Ringo
I’ve been working on a project to collect data about Armored Combat in North America. This is my second attempt at this project and I’d like to make it an annual thing of collecting survey data on our community. This year I put up a public survey in a variety of venues and got some 300+ respondents. This was well short of my 500 respondent goal but still a significant number. After closing the survey I made an offer to let certain individuals in the community take a peak at the data provided they didn’t share till after I had made some analysis posts.
I was surprised when I was approached by Asher Hart, who claimed to work in data. Asher simply wanted to take a look at it due to being a true data nerd, of the type I only pretend to be. We got to talking and he actually offered to do some quick analysis. I expected I would get some spread sheet tables or a few sentences in a couple weeks. NOPE! That night he sent me a full write up, with not only great analysis on a specific issue, but witty and engaging prose far better than I could provide.
I still intend to give my thoughts on the data separately which likely align in some places and not in others, but this write up was too good to not share right away. So, thank you Asher. I’ve asked him to include his bonafides as well. The words below are his. The raw data will be available in a few weeks after I (and hopefully Asher again) have had some time to review it and post my thoughts. I promise to release by March 1st at the latest.
“The community was asked to provide their feelings on dozens of data points, the entirety of which is far too large to break down in a single post. However, we can look at specific data points within the ACS community very easily now.
Out of the sample data from every person who responded to the survey, we can parse out what the attitude towards one of our favorite subjects is- authenticity! How does the community really feel about it?
We asked fighters (and spectators, but that’s for another post) how they felt- using a numerical ranking system- about the importance of authentic historical gear. Shared below is the original question for transparency, copied directly from the raw data:
How much is Historical Accuracy a selling point to you for the sport, as a participant? 1 means the pursuit of historical accuracy actively detracts from the sport and you want things like Orcs and Mad Max, 5 Means you don’t particularly care one way or the other, 10 means it matters to you a lot and you want things as close to historically accurate as is possible?
It is a bit of a loaded question on posts. We have all been there, and we’ve all seen it go back and forth into a death spiral with no real end in sight. You know, like… really any social media post ever.
So, let’s talk about the majority, first. We’re going to handle this in pairings to help make the data digestible but have included the data above for transparency.
Grades of 7 and 8 make up over 1/3 of our community at 34.07%. Generally, this was interpreted as people who believe that the armor having a historical counterpart was important to the sport, but wiggle room with how it is presented or assembled was acceptable or encouraged.
It’s not surprising that this is the largest group, as the next two largest pairings exist on either side of this. We’ll handle the slightly larger pairing first- No Shits Given and its sister rank of 6, which is some shits given, but certainly not a lot of them. Combined, that makes up 24.81%, nearly a quarter of the community that responded. Combining that with the next pairing up (7 and 8) and you’re looking at 58.88% of the community being ok with varying combinations of non-fantasy armor (we’ll get to you fantasy folks in a bit), which seems very in line with the perceived attitude of ACS and domestic fighting in general.
This is actually a sweet spot of where you would want a community to reside. The majority of people are- by and large- close enough in agreement to one another to at least see the point of view of the other person. We definitely have more in common than separates us in this regard.
The next highest pairing was easily the authenticity crowd in the third place of pairings. However, don’t take that to mean that is a small number of people. At 19.63%, that’s nearly 1/5 of the community that feels authenticity is important. Of that pairing, just under half selected 10, which would indicate a very passionate stance. A big part of the community takes what they gear up in very seriously with regards to its historical analogues. While it’s still a minority, it’s a substantial enough amount of people that it’s always worth considering in these conversations how they feel about this sort of thing.
Which brings us to our final two pairings. We’ll start with the fourth place pairing, which is drifting close or slightly into fantasy armor, but with (I assume) noticeably less spikes. These folks make up 14.45% of our community, and as stated before, that’s not nothing. This is an interesting group because it is quite hard to quantify what counts as fantasy or how to scale fantasy on a gradient. For example, would a 14th-century flat-top helm with a face on it count as fantasy? It’s a term we can, as a community, be a bit hyperbolic about. It deserves a conversation of its own at a later date, but for now, let’s put a pin in it. We see you, and we want to talk to you, and maybe someday we’ll be able to sort something out.
There was one other pairing that was incredibly small. At just a touch over 7%, we’ve got fantasy enthusiasts. This is a tricky group as well, because we’re trying to quantify an unknown. And then it becomes even harder to write a ruleset that ensures safety. It’s easy to say that waivers and such would cover the liability at hand with fantastical sets of armor, but the reality is that they really might not. To make this an official category would be an enormous undertaking, especially for a niche sport with resources stretched pretty thin. I personally would never say never to anything, but being realistic about the amount of work that goes into this is important. I’m not comfortable writing off 7% of opinions as ridiculous. Obviously there is a niche-within-a-niche appetite for this, and we’d all be better served as a community acknowledging that the appetite exists, even if it isn’t ours or currently feasible to put in the list.
As with all data, this is a sample. Quite a good one, actually! There are many people that we did not hear from, but our margins aren’t too bad with this. And, as with all statistics, it’s possible to argue points in both directions using these numbers as a tool. Provided above is my interpretation of the numbers, but as always, I try to keep an open mind and heart about something people are so passionate about, and hope others find this data as interesting and useful as I did.
Note/bona fides: My name is Asher Hart. I’m a logistics and inventory analyst for a large United Kingdom-based miniatures company, but live and work just outside the Memphis, Tennessee area. My work with data is all professional experience, as I used to be an anti-money laundering financial analyst and spent over a decade within various analyst roles within Chicago and Denver before ending up here, which just shows how my degree in stage performance in live theatre is working out for me. It was, as it turns out, “not to be”.
My first fight was in the last quarter of 2019 with Memphis Armored Fight Club, and I’ve fought in a handful of local events since. I’m a passionate newbie who will definitely, absolutely be the first to tell you that I still have a lot to learn. And boy don’t we all. I look forward to taking that journey with the rest of the post-split fighters as the sport grows and becomes more and more popular across the nation. “