153 replies to this topic

[Mead]

Oncoshi, on 26 February 2016 - 12:58 PM, said:

Well maybe you can enlighten us why half of the few new players from steam already left MWO and why the community doesnt grow.

Well maybe there's not enough game to keep a lot of new people. There are a lot of places you can get deathmatch that don't require the learning curve this game has.

And have you seen this community and how it treats new players? When you're received in the manner of something that needs to be scraped off one's boot, there's not a lot of incentive to stick around.

[AztecD]

VorpalAnvil, on 26 February 2016 - 10:58 AM, said:

Your console peasantry sickens me...

poor console players, little more than peasants

I agree

Edited by AztecD, 26 February 2016 - 01:19 PM.

[Jables McBarty]

Oncoshi, on 26 February 2016 - 12:39 PM, said:

World of tanks is the same game type but they have 500000 players. Its not about the niche but about the quality of a game.
http://wotlabs.net/

With bad matchmaking, bad balance and beginners unfriendly gamestyle u cant win new players for your game.

OP, I was a combo Anthro-Sociology-Linguistics-History major, but I'm gonna learn you something about sources in research:

Sources cannot be meaningfully compared if they are not shown to be congruent.

Argument: WOT has 500,000 players, ergo it is a better/more popular game. (Paraphrased)

Source: A third-party WOT tracker site, with the datum "Players Tracked: 534448"

Comparison: MWO has falling playerbase (paraphrased)

Source: A third-party Steam tracker site. There are multiple data here, such as "Number of Owners", "Number of Players [presumably includes one-time players]", "Players in last 2 weeks", "Currently Playing."

So, we're going to blow right past the parts that others have covered--namely that not 100% of the players play off of Steam, number of active players not necessarily indicative of other trends*, new players might suddenly have real-life obligations now that the holidays are over, etc..

Ok, that's done. Data. We don't know what the WOT number represents. If it is is "Currently Playing," then that's a HUGE difference. Point made. But please direct us to that particular datum rather than making us search for it (because I couldn't find it). If it's "Last 2 Weeks," then still pretty solid point. The order of magnitude is only x10, but PGI should take note and maybe adjust business plans. If it's One-Time Players, or even Owners (have downloaded from the website), then you have no real argument. Like, at all.

Really, these types of arguments can't be had until MWO releases bulk user data (for both Steam client and Classic client) so that they can be aggregated by third party sites like Steamdb, this WOT site, or Dotabuff for Dota 2's user stats.

*EDIT: By "other trends" I'm referring generally to the "dedicated, $$-paying fanbase" being more important than raw F2P numbers.

Edited by Jables McBarty, 26 February 2016 - 01:30 PM.

[Mcgral18]

Oncoshi, on 26 February 2016 - 12:39 PM, said:

World of tanks is the same game type but they have 500000 players. Its not about the niche but about the quality of a game.
http://wotlabs.net/


With bad matchmaking, bad balance and beginners unfriendly gamestyle u cant win new players for your game.

I found WoT to be an absolute piece of ****, and stopped playing shortly after starting.

MWO is at least fun, with Shooty Stompy Robots.
I'll never understand popular games...

[PFC Carsten]

Louis Brofist, on 26 February 2016 - 10:44 AM, said:

It's a niche game with a small, but dedicated fanbase, it will never achieve mainstream status. Steam is simply not a good measure of MWO's playerbase. The core following use the standalone client.

IIRC in the last Townhall, Russ said something about it being 50:50 Steam and Standalone. Might wanna look it up.

edit:
Here it is, right at the beginning:
https://www.reddit.c..._summary_recap/

Edited by PFC Carsten, 26 February 2016 - 02:30 PM.

[Oncoshi]

Jables McBarty, on 26 February 2016 - 01:27 PM, said:

OP, I was a combo Anthro-Sociology-Linguistics-History major, but I'm gonna learn you something about sources in research:

Sources cannot be meaningfully compared if they are not shown to be congruent.

Argument: WOT has 500,000 players, ergo it is a better/more popular game. (Paraphrased)

Source: A third-party WOT tracker site, with the datum "Players Tracked: 534448"

Comparison: MWO has falling playerbase (paraphrased)

Source: A third-party Steam tracker site. There are multiple data here, such as "Number of Owners", "Number of Players [presumably includes one-time players]", "Players in last 2 weeks", "Currently Playing."

So, we're going to blow right past the parts that others have covered--namely that not 100% of the players play off of Steam, number of active players not necessarily indicative of other trends*, new players might suddenly have real-life obligations now that the holidays are over, etc..

Ok, that's done. Data. We don't know what the WOT number represents. If it is is "Currently Playing," then that's a HUGE difference. Point made. But please direct us to that particular datum rather than making us search for it (because I couldn't find it). If it's "Last 2 Weeks," then still pretty solid point. The order of magnitude is only x10, but PGI should take note and maybe adjust business plans. If it's One-Time Players, or even Owners (have downloaded from the website), then you have no real argument. Like, at all.

Really, these types of arguments can't be had until MWO releases bulk user data (for both Steam client and Classic client) so that they can be aggregated by third party sites like Steamdb, this WOT site, or Dotabuff for Dota 2's user stats.

