56 replies to this topic

[tokumboh]

I was watching a Kanajashi's video on the PTS and it got me thinking how many of us actually play the game? So I went through the overall leaderboad and got to the end for this season at i is 60204.

Now I am not sure about the economics of gaming. but that for me was a surprise. I would have hoped that it was past 100K people, but we are where we are and that led me to thinking a couple of things

1. Are PGI trying to do too much

Essentially PGI os trying to create FW as a massive strategic battlefield of planet where competitive units strive for supremacy and a fast fix of QP games for those that are either not very good , socialable, competitive, don't have the time or a combination of these,

2. For such a small community does those that shout loudest get the goodies.

it is clear there is a very vocal community but as compared to something like oveerwatch it is clear that whilst the community can steer the company's direction it cannot lead it. which is all well and good since for example Overwatch's equivalent to PTS garners not more than 2% of the player base. Now having tried the PTS myself I would have thought at most 1000 people would have tried the server. it would be interesting if PGI furnished the numbers.


which leads me to as the question given the fact that we do not have the numbers should we not think of combining the FW and QP into a single system. and make competitive play competitive play and not FW. The basis of the game is that yu can chose a clan or a house and fight over planets. The depth in terms of the matches could be provided by something closer to how MW-LL works with a bigger map bases with repair and rearm which need to be won and the need to take over a base. The maps could be more open and much larger with less choke points and the numbers could be higher 24 v 24 making it easier for the match maker. For those that play in groups it would be more immersive since taking a base may bring huge rewards and scouting would become a thing and use of LRM will also be better it is would make sense in terms of indirect long range fire.

I believe the PSR is rubbish essentially it does not reward good players by moving them up a tier. What you need is an ELO style system based on the match score the higher your match score the better your tier until reach a plateau and what you will find is that we will have some people that will always be Tier 5 and some that will always be Tier 1.

Now I do not believe that the idea is to separate tier 1 form Tier 5s indeed the current matchmaker has them mixing because at mopst times there isn't enough players to do that separation but at least we will understand what we are trying to achieve.

I feel that if we had that then people can join a clan or house for a month and fight battles either in solo queue or group queue. Now the argument of whether you have spawns or not is one we should have i personally think not but the expanse of the maps should allow scouts to actually scout and we should move the reward system to be about objectives rather than just kills and damage.

We do not it seems have enough numbers for a game that attempts to split things up too much and I don't think PGI has the resource to make two games out of MWO. Would it not be bette rto make a single game which bring all sides together.

[Palor]

I would of guessed MWO's active population around 20k, 60k is much better than what i figured.

In most communities the vocal minority get noticed and catered too, that is common.

[Mister Blastman]

Names only show up if they have played a game in the season you're looking at. There are plenty of folks like myself who haven't played in a few months.

[Tyler Valentine]

Mister Blastman, on 19 February 2017 - 10:50 AM, said:

Names only show up if they have played a game in the season you're looking at. There are plenty of folks like myself who haven't played in a few months.

There's also plenty of alt accounts so players show up more than once. Hard to get an accurate measure this way.

[WolvesX]

Probably Not, on 19 February 2017 - 11:10 AM, said:

In regards to PGI supposedly catering to the vocal minority: How are PGI supposed to listen to a supposed majority IF THEY DON'T SPEAK UP?

Yup.

[FupDup]

Probably Not, on 19 February 2017 - 11:10 AM, said:

In regards to PGI supposedly catering to the vocal minority: How are PGI supposed to listen to a supposed majority IF THEY DON'T SPEAK UP?

PGI never thought of that problem when they decided to only listen to the Silent Majority™.

[Deathlike]

FupDup, on 19 February 2017 - 11:18 AM, said:

PGI never thought of that problem when they decided to only listen to the Silent Majority™.

I always felt they were voices, emanating from the Dartboard and/or Nerfbat.

The Voices in our Balance Overlord's Head said:

Nerf the MGs. The 6 MG Spider is too much!
Nerf MLs. 3 second Jenners violate Atlas backs!
Nerf Scats. Poop is another name for Scat after all!
Nerf Flamers. We can BBQ with tiny matches!
Buff MLXes. That CUAC2 build needs all the help it can get!

You see... that is the genesis of MWO balance in a nutshell.

[Sunstruck]

Theres no way its 60K its more like half that, a lot of people have multiple accounts, one for Clan one for IS.

[C E Dwyer]

Don't know where you plucked that number from, last time I looked at the leader board there were slightly more than 28,000 people with 10 or more games under their belt.

That was this week btw, my daughters playing again and is T4 and having to learn all over again.

So it was easier to use her as a base and click back, than myself.

gone up to 30,127 since tuesday

Edited by Cathy, 19 February 2017 - 12:50 PM.

[Mystere]

60,000 is called "an OK day" in War Thunder.

[Bud Crue]

Cathy, on 19 February 2017 - 12:43 PM, said:

Don't know where you plucked that number from, last time I looked at the leader board there were slightly more than 28,000 people with 10 or more games under their belt.

That was this week btw, my daughters playing again and is T4 and having to learn all over again.

So it was easier to use her as a base and click back, than myself.

gone up to 30,127 since tuesday

Be it the OP's 60K+ or 30K, I'll tell ya that regardless of the actual number apparently only a few hundred of em are playing group queue on a Saturday night during North American prime time. We played maybe a dozen matches and had GROG with or against us on 7 of em. 228 on 4 of em. SA on three of them.

I gotta think if we really had 30K-60K players I would see more variety of teams on a given evening of play; but I don't. Last night was not unusual in any way: the same maybe half dozen teams with a few random unaffiliated folks...over and over and over. We may have 60K or 30K or whatever, but I'll be damned if I have ever seen more than about 1000 of em...tops.

[PhoenixFire55]

60k unique accounts. Probably about 20-30k actual players. No more than 5k actually active players (i.e. more than a couple drops a day). 5k is a sad number for a multiplayer game, or any game tbh ...

[tokumboh]

Bud Crue, on 19 February 2017 - 01:35 PM, said:

Be it the OP's 60K+ or 30K, I'll tell ya that regardless of the actual number apparently only a few hundred of em are playing group queue on a Saturday night during North American prime time. We played maybe a dozen matches and had GROG with or against us on 7 of em. 228 on 4 of em. SA on three of them. I gotta think if we really had 30K-60K players I would see more variety of teams on a given evening of play; but I don't. Last night was not unusual in any way: the same maybe half dozen teams with a few random unaffiliated folks...over and over and over. We may have 60K or 30K or whatever, but I'll be damned if I have ever seen more than about 1000 of em...tops.

All I did was look at the leaderbard stat and work down the pages until the end I accept it is not scientific