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Player Base Shrinks


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#81 Narcissistic Martyr

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Posted 26 February 2016 - 08:23 PM

View PostOncoshi, on 26 February 2016 - 09:51 AM, said:

Steam release had no positive effect on the player base in MWO.

http://store.steampowered.com/stats/

https://steamdb.info.../342200/graphs/
(thx @ PFC Carsten)

There are more people interested in Euro Truck Simulator 2!!!!! than in MWO.

You cant find MWO in the top 100.


To be fair 99% of the people playing Euro Truck Simulator 2 are German. They have a weird thing for sims. MWO would have more Germans playing if it was more sim and less mech themed arcade shooter. Ah well, not like there's another battletech game for me to play atm.

#82 Rhent

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Posted 26 February 2016 - 09:32 PM

View PostTLBFestus, on 26 February 2016 - 08:02 PM, said:


Wow......gotta love that level of optimism. I'd say that "rose colored glasses" thing again, but you need rose colored eyeballs to make that part of a successful argument.


If you have 10 apples and your teach adds 1 apple to your pile, your pile has ADDED 1 apple, meaning your pile has GROWN.

#83 SteelMantis

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Posted 26 February 2016 - 09:52 PM

It is totally normal to lose some of the new Steam players. A fair portion of Steam users are forever bouncing from one new game to another. Even those that usually stay with a game in the long term will not all like MWO for any number of reasons.

That said I do think PGI could be trying harder to capitalize on being on Steam. I noticed MWO didn't have anything on sale for Steam's last big sale (the Chinese Lunar New Year). They should put the Steam packs on sale as often as possible both to bring in new players and keep the Steam players interested.

But all in all Steam has been a gain. I know it got me to come back and drop 100$ into the game that I would not have otherwise.

#84 Rhent

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Posted 26 February 2016 - 09:59 PM

View PostSteelMantis, on 26 February 2016 - 09:52 PM, said:

It is totally normal to lose some of the new Steam players. A fair portion of Steam users are forever bouncing from one new game to another. Even those that usually stay with a game in the long term will not all like MWO for any number of reasons.

That said I do think PGI could be trying harder to capitalize on being on Steam. I noticed MWO didn't have anything on sale for Steam's last big sale (the Chinese Lunar New Year). They should put the Steam packs on sale as often as possible both to bring in new players and keep the Steam players interested.

But all in all Steam has been a gain. I know it got me to come back and drop 100$ into the game that I would not have otherwise.


Its been a while since I've worked for a video game company selling games online, but my impression was that Steam set the price for the sales, not the studios. It doesn't mean Steam could negotiate a lower price for the games. But its doubtful Steam would sell MWO without being given a financial incentive, which would hurt it if it showed favoritism.

#85 Anjian

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Posted 27 February 2016 - 01:34 AM

Correction:

WoT has 500,000 plus players on its NA servers ALONE. Those numbers don't count have RU, EU, SEA, CHN and KOR servers, and the EU and RU has a bigger player base much bigger than the NA servers that those numbers must be expressed in terms of multiples over the NA server. Today the RU servers concurrently peaked at 700,000 players alone, and the EU adds another 160,000 over that. It's easy to see why the CEO of Wargaming is now the first Belarussian to be a billionaire. Yet despite this, Wargaming makes less than half of Crossfire and League of Legends, the two biggest F2P games of all.

Wargaming's games are considered among the least predatory among F2P games. I personally consider MWO to be even less predatory than WG's. When you are successful, you tend to change less any broken way you have. The WG matchmaker seems to deliberately punish people with winning streaks by stacking odds against them until their win-loss ratios are closer to 50%. These creates brutal long losing streaks.

While tanks are universally recognizable, so are big robots. Even though the Battletech IP is now reduced to the point of public invisibility, big robots are still universally recognizable as well and MWO failed to capitalize on that. Its like EVE Online or Elite Dangerous. The IPs aren't that well known by themselves, but everyone knows space ships.

I suggest people might be better off using this as a metric.

https://www.google.com/trends/

The number of searches being made on a topic indicates rising or falling trends of interest. This is a powerful marketing tool, not to mention in making predicting political trends.

There is a sharp peak at Steam release for MWO but even when accounting for peaks and valleys, there is an overall decline of interest since. This does seem consistent with the Steam numbers.

In terms of regional interest, Canada is the highest, which also explains the game's low population base, followed by the US. The highest European nation in interest is Germany. Russia appears next. Outside of that, there is Australia.

I do think the game has a problem keeping players.

Edited by Anjian, 27 February 2016 - 01:36 AM.


#86 Reza Malin

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Posted 27 February 2016 - 07:17 AM

View PostAnjian, on 27 February 2016 - 01:34 AM, said:

*Intelligence*


The reason the game has trouble keeping players is the steep learning curve and the alpha cheese of some weapon types.

