I like this calculation!

Subject: I like this calculation!
Author: Ekyl
Posted on: 2015-08-29 14:06:00 UTC

It does cover some blank spots I feel I was leaving, and you have data I either couldn't get or didn't think to get. And this is why when you post these things you hope an actual scientist comes by to poke at it. :P I genuinely didn't think to check how many fics per hour appear on FF.net, or maybe I just didn't get around to it; I just took the numbers as they currently existed and went "okay, so assume these agents are tackling X number of these fics during an 'all hands on deck, constant missions' footing, how many would they chew through assuming what I would personally consider a truly huge workload." I'd be run ragged if I had to kill three badfics a day! That's a ballpark figure I took as sort of going "what might a PPC workload look like at its heaviest."

4-5 missions a week is still a lot, maybe more than some could handle, and does sound like a heavy enough workload to cause some of the issue we've seen in fanfic explosions. However, the question would be if it's truly the extreme workload that seems to be implied in old missions. Not to trivialise the work a PPC agent has to do, but at this pace it basically turns into a slightly longer, much much more dangerous version of the standard work week. Which I guess fits right in with the workplace humour. I do think 1000-10,000 action agents (I'm replying to both of your posts in this one to save time) figure might be lowballing it a little, but it does work as a good "let's assume there are at least this many agents out there killing fics, to keep up with how many are posted daily" figure. I suppose it depends, in part, on if you figure that's a number per action department, or for EVERY action department; 10,000 agents is still a lot of people, but I dunno.

To get back to actual numbers, I would say 4-5 a week would possibly work as a ballpark estimate for the average number of missions tackled by an agent team (some people get more, some people get less, and when there's a huge fanfic boom everyone's doing everything as fast as they can possibly do 'em) considering the general "things have slowed down a bit" vibe I get from recent stuff and that there's still a lot of fic out there to kill. Though I still think a look at a PPC that realises there's no fanfic left to kill would be interesting one day, and it does seem to me that they're capable of taking out a truly immense amount of fics when they have to. Of course, 208/260 missions a year per team feels much more reasonable than tens of thousands of missions like if agents are getting multiple missions daily. I do think the difference in these figures actually suggests, especially since I personally prefer the four-a-week-with-two-days-or-so-off model for the modern, "nothing is currently exploding" PPC, that the agents could have it much much worse than they do.

On DAVD: Yes, I'd remembered before going to bed that a discussion about their numbers happened years ago and you had said pretty definitively that there obviously weren't still only 50 agents when they became the fourth largest Action Department. I used 50 as a marker because a) it's a rare department where we have an actual number for how many of them there are in-universe, so I didn't have to pull a number completely from my hat, and b) we can then point to it and say there are 50 people here going into the Word Worlds and killing badfic on a regular basis. 50, in the original post, was my minimum "we can assume a given action department, at least among the major departments, will have at least 50 agents available for missions at any given point in time." I do think it's odd that a major department like DIC would have less people in it than DAVD, say, but Floaters has probably taken a lot of workload from departments like DIC and APD. I imagine there's a lot of departments that only still exist to give the Department Head a job.

This data and the conclusions you come to also support a thought I've always had, namely that there's probably many more agents in the infrastructure and support departments (think Intel, Finance, Personnel, Operations, DIA...) than Action. This makes perfect sense, because the logistical needs of this place are immense; in every army, 9/10 or so of the soldiers are working behind the lines. This would do something for addressing the huge implicit numbers of agents without completely stripping the Worlds bare, though some of the Action Departments are probably big enough to be doing a real number on what's out there.

Admittedly, our two models rely on some different assumptions that could make the resultant data go wildly off course. How does mission time really relate to HQ time? How many missions really come down in what an agent might recognise as a 24 hour period? What's the difference between an agent's perceived time and the time that actually passes? Yours says mission time matches up more or less with HQ time and each mission takes about a day as a ballpark guess, mine says missions seem to vary and not everyone seems to experience the same amount of time in mission as passes outside the Word World. Admittedly, yours gets pretty specific, whereas mine basically goes, "let's assume it's possible for at least some agent teams to get multiple missions within one HST day and complete them all, and see how many they'd chew through in a year if this happened every day".