*EDIT: By "other trends" I'm referring generally to the "dedicated, $$-paying fanbase" being more important than raw F2P numbers.

Im sorry when your "major" doesnt teach you how to use google and find links like this in 5 seconds instead of writing a whole roman: http://wiki.wargamin.../World_of_Tanks

There you have live stats.

You are right a paying fanbase is important but then i wonder what PGI wants. They could make a pay 2 play game like world of warcraft... So their paying users would stay and could profit from new content.
But i dont think you would generate many more players.

Or do they need F2P user to fill the game with life and make events and community warfare interesting without matchmaking times >10 min.

And as long as PGI doesnt give us numbers of course third party sites are the only source. But that doesnt mean you are right if you say "the big fanbase" all use the external launcher. How do you know that noone switches from the external launcher to steam because he have his friends and his other games on this platform?

[KHETTI]

Oncoshi, on 26 February 2016 - 12:39 PM, said:

World of tanks is the same game type but they have 500000 players. Its not about the niche but about the quality of a game.
http://wotlabs.net/


With bad matchmaking, bad balance and beginners unfriendly gamestyle u cant win new players for your game.

Out of all the F2P games i've played, War Gaming's products are the most toxic, poorly balanced with match making every bit as bad as MWO, if not worse.
And WoT is a yawn-fest to boot.

[Revis Volek]

Oncoshi, on 26 February 2016 - 12:58 PM, said:

Well maybe you can enlighten us why half of the few new players from steam already left MWO and why the community doesnt grow.

You should look at more then just ONE STEAM GAME....

You will see this is a TREND with TONS OF GAMES ON STEAM, not just MWO.

They have BOOM when it released and they people get bored, realize its not for them or just move on to other Real Life things.

[Mystere]

KHETTI, on 26 February 2016 - 02:32 PM, said:

Out of all the F2P games i've played, War Gaming's products are the most toxic, poorly balanced with match making every bit as bad as MWO, if not worse.
And WoT is a yawn-fest to boot.

And yet their games' populations seem to suggest they are doing something right compared to PGI.

Edited by Mystere, 26 February 2016 - 02:36 PM.

[Jables McBarty]

Oncoshi, on 26 February 2016 - 02:25 PM, said:

Im sorry when your "major" doesnt teach you how to use google and find links like this in 5 seconds instead of writing a whole roman: http://wiki.wargamin.../World_of_Tanks

There you have live stats.

Thank you, that's much better. My other point stands--that it's your job to find the good sources b/c you are the one arguing the point. Whether or not I can use google isn't a factor (unless you put "google it" in the Progress Reports you give to your boss...in which case, where do you work? I want to work there too).

Oncoshi, on 26 February 2016 - 02:25 PM, said:

You are right a paying fanbase is important but then i wonder what PGI wants. They could make a pay 2 play game like world of warcraft... So their paying users would stay and could profit from new content.
But i dont think you would generate many more players.

Or do they need F2P user to fill the game with life and make events and community warfare interesting without matchmaking times >10 min.

And as long as PGI doesnt give us numbers of course third party sites are the only source. But that doesnt mean you are right if you say "the big fanbase" all use the external launcher. How do you know that noone switches from the external launcher to steam because he have his friends and his other games on this platform?

I believe that my Founder friend switched to Steam for just that reason. My point is that this entire discussion is pointless unless you have aggregate data. I'm also not sure what you hope to accomplish by even bringing up this whole topic. Normally I would have read the first post and moved onto the next topic but your use of sources and argument woke up my deeply repressed Grad Student TA.

[Groutknoll]

Mister Blastman, on 26 February 2016 - 10:39 AM, said:

I'm used to being unpopular. I was that guy that never went to the prom and instead hung out with nerd buddies talking about nerd stuff.

So it doesn't bother me that the MWO population is small. I'm okay with that.

heh, you were cooler than me .... I did not have nerd buddies to hang out with while not going to prom

But I did play battle tech/mechwarrior rpg with my brothers instead

Edited by Groutknoll, 26 February 2016 - 02:43 PM.

[Jables McBarty]

Seriously, I really don't understand the point of these types of threads.

The best I can come up with is "Dwindling playerbase leads to dwindling income for PGI leads to PGI gives up developing new content and eventually gives up on running the servers."

At which point you get a little sad, then move on to something else in your life. Seriously, everyone on the forums seems to hate the game, why get so pissed if it's gone? Toxic relationships seem necessary when you're in one, but once you're out, it's like a breath of fresh air.

Me, I'm still happy with my MWO girlfriend. I had a huge crush on her before we started dating. I spend a little money on her, she makes me happy. She's a cheap date. But if she decides the relationship isn't mutually beneficial, I'm okay with that. And if I make that decision, she'll be too (because she's only software). I'll be sad. I might comfort myself with ebay copies of MW4. But I'll cope with it.

[Dimento Graven]

chewie, 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???

Not only cpu/mem sucking, but also the Steam client seems to suck over 10% of my bandwidth just sitting there.

My pings go from in the 80/90's to 60's when I kill that POS...