Nothing dashes the hopes and dreams of Mr Newb more than stepping up and having his CT opened by one or two unforgiving volleys every game..

The TTK is sometimes pathetic in MWO, they should lengthen it somehow. It might not provide any real advantage for said new player, but it may make him feel like he played the game a bit more before he gets dropped by some douchebag shooting him with an arsenal of large lasers from 500M away behind a rock.

He probably bought into the whole promotional video thing, seeing beefy robots striding towards each other tearing each other apart in maelstroms of close to medium range combat. Thus, Mr Newb had aspirations.

Then Mr Newb played his first few matches where he was laced with long range large laser, gauss and WARNING INCOMING MISSILE fire, and wondered what the frak was going on and that in fact, this game was too much hard work for him.

Mr Newb then probably goes and preorders The Division instead, and with that MWO is lost to him, in that realm of niche games backed with lore, that would be dead without fans of the game's original premise.

#87 Robot Kenshiro

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Posted 27 February 2016 - 07:45 AM

Just because players dont transfer to steam doesnt mean the population is down. As far as i know im not waiting 4mins per game anymore. I wait around 45secs. This tells me the population is fine. Going off a steam stat is rubbish. Steam is great. But ppl dont need to rely on it when games like mwo and such have its own client

#88 Dahkoht

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Posted 27 February 2016 - 07:48 AM

View PostRhent, on 26 February 2016 - 09:32 PM, said:


If you have 10 apples and your teach adds 1 apple to your pile, your pile has ADDED 1 apple, meaning your pile has GROWN.

Posted Image

#89 Zerberus

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Posted 27 February 2016 - 08:02 AM

View PostNarcissistic Martyr, on 26 February 2016 - 08:23 PM, said:


To be fair 99% of the people playing Euro Truck Simulator 2 are German. They have a weird thing for sims. MWO would have more Germans playing if it was more sim and less mech themed arcade shooter. Ah well, not like there's another battletech game for me to play atm.

MWO once had many more germans playing it, during CB I hat 5 or 6 friends who were regularly on. A few left durcing CB becasue they were´t beta tester material, but returned after release. None stayed, and the dumbing down of the game was teh main reason. There are A LOT of BT fans in Germany, but they grew up on mech SIMS and not arcade mech shooters, and it shows in ther preference of games. Hawken for ex. wasn´t even a consideration for many of them...

But still, they already felt "undertasked" before by the stupidly simple controls and point and shoot interface, but when things of actual tactical value started getting removed from game modes (or rather modes were added with zero tactical merit), the realized that this game was going to become more and more lowbrow as time went on. And when the turrets were removed from assault after years of waiting for it to be something more than "stand in teh square" and only a few months of it not being skirmish with an early end option, I became the last one to still be here.

And TBH 30 years of love for BT is the only thing really keeping me, because the the game seems to devolve more and more intoBattlemech Shooting gallery... and I can already have the superduper HC version of that by simply taking my miniatures and an airsoft rifle out in the yard.... Maybe domination will be a fresh breeze, but if it´s anything like UT domination we may have just called it "Conquest II", which is basically domination already. Take points, hold them by force until time runs out /score runs up... only real difference is no respawns in MWO....

Edited by Zerberus, 27 February 2016 - 08:04 AM.


#90 Johnny Z

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Posted 27 February 2016 - 08:02 AM

View Postchewie, on 26 February 2016 - 09:57 AM, said:

just means people are maybe playing more via the normal method rather than having a cpu /memory sucking 3rd party software to go through first in order to play the game they wanna play???


QFT.

Anyone that is over 50% CPU usage or something would actually benefit from not using the Steam launcher.

Running programs or anything in the background negatively effects performance.


Edited by Johnny Z, 27 February 2016 - 08:07 AM.


#91 Clint Steel

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Posted 27 February 2016 - 08:26 AM

I used Steam for a while just to get some hours in, to make my review look more legit. But now I'm back to using stand alone launcher, because I just got a Thrustmaster T16000, and the TARGET software can launch the game for me so I can use a script that lets me program buttons to the twist.

#92 Sylonce

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Posted 27 February 2016 - 09:01 AM

As a person who is part of the statistic based on the player-base shrinkage on steam, here is my thoughts on why:
1) XCOM 2
2) Euro Truck Simulator 2 is the next best thing since sliced bread Posted Image

On a slightly more serious note though, player bases do tend to level off after a certain time, and will slowly decrease as time goes on. Players lose their interest, gets fatigued, or there are simply better games that gets rolled out. The games that tend to retain people are the kind that appeal to large masses, has varied and replayable gameplay, and is unique enough to occupy it's own niche in the gaming community.