I think we can say that given what's suggested from both our models, there's definitely enough missions going on within a short enough timeframe for your average agent to feel overworked and like there's no end in sight, and whether or not they truly are that put upon is a matter of interpretation. It does seem like things are better now than they were in Jay and Acacia's day, where I bet Intel really couldn't keep up because so many people were posting so many things at once - it would explain current missions being posted using old fics, if that's backlog being cleared because Intel finally got to that fic, although in universe the 2001-2003 fics are almost all surely dead by now. It could definitely vary between department, division, and individual agent; there's probably busy areas, and divisions for fandoms that're extremely quiet because there's hardly ever fics worth killing any more, plus my assumption that maybe more fics are being written in-universe than we see here. A DMS Tolkienverse or Harry Potter agent team is probably busier than, say, the entire APD Mossflower Division or DMFF, especially from 2001-2004 and 2011-2014 (creeping into 2015 because there's still a lot of Hobbit fic being written - there weren't 11,000 fics in the Hobbit section this time last year). Floaters, the poor sods, probably get the most work due to having the most agents and the least specialisation. This would allow for what you said, that there's room for things to shuffle around either way - while your typical agent probably feels overworked, and really does see quite a lot of missions, I doubt things are quite so bad as, say, never having any time to relax or recover. For one, we see a lot of stories lately that have them doing exactly that; would Rudi's or the Pennacook Club or A Troupe By Any Other Name or the businesses in New Caledonia or the Multiverse Monitor exist if nobody ever had time to run the show or be a patron?

(That does raise a question though: what does a badfic do when nobody's killing it? I seem to recall reading somewhere it just sorta loops over and over until someone shows up to deal with it but does it hurt the canon worse? Is there any particular effect if an author finishes their fic before the PPC gets to it? These are outside the scope of this model and discussion, but something to ponder.)

For their purposes, though, I think both calculations are serviceable - namely, to allow for this discussion and to look at what it might actually look like to be an agent. How busy is the PPC, really? What kind of progress are they actually making? Maybe more than we thought, or less, depending on which data you like better, and either set of numbers shows how daunting a task is ahead of someone who takes this job. With so many badfics to face, no wonder turnover can be pretty high. I guess in the end it's sort of the Batman situation. Batman has cleaned up the streets of Gotham considerably, by now, in many interpretations, but there's always going to be crime, and his rogues gallery will always be out there causing mayhem, because as long as people want to write and read Batman stories there has to be a villain for him to face.

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Is the PPC really that overworked? (Warning: maths) by Ekyl on 2015-08-29 05:16:00 UTC Reply

So I was digging through chatlogs from last year and found some number crunching I'd done for fun and meant to post but never got around to doing so, so here it is.

The common refrain is that agents are horrendously overworked. To be sure, this is an incredibly demanding job, and in the middle of a badfic explosion it must feel like the missions have no end to them, but is it really as bad as some stories have made it out to be? For sure, we see a lot of stories about agents on their off time nowadays, which implies things have slowed down a good bit from the days Jay and Acacia were swinging swords at all things glittery, but I was curious and decided to test things out with a basic model I drew up. This is by no means totally comprehensive, there's too much missing data and too many variables for that, but there is enough here that the results are pretty interesting, I think.

Bob and Alice are two agents in a Generic Action Department, we could assume they're in DMS LOTR Division or Department of Floaters I suppose because of the specific category I'm drawing on for example numbers. Let's assume Bob and Alice get three missions a day, every day, in one year of working for the PPC; I consider three missions daily to be a minimum marker for "overworked"/a generally stressful workload, mostly because I personally don't consider much less than this to be all that great a workload - I'm sure some would disagree, it could be argued that even one a day is a very high workload considering the incredibly demanding and time consuming nature of a PPC mission. I will be including alternate calculations for one-mission-a-day. Three missions also seems to me to be as many as an agent pair would be able to take on in a day while still allowing them to meet sapient needs for food, rest, social time, and the like - that would be, say, one mission in the morning, one in the afternoon, and one in the evening, or all in one block at one time of the day, depending on when they arrive.

So we have our agents, and our rough workload. Bob and Alice kill three fics a day, every day, for a year, tallying 1095 missions performed by the end of the year; the Lord of the Rings section on fanfiction.net has 54,000 fics in it, most of which were probably written in the great fanfic boom of 2001-2004. At this workload, it would take Bob and Alice 49.32 or so years to kill every fic in LOTR, and even longer if you merge the Hobbit (11K) and Silmarillion (4.7K) sections with LOTR under a general "Tolkienverse" banner, at which point you're looking at 69.7K fics ahead of our heroes.

