Quantitative: A Look at the Big(ger) Picture

And now, for more data visualizations than you can comfortably shake a stick at. Here I have charted all of the fertilizes for January-March 2009. These are a little hard to read, because there’s so much information here, but take note of the sort of density spike in the middle of the chart. Basically it looks like a stalagtite hanging from the top of the middle of the chart, and a stalagmite growing from the bottom of the middle of the chart to meet the stalagtite from the top. This is particularly visible in the chart showing only the Attack and Defense trains. Well, as it turns out, that increase in activity came from a spammer on Facebook. Apparently, around that time someone ripped off Plant Wars to create a Facebook game, and then began spamming Facebook like crazy. This resulted in a significant increase in traffic to the real Plant Wars, and the accompanying increase in trains.

For the full story on the Facebook Plant Wars rip-off, read Jon’s blog post about it.