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I wanted to know if data backed up the assertions that sava's pre game zatsus were too long. I looked at every every game stream, so no chatting or art streams. I clocked the time from stream start to when she actually started playing, not just fiddling with settings. Here's what I found:
Average time to game start: 48 minutes
Median Time: 34 minutes
Max time until game start: 191 minutes (Deus Ex 10)
Doom streams take an average of 41 minutes to gameplay, DX 66 minutes, Morrowind 76 minutes.
There is a definite trend where the first few streams of a game start pretty quick, but by stream 6 or 7 starting takes longer.
There is also a trend where the time to start gameplay becomes consistently about an hour, around Doom 9/Deus Ex 6 (late Nov/early Dec). This increased steadily to just over 2 hours with Morrowind 6, dropped sharply with Halo 1 and then back up to over two hours with Morrowind 7 and to 3 hours with Deus EX 10.
As for conclusions, while it is fair to say that pregame chats have gotten long, it's been that way for a while, so you probably need to adjust your expectations. Pregame chatting is probably going to be an hour or so, unless it's a brand new game. And if it's a long series game (DX, Doom, Morrowind), expect up around 2 hours of pregame chat.