#93 Narcissistic Martyr

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Posted 27 February 2016 - 12:05 PM

View PostSylonce, on 27 February 2016 - 09:01 AM, said:

As a person who is part of the statistic based on the player-base shrinkage on steam, here is my thoughts on why:
1) XCOM 2


Guilty

#94 Sandpit

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Posted 27 February 2016 - 01:15 PM

View PostRhent, on 26 February 2016 - 10:07 AM, said:


Have you had at least one class in statistics so you have the modicrum of intelligence in presenting data. Lets go through the logic train that you missed:

1st) You show steam stats for Top 100 games. MWO is not present in the top 100.
2nd) You did NOT show any history to show MWO play behavior since its been released on Steam
3rd) MWO is split between two clients the native MWO and the modified one using Steam to send stats to Steam. Therefore, when using Steamstats, at best you can only talk about the Steam side of the house and not the MWO side of the house.
4th) You did not present in any way to show that Steam has had no positive impact on MWO at all.

Lastly, get a better data source showing the release stats on Steam and current play activity. And understand that if MWO released on Steam and got 1 player from Steam, it means releasing on Steam increased players for MWO. If by some miracle releasing MWO on Steam caused MWO non-steam players to leave more than the new Steam players coming in, then yes you'd have a correct statement, but lets be frank your entire post is one hell of a lie.

you have a lot of "statistician" and "experts" on the forums who obviously have no clue when ti comes to sampling, bias, skewed data, controls, collection, correlations, etc.

That's why there are very few people on here that I pay any attention to when they begin mentioning stats and maths because a good chunk of the time it's done from a very uninformed and ignorant standpoint and is just skewed with their personal bias to further a personal idea or agenda they have

#95 Moldur

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Posted 27 February 2016 - 01:27 PM

MWO is a good game to play every six months. I don't play it during school, then when I come back in the summer or winter, hey look at that! New mechs! Free cbills! Another loyalty bot! ahahahaha


I wouldn't be surprised if MWO had a drop-off during these parts of the year every year since its release.

#96 Kaisha

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Posted 27 February 2016 - 02:40 PM

The fundamental problem with MWO is that it isn't what it claims to be. It is NOT a thinking mans shooter/mech simulation. There's all this talk about how hard or difficult it is. That's hardly the case.

The mech loadouts/weapons take some time to get used to, but they're not more complex or difficult to work with than mastery/skills/talents sets found in most MMOs and MOBAs. This is compounded by the fact that a large majority of the weapons are just not useful in most situations (there's always niche builds in MWO just as in MMOs and MOBAs).

The multiple damage points (ie. head vs legs vs torso) is cool for a bit, but very quickly people learn to just focus fire on center torso and the rest of the armor on your mech means almost nothing. Unless you're a light pretty much every encounter ends with your core being blown out because there no reason not to aim for it first. Torso twisting helps a bit, but its such a minor and gimmicky technique, and is only a small alleviation for such a large problem.

The whole notion of strategy and teamwork is laughable compared to so many other teamwork orientated games. Apart from ECM/locking, there's almost no inter-mech teamwork. All the tops players either sniper or form firing lines. There's very little movement, back and forth, brawling is just a last resort. Compare a pro LOL/DOTA game and you see far more positioning, baiting, ganking, and inter-player coordination. In MWO the whole 'teamwork' aspect gets boring fast because in reality there is so little of it.

In the end, all the battle tech 'big giant robots' is just a cool skin for what is underneath just another shooter. When that happens you ask yourself... why bother? If you're not a BT fan, there's nothing special here for you that hasn't been done elsewhere much better.

Edited by Kaisha, 27 February 2016 - 02:42 PM.


#97 MechaBattler

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Posted 27 February 2016 - 02:57 PM

A lot of people I knew opted not to play it over Steam. So while the numbers on Steam have gone down. It doesn't represent the whole of the player-base.

It's probably bigger than it was, but not by so much that it's going to top any list. Just simply keep itself alive.

#98 Rathverge

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Posted 27 February 2016 - 03:11 PM

You are flawed and imperfect. And you have not corrected by sterilization, you have made three errors!

1. Your figures show more people playing than previously.
2. Running client loading games has issues with steam. I get a lot of problems as do the many steamolians I have recruited to the game. I get this issue with MWO, Warthunder, EVE and any game that seems to launch through its own client. We choose to run it outside of steam for the sake of our steam not going bananas
3. Clickbait thread title is just morally wrong. Go pray or something.

#99 MischiefSC

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Posted 27 February 2016 - 04:08 PM

The telemetry isn't optimal but it's pretty standard for a F2P. It picked up 4k people at peak at first, which has trickled to about 2800.

It probably comes to 3-4k net pop adds. Peak population /= total population. You'll also see some returns on the old client.

It's not ideal but I would bet it paid for itself and then some. Being on Steam is way better than word of mouth.

#100 Tripzter

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Posted 27 February 2016 - 04:14 PM

lol well lets look at the games history. Problems what were present like invisible walls and this joke of a balance are still present... 4 years now after release? No wonder people leave.

Edited by Tripzter, 27 February 2016 - 04:21 PM.






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