However, Bob and Alice would not be the only agent team in their department. This is where the second part of my model comes in: the fourth largest Action Department, DAVD, has at least 50 agents. Ignoring questions of why so many other Action Departments have fewer than 50, this seems like a good benchmark because not only is it a large number of agent teams all working at once, but the three most prominent Action Departments - Floaters, DMS, and Bad Slash - are implicitly or explicitly much larger. It's implied in several places that many thousands of agents work for the PPC after all, and depending on how literally you take a speech made by the SO in Reorg ("If any Guards are listening, I urge you to heed my words. You may think yourselves a match for any Assassins, and that may be true, but the DMS outnumbers you ten, a hundred to one.") the DMS might have had up to 40,000 agents in 1999 (the DIS, when they became the Black Cats, had about 350-400 members, this including outside recruits, and the formation of the Black Cats is after they retreated from HQ having taken, in Nendil's words, unsustainable casualties in the fighting against the PPC; this means their effective strength immediately before the civil war must have been above 350 Guards, and 350 * 100 = 35,000), though this would be modified by taking into account agents who have since died, changed departments, left the PPC, and the like. I doubt in the span of 1999-2015 the DMS' numbers have dropped from, say, 40,000 to 400 though. Thus, 50 agents is, for the Big Three that would be getting most of the missions, most likely a very small percentage of their effective strength, and at any given point they are very likely to have at least 50 agents able to perform missions.

Most agent teams consist of two agents, so 50 agents is 25 teams. Let's give Bob and Alice's 48 coworkers the exact same workload, three daily missions all year. 25 * (365 * 3) comes out to 27,375 fics killed. At this workrate, the Generic Action Division would wipe out the entire LOTR section of the Pit in about two years, and if you include the entire Tolkienverse (6.7K fics) as one category, they will take about two and a half years to wipe out all three sections. At this workrate, they would have cleansed the entire Hobbit section of the Pit before the badfic explosion was even finished. Now, let's take into account that not every single fic would be considered worth a mission by Upstairs - some wouldn't be damaging enough to canon, and some would be outright good. In this hypothetical, if we take LOTR and say half of its entries in the Pit are deemed not in need of a mission, that's 27,000 fics up for killing, all of which would be dead in this first hypothetical year.

Now, that's a very harsh year, but it's a period of "argh, agents are so overworked" that would be over quite quickly, especially when you consider there are much more than 50 agents out there and these missionable fics would be being distributed all over the place, rather than staying in one specific department. If we take into account there being more than 50, let's say 100 agents, these 50 agent pairs with the same workload as before have killed 54,750 fics in the first year. If we go even higher, let's say 2000 agents, 1000 agent pairs have killed 1,095,000 fics in one year (hey, they're millionaires!). Needless to say huge swathes of the Pit, including the entire Tolkienverse many times over, have been gutted by such a ravenous onslaught, and I would dare say most of the non-Pit sites have taken a beating too. Even at the height of the 2001-2004 badfic boom, I doubt there were a million fics in any continuum to kill.

Because I said I would, here is how these numbers come out for just one mission a day:

Bob and Alice: 365 (duh)
50 agents: 18,250 (this would take about 3.82 years to wipe out the collective Tolkienverse section on the Pit)
100 agents: 365,000 (duh again)
2000 agents: 730,000

Obviously, far fewer fics than three missions a day are being killed, but that's more than enough to wipe out most sections in short order. It's still quite a heavy workload, too, but again, not one that would last a long enough time for the badfic supply to be sustainable. In a major badfic boom, maybe fics are coming in faster than they're being killed, but booms end, and then the remaining fics are still there to be killed off. When even a somewhat modestly sized department of 50 agents can wipe out a whole fandom's badfic in a year's work, can we really say agents are still overworked? At any workrate that would qualify for the term, the question seems to be just how there's any badfic left to kill, especially since it's taken as a given that the missions we see agents do on page aren't the only ones they do; it would be patently absurd to suggest only a couple teams have ever done 50 missions in universe, for example.

BUT EKYL...

I know, this is a simplistic model that leaves several variables out, either due to lack of data or just to avoid this whole thing becoming an incomprehensible mess (read: for my own sanity's sake). Let's run down a few of them:

A lot more places than the Pit post fanfic: There's adultfanfiction.net, AO3, Quotev, people's blogs, independent sites, forums, etc. etc. etc. - however, this model uses the Pit because it's the easiest to get data from, AND by far the most popular: the majority of fanfics for a given canon are almost certainly going to be posted on FFnet, even though AO3 is picking up a lot of steam in recent years. If you add on the fanfics in these places, yes, there's a lot more on the pile, but the agents are still killing a huge number of fics yearly, and when you take my point above that not all fics posted will be deemed killable, the numbers will be dwindling fast.

Authors will keep writing fanfic/badfic: Yes, true, but how many? At what rate? To sustain a workrate like in this model, fics would have to be written and updated faster than the agents could kill them, and fandom momentum doesn't sustain that kind of pace for long. The LOTR and Hobbit booms lasted for years but eventually petered out; people still write fics for them, and for Harry Potter, but at nowhere near the rate they used to. Factor in the time it takes for Intel to find fics and determine if they need killing, then to send them to an agent team, and this would see the PPC workload start to slow down immensely.

Your data is full of assumptions!: By necessity, unfortunately. There's a lot of stuff here where gathering conclusive data would either be impossible (there's no way to say for sure exactly how many people are supposed to be in each department, in-universe, for example, just that the PPC as an organisation is much, much larger than the people actively writing characters in it), or more trouble than it's worth. As such, I put together a reasonably plausible hypothetical and fed data I could get into it to make a point.

Not every agent would get this many missions: Of course not, though I'd say if you don't even get one mission a day you're not that overworked. But anyway, there are agents who wouldn't get this many missions daily, who wouldn't complete them quickly enough to stay on top of the pile (or at all, deaths/accidents/failures/snappings-in-actions do happen) or would be unavailable, but the key is that enough agents would be doing these missions to make this impact. If a department has 1000 agents and this workrate, 5% of its effective strength would be killing 27,375/18,250 fics a year. PPC work is demanding enough and dangerous enough that this would easily count as overworking agents, but for how long?

What about missions that take more than one day: This is tricky, and I'm not sure I have an answer for it now - there's not really much in the way of data to figure on how in fic time relates to out of fic time, or how long your average agent spends on a mission. There've been people who've vanished for years doing missions, people who've been in mission for a long while then come back at the end and it's the same day as when they left, and in between; I remember something about Jay saying she'd spent years in missions but came back to HQ not having aged and finding time not having passed, or something like that. It does seem that time outside the Word Worlds moves more slowly than inside, so I consider it possible at least a minority of agents would be able to do three missions in an HST day, although to them it might feel like more or less than that period of time.

What about reposts: In cases where a fic is reposted, or posted in multiple places... I'm honestly not sure, but I think there might be precedent for this. My personal theory is it stays dead; whatever problem the agents go in to fix serves as the sort of anchor of the author's influence, and with it dead the word world sort of collapses and/or becomes inaccessible - so the text would still exist but it would be unable to affect the canon any more. This is why fics killed by agents don't just get deleted, by my estimate. It's midnight now as I type this so I might not be explaining very well.

In the PPC multiverse, wouldn't fics come from more places than just World One: This is actually my (super meta) preferred explanation - surely the LMSF and other Sue-creating organisations make badfic happen too, plus there's how many alternate Earths out there in this setting? Plus canons that have fictions that people would write fanfic about? A simultaneous fanfic boom from two Earths could produce a terrifying amount of badfic if timing ended up working out. Given what we just calculated for a small percentage of the largest departments, the PPC could handle this, but I could see them getting swamped if there's enough of it out there. Still, overwork would be a temporary situation, I'd think, because they'd be chewing through fics at an alarming rate given how many more agents there supposedly are than I have included in this model. It could well be that things are slowing down in-universe, though, possibly in response to how much fic has already been killed - the Flowers probably don't want all their agents to suddenly be out of a job.

I'm tired now and starting to lose track of all my points, I believe I had more but this is probably good for now. I'm sure I'll remember more tomorrow and over the weekend in general, but I thought this would be interesting stuff for the Board to chew on! It certainly does give some food for thought.

...Now I sorta wonder what the PPC would do if one day they ran out of badfic to kill. Which, in an entropic multiverse, I suppose they inevitably will one day. It could maybe be good material for an AU or "the day the consoles stopped beeping" short story.

