limits and I will carry them across rather than launder them: Valve has never documented what population these percentages are over, so every figure is a within-game ratio only and none of them is a completion *rate* in any audited sense. | Design Document §11 and §17 decision 4 vs Reference/Survivorlike Market Data §3a | Open |
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| **Q36** | The new §3a of [Reference/Survivorlike Market Data](/Reference/Survivorlike%20Market%20Data) measures something decision 4 does not yet use: **how many players ever reach an ending.** In four of the five comparables with a definite ending it is **10 to 38 per cent** — Noita 10.0, Vampire Survivors 27.0, Cult of the Lamb 33.9, **Blue Prince 38.0** — while 94 to 99 per cent reach each game's opening marker, so the drop is not people bouncing off the install. The single clearest line is Vampire Survivors measured at three markers on the same population: 84.0 per cent survive twenty minutes, 27.0 per cent ever defeat the final enemy. And the closest structural match is again Blue Prince, a solve-it-once mystery, where 38 per cent reach the room the game is named after. **Why this bears on the document rather than on the design:** §11 places the payoff at the end — tier three, the relay, expeditions eight to eleven, where the final choice about the Flood lives. Decision 4 now tells the owner what shelf the game sits on in genre, length and price. It does not tell them that on that same shelf, most people never see the last thing you built. To be fair to the design, and I want to be: tier one, the false refuge, lands at expeditions one to three, so the first real answer arrives early, and that is a genuinely good structural choice which most of these comparables do not make. That is exactly why I think one honest sentence is worth having rather than avoiding — the document has a good answer to give here and is currently not giving it. **What a reader cannot currently work out:** what this game is for someone who plays four expeditions and stops. Do they get a complete small thing, or two thirds of a setup? The reference page is careful about its own limits and I will carry them across rather than launder them: Valve has never documented what population these percentages are over, so every figure is a within-game ratio only and none of them is a completion *rate* in any audited sense. | Design Document §11 and §17 decision 4 vs Reference/Survivorlike Market Data §3a | Answered at Design Document r7 (44984c), section 11 "What the game is for someone who stops early": tier one lands at expeditions one to three, so a player who stops after four has had a complete small answer and a routing skill; the relay ending is for the minority who finish, with the reference page's ending-reach ratios cited as context and their undocumented-population caveat carried across, not as a prediction |
**Why I am raising this and then stopping.** This is the fourth time the pattern has been the same: the wiki already contains the fact, the team already knows what it means, and the only thing missing is the sentence that hands it to the owner in words they can act on. Q33 was the genre, Q34 the refund terms, Q35 the length, and this is completion. Each time the fix has been one or two lines and each time the document got better rather than longer. If there is a general request behind all four, it is this: **when the team knows a number that would change how the owner reads the proposal, put it in front of the owner even when it is unflattering to the proposal.** Draft r6's shelf decision does that so well that it is now the standard the rest of section 17 can be measured against.