Yeah, the 'smart' player will avoid the 'Steam' overhead and just play 'native'...

[PFC Carsten]

Maybe it's because we actually care and would love for MWO to prosper, but seeing that all PGI does is doing Mech-Pack after Mech-Pack with a little XML-tweaking in between while not delivering on core-gameplay makes us all sad-faced Mechwarriors.

[Armorine]

is this another one of those threads?? yeah looks like another one of those threads

[Odanan]

Mystere, on 26 February 2016 - 02:35 PM, said:

And yet their games' populations seem to suggest they are doing something right compared to PGI.

Are you really comparing WW2 with Battletech? How many people out there could guess the name of this:

compared to how many people could guess the name of this:

?!?!?

WW2 has a huge following. Battletech is only a minor IP in a big sea of sci-fi franchises.

But I'm glad this is not a game played by many hundreds of thousands of people. If it was a game for the masses, it wouldn't be Battletech at all.

PS: some people work hard to put MWO down, in the hopes PGI abandon it and a huge company will make a MW4-type game (with grand singleplayer campaign). Guess what? As the market is now, no big game developer would ever make a Mechwarrior game with full campaign! Even DICE did not dare to spend that much money by making a campaign in Battlefront. And that's for a Star Wars game!

Only a small company, made of Battletech fans like PGI, would do a Mechwarrior game in this century. If you have any hope for a MW singleplayer game, support PGI.

[SideWinderBLN]

Some people asked for why MWO is not retaining those people who join via steam.

Here's my completely anecdotal personal history:

I came in because of the Steam release because the game had completely dropped of my radar around the time the kickstarter finished. I tried it and was very, very happy with it.

I tried to get my usual suspects of multiplayer playing friends together. Total of 8 people. One of them already had the game from way back when. Him and me are on about 10 hours a week now and have both sunk some money into the game since Christmas.

Everybody else:
- some outright don't like Big-Stompy-Robot Games and hence didn't even try. (2 of the 7 potential players)
- some tried it but were put of by the learning curve for basic controls (3 of the 7)
- one was overwhelmed and put of by the very prospect of learning curve of the keyboard bindings for about a dozen regularly used functions

So .. how would this look in the steam statistics:
5 new owners
5 started playing
4 played for more than a day
After two weeks there was only 1 left

And nothing of this has anything to do with the much touted shortcomings but rather with pretty essential basic game concepts that none of you would ever start to question.

And yet the game is now at +2 players for the forseeable future.

[Khosumi]

Oncoshi, on 26 February 2016 - 12:39 PM, said:

World of tanks is the same game type but they have 500000 players. Its not about the niche but about the quality of a game.
http://wotlabs.net/


With bad matchmaking, bad balance and beginners unfriendly gamestyle u cant win new players for your game.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH. Also, HAHHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

WoT has no matchmaker, it only throws tanks around of around the same weight, the balance is through the god damn roof (Tier 6 arty can 1 shot any tanks on the field by doing 900 damage to tanks with just over that amount of health, > IF < you are a heavy, anything else gets 1 shot), the WoT mechanics are AAAAAAASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS. My win rate is well over 50%, I know what I'm talking about. Invisible tanks 200m away from you. Behind nothing. Because camo. Spotting is a mess. Gold rounds makes armor worthless.

The amount of mods this game holds can and will give other players a clear cut advantage and it is shown nowhere but you have to search for them. Also, the community is more toxic than Chernobyl. Trust me on that. It's pure garbage.

That being said, what makes MWO so different from WoT in terms of balance and quality? As far as I'm concerned, the balance in MWO isn't stellar either and offers a MUCH better team oriented experience. You also don't have to grind for your entire mech once you buy it.

The difference is WoT does aggressive advertising, it's bloody EVERYWHERE. I merely see MWO here and there. Also, we're talking about badass tanks compared to a tabletop game young people never heard of, so it's mostly 30+ years old playing. Feel free to disagree with me, but this game has a much more mature and older audience than most games, simply due to the fact Battletech and Mechwarrior titles are very old and haven't gotten modern or any recent games, aside from MWO, so of course the population will be small. It is in fact about how niche the game is. Look at Steel beasts. It's a tank game, but since it's so hardcore sim, not many people know about it.

Edited by Ethak, 26 February 2016 - 04:48 PM.

[Exilyth]

I actually found out that MW:O is on steam when it showed up in my queue.
Went and uninstalled MW:O, installed via steam and got back into the game.

Now I'm one of them numbers on that steam graph.

[Oncoshi]

The whole point of this post is not the shrinking player base but the discussion WHY there are so few new people out there who are interested in MWO / like MWO / know about MWO and WHY so many of the new steam players already left.

There must be reasons (maybe because the game is not good enough?).

There are enough other examples where games after steam release had a growing population because the new player showed their buddys how cool the new game is.

Many of the people i showed MWO had enough of it after we dropped in a small group and got stomped by10 or 12 stacks of enemys. They had no fun at all. This is just one of many examples where u cant just ask somone to join for some fun rounds TOGETHER if you dont play with 8 or more people.

Edited by Oncoshi, 26 February 2016 - 04:09 PM.