A bit of new perspective. by JulyFlame on 2015-08-29 13:39:00 UTC Reply

I'm in the navy, which is not news to most people these days. Currently I work in deck. There can be made very many not-so-suspicious parallels!

We do a lot of work and don't really get extended time off, especially compared to other certain departments (I'm looking at those berks in the personnel office) but it's not quite as bad as others (engineers, those poor buggers).

Now, on an underway, there is no way to leave the ship (obviously). You are always On Duty. There are different working hours, as well!

For example, me? Normal work starts at seven thirty usually. We work until ten thirty am (to go and wait in line for an hour to eat). We get our food and hope it isn't too alive and that there's ice in the ice machine and that there is hot sauce to hide the sometimes questionable taste. I have seen people put hot sauce on things you would normally not put hot sauce on out of sheer desperation. After eating you hole up somewhere to nap until one PM and then go back to work again until four PM when you go back to the ever present food line and end up putting hot sauce on hot sauce covered chicken. And then you go back to work again for an hour or two after that, so the normal working day ends between seven and eight PM.

That is not including watch, which is three to five hours of watch which is in shifts that could be during normal working hours to being after or before. When you are not actively working with the department you are usually trying to either catch up on something you were supposed to be working on to get qualified on it or trying to desperately catch up on sleep and not murder the master at arms or legal person who is talking loudly right next to your bed.

We get the occasional Sunday morning off. Unless you have watch that morning in which case you don't get a Sunday morning off at all.

Sometimes we have to wake up at four, even three in the morning to do things that will last the rest of the day anyways, we're just staring early.

As you can see this is a lot of time spent working and not very much time for anything else, and maybe overall one night's full rest every four or five days give or take.

This is a sane schedule compared to the engineers who are on a five and dime. (Which is I can't remember the order but I'm pretty sure is five off, ten on.)

We still goof off, go to the gym, screw around in random spaces, play games, and do things. Like karaoke with the marines. Or fish off the aft end of the ship. Lack of sleep be damned.

This is not an existence where "days" are a thing, much less "days off". Everything is hours.

Common issues cited with the navy is personnel not getting enough sleep, working too much with not enough people, poor retention causing people to leave and never look back and a lack of trust in the leadership.

(Sounds familiar no?)

...anyway, I lost my point a bit. But yes, you can be hideously overworked, sleep deprived, and hoping your food still isn't alive and still be able to do things by forcibly making time some way or another.
A less-assumption-ridden alternate calculation. by Huinesoron on 2015-08-29 08:52:00 UTC Reply

Or at least, ridden with different assumptions...

FF.net gets ~60 fics an hour (that is, the 'Just In' page lists 60 items with under one hour since posting. It's ~40 at 9am UK, rising to ~50 by 3pm; I'm assuming but haven't checked that it will top 60 when America gets online properly.)

ASSUME the 'good's in that are balanced out by the 'bad's from other sites.

That means each week sees (60*24*7) = 10,080 new badfics.

A mission takes ~ 1 day, internally. Some are shorter, some span multiple days.

ASSUME that mission-time and HQ-time are roughly synchronised.

Agents get ~3 hours between missions. Sometimes longer (Medical visits), sometimes the next mission follows immediately. This is basically the time it takes to write a report. Some agents manage to snatch a little sleep.

Agents seem to have a day's-worth of down-time every 4-10 missions, depending on the writer. Let's call it one day a week.

In one week, an agent can therefore deal with (24*6)/(24+3) = 5 stories

To keep pace with the influx, the PPC requires (10080 / 5) = 2016 Action teams, thus 4032 Action agents.

If agents are assumed to work five days and have two off, they can only handle 4 stories per week, and the number rises to 5040 Action agents.

To keep pace with the influx, the Department of Intelligence needs to handle 60 fics per hour. An hour seems like a reasonable average time to work through a fic - some require a personal visit and take longer, others are short and take less - so that implies 60 Spies in the Sorting Room per shift. Per (Un)Intelligence, there are six teams, which don't seem to work simultaneously, implying 360 Sorting Room Spies. The number of Action Spies is much lower: assuming only one fic an hour gets bumped up to them, and allowing six hours for a mission + report, they may only need six! To allow for sleep, assume ten, giving a total of 370 Spies.

hS

PS: Coming later - comparisons between the two mathsings, including a look at that 60-per-hour figure, and the 50-in-DAVD-fourth-largest one. ~hS

One thing to note, too. by Ekyl on 2015-08-29 14:18:00 UTC Reply

After that huge post I just made, I plugged your agent numbers for agents needed for 5 and 4 missions weekly, and that many agents doing that much work (2016 * 5 * 52 and 2520 * 4 * 52 [or 5040/2(4*52)) for a year seems to come out to 524,160 fics killed in that year. Still more than enough to wipe out entire fandoms if it's a slow year. It sounds like enough fics are coming in daily to keep things going, but even the biggest categories on the Pit could get chewed up within a few years if there's more agents working than the bare minimum suggested number for keeping up.

A last figure by Ekyl on 2015-08-29 14:52:00 UTC Reply

I checked out your 60 an hour estimate for fics posted, too, although you said that's high. 60 * 24 * 365 = 525,600 fics posted to the Pit a year, and that's presumably fics for more than one continuum. While that's 1440 fics escaping missions at year's end if we assume every one of those fics gets targetted, more than the bare minimum number of agents - and we've already covered that I think there are more Action agents than you say - and we quickly reach a point where more fics are being killed in a year than are actually being posted.

Though at that point, of course, we have to factor in all the non-Pit sources of badfic.

I like this calculation! by Ekyl on 2015-08-29 14:06:00 UTC Reply

It does cover some blank spots I feel I was leaving, and you have data I either couldn't get or didn't think to get. And this is why when you post these things you hope an actual scientist comes by to poke at it. :P I genuinely didn't think to check how many fics per hour appear on FF.net, or maybe I just didn't get around to it; I just took the numbers as they currently existed and went "okay, so assume these agents are tackling X number of these fics during an 'all hands on deck, constant missions' footing, how many would they chew through assuming what I would personally consider a truly huge workload." I'd be run ragged if I had to kill three badfics a day! That's a ballpark figure I took as sort of going "what might a PPC workload look like at its heaviest."

4-5 missions a week is still a lot, maybe more than some could handle, and does sound like a heavy enough workload to cause some of the issue we've seen in fanfic explosions. However, the question would be if it's truly the extreme workload that seems to be implied in old missions. Not to trivialise the work a PPC agent has to do, but at this pace it basically turns into a slightly longer, much much more dangerous version of the standard work week. Which I guess fits right in with the workplace humour. I do think 1000-10,000 action agents (I'm replying to both of your posts in this one to save time) figure might be lowballing it a little, but it does work as a good "let's assume there are at least this many agents out there killing fics, to keep up with how many are posted daily" figure. I suppose it depends, in part, on if you figure that's a number per action department, or for EVERY action department; 10,000 agents is still a lot of people, but I dunno.

To get back to actual numbers, I would say 4-5 a week would possibly work as a ballpark estimate for the average number of missions tackled by an agent team (some people get more, some people get less, and when there's a huge fanfic boom everyone's doing everything as fast as they can possibly do 'em) considering the general "things have slowed down a bit" vibe I get from recent stuff and that there's still a lot of fic out there to kill. Though I still think a look at a PPC that realises there's no fanfic left to kill would be interesting one day, and it does seem to me that they're capable of taking out a truly immense amount of fics when they have to. Of course, 208/260 missions a year per team feels much more reasonable than tens of thousands of missions like if agents are getting multiple missions daily. I do think the difference in these figures actually suggests, especially since I personally prefer the four-a-week-with-two-days-or-so-off model for the modern, "nothing is currently exploding" PPC, that the agents could have it much much worse than they do.

On DAVD: Yes, I'd remembered before going to bed that a discussion about their numbers happened years ago and you had said pretty definitively that there obviously weren't still only 50 agents when they became the fourth largest Action Department. I used 50 as a marker because a) it's a rare department where we have an actual number for how many of them there are in-universe, so I didn't have to pull a number completely from my hat, and b) we can then point to it and say there are 50 people here going into the Word Worlds and killing badfic on a regular basis. 50, in the original post, was my minimum "we can assume a given action department, at least among the major departments, will have at least 50 agents available for missions at any given point in time." I do think it's odd that a major department like DIC would have less people in it than DAVD, say, but Floaters has probably taken a lot of workload from departments like DIC and APD. I imagine there's a lot of departments that only still exist to give the Department Head a job.

This data and the conclusions you come to also support a thought I've always had, namely that there's probably many more agents in the infrastructure and support departments (think Intel, Finance, Personnel, Operations, DIA...) than Action. This makes perfect sense, because the logistical needs of this place are immense; in every army, 9/10 or so of the soldiers are working behind the lines. This would do something for addressing the huge implicit numbers of agents without completely stripping the Worlds bare, though some of the Action Departments are probably big enough to be doing a real number on what's out there.

Admittedly, our two models rely on some different assumptions that could make the resultant data go wildly off course. How does mission time really relate to HQ time? How many missions really come down in what an agent might recognise as a 24 hour period? What's the difference between an agent's perceived time and the time that actually passes? Yours says mission time matches up more or less with HQ time and each mission takes about a day as a ballpark guess, mine says missions seem to vary and not everyone seems to experience the same amount of time in mission as passes outside the Word World. Admittedly, yours gets pretty specific, whereas mine basically goes, "let's assume it's possible for at least some agent teams to get multiple missions within one HST day and complete them all, and see how many they'd chew through in a year if this happened every day".

I think we can say that given what's suggested from both our models, there's definitely enough missions going on within a short enough timeframe for your average agent to feel overworked and like there's no end in sight, and whether or not they truly are that put upon is a matter of interpretation. It does seem like things are better now than they were in Jay and Acacia's day, where I bet Intel really couldn't keep up because so many people were posting so many things at once - it would explain current missions being posted using old fics, if that's backlog being cleared because Intel finally got to that fic, although in universe the 2001-2003 fics are almost all surely dead by now. It could definitely vary between department, division, and individual agent; there's probably busy areas, and divisions for fandoms that're extremely quiet because there's hardly ever fics worth killing any more, plus my assumption that maybe more fics are being written in-universe than we see here. A DMS Tolkienverse or Harry Potter agent team is probably busier than, say, the entire APD Mossflower Division or DMFF, especially from 2001-2004 and 2011-2014 (creeping into 2015 because there's still a lot of Hobbit fic being written - there weren't 11,000 fics in the Hobbit section this time last year). Floaters, the poor sods, probably get the most work due to having the most agents and the least specialisation. This would allow for what you said, that there's room for things to shuffle around either way - while your typical agent probably feels overworked, and really does see quite a lot of missions, I doubt things are quite so bad as, say, never having any time to relax or recover. For one, we see a lot of stories lately that have them doing exactly that; would Rudi's or the Pennacook Club or A Troupe By Any Other Name or the businesses in New Caledonia or the Multiverse Monitor exist if nobody ever had time to run the show or be a patron?

(That does raise a question though: what does a badfic do when nobody's killing it? I seem to recall reading somewhere it just sorta loops over and over until someone shows up to deal with it but does it hurt the canon worse? Is there any particular effect if an author finishes their fic before the PPC gets to it? These are outside the scope of this model and discussion, but something to ponder.)

For their purposes, though, I think both calculations are serviceable - namely, to allow for this discussion and to look at what it might actually look like to be an agent. How busy is the PPC, really? What kind of progress are they actually making? Maybe more than we thought, or less, depending on which data you like better, and either set of numbers shows how daunting a task is ahead of someone who takes this job. With so many badfics to face, no wonder turnover can be pretty high. I guess in the end it's sort of the Batman situation. Batman has cleaned up the streets of Gotham considerably, by now, in many interpretations, but there's always going to be crime, and his rogues gallery will always be out there causing mayhem, because as long as people want to write and read Batman stories there has to be a villain for him to face.
Those figures. by Huinesoron on 2015-08-29 10:53:00 UTC Reply

60 stories per hour may be a bit high. Right now I count 33, so perhaps the 40 was closer to representative than I thought.

More interestingly, FF.net splits its New Stories by Stories and Crossovers. That 33 is 30 stories, 3 crossovers; that means that, to keep pace, roughly 10% of PPC Action agents must be either Implausible Crossovers, Floaters on Crossover duty, or dealing with crossovers as a secondary charge.

Now: DAVD. DAVD had only a handful of (Action) agents left in 2006. By 2009, they were back to 49 Action agents, and ~66 total. By 2012 (another three years), they were the fourth-largest.

Assuming linear growth - which doesn't seem unreasonable, since DAVD are leaching off general PPC recruitments, rather than running their own - it seems reasonable to assume that 2012 figure was about 100 agents. That means that DMS-DF-DBS have over 100 each, and that - yes - most departments have less. Well, how many DMFF agents did you think there were?

And my figures are for keeping pace. IS the PPC keeping up with badfic production? Are they ahead and eating through the backlog? Are they lagging behind? We don't know; there's room enough to shuffle the numbers either way.

I think the conclusions from this have to be:

1/ PPC Agents do a hard, dangerous job, with not enough time between missions to relax, and not enough time off to recover.

2/ There are somewhere between 1000 and 10,000 Action agents, probably towards the lower end of that scale.

3/ The biggest departments number in the mid-to-high hundreds; the smaller ones are in the tens.

4/ The Department of Intelligence is one of the largest in HQ.

5/ There will be work enough, and unfamiliar faces enough, for the PPC for many decades to come - because we'll keep on writing it. ^_^

hS

I think you're underestimating how long a mission takes by Tira on 2015-08-29 07:39:00 UTC Reply

Multiple missions a day might seem to be feasible from an outside perspective, but a lot of missions seem to last multiple days. Even in TOS, Jay and Acacia frequently have to make camp or find somewhere to sleep. Now, given that the PPC's temporal mechanics are... complicated, a mission could theoretically only take about two or three hours of Headquarters time (HQT) but several days of Agent time (AT). Heck, a mission could theoretically take no time, with the agents returning only a few seconds of HQT later than when they left, but with a cumulative AT of a week. With that kind of system, it's easy to feel overworked even if you only get a mission every other day.

In general, I imagine most PPC agents, rather than the typical nine-to-five pattern, tend to work extremely long "shifts" with relatively neglible time off between them. It might not look like much from an outside perspective, but most of them put in far more than 40 man-hours of work a week, at least in terms of AT.

Actually covered this, in brief, towards the end. by Ekyl on 2015-08-29 11:52:00 UTC Reply

Admittedly, "there's no way to tell how time spent in mission relates to time passed outside the mission, but I assume at least some agents can do multiple missions in a day" might seem like a bit of copout? But you're saying I didn't talk about something that I, you know, did.

That's putting it a bit harshly ^^ by Tira on 2015-08-29 19:16:00 UTC Reply

I suppose you did talk about it in brief, but still. You predicated the entire definition of how hard they worked by assuming that a mission is a reasonable thing to do multiple of in a day, and I thought the idea that it wasn't was a topic worthy of further discussion.

Also, my reply wasn't meant to be harsh or dismissive or anything, I was just continuing the discussion.

Cannot reply now but plan to. Sorry! (nm) by Anonymous on 2015-08-29 19:22:00 UTC Reply

In addition... by Desdendelle on 2015-08-29 08:44:00 UTC Reply

There's more to 'overworked' than workload. The agents get no breaks (Ironic Overpower, anybody?), the food is bad (hello, Slorp), and missions are, for the most part, very stressful; I think those factors all contribute to the feeling of overworked-ness, as they all serve to make an agent feel that they don't have time to breath.

The "no breaks" bit was touched on by Ekyl on 2015-08-29 12:08:00 UTC Reply

Namely, this was me taking a ballpark figure for how many missions might be coming in to create the feeling of constant work with no breaks ever. Especially when you consider that there's only so much a pair can do before they've just been run into the ground by the workload.

And don't get me started on Slorp, that took maybe half an hour to get thoroughly run into the ground. :P

I will admit that I personally assume things have gotten better/slowed down a bit in HQ compared to the Great Fanfic Explosion, but then, Tolkienverse agents will have only recently finished riding out the smaller fanfic boom ("only" 11,000 fics at the time of this writing) caused by the Hobbit movies. This also isn't something pulled out of my hat randomly, but going off the vibe I get in a lot of stories lately - the "oh [diety of your choice], we literally never get any breaks ever and everything is horrible and somehow I haven't died from starvation or sleep deprivation" seems to have fallen aside, especially since there's a lot of alternatives to the Cafeteria these days. We see enough stories of agents just hanging out and doing their thing, or at least not being completely buried in missions 24/7, that it seems to indicate the old status quo is no longer, well, quo.

Hold on, bit of an error in the one-a-day. by Ekyl on 2015-08-29 05:29:00 UTC Reply

I'd forgotten to make the numbers for pairs, not individuals. It should come out like this:

50: 9,125
100: 18,250
2000: 365,000

Sorry about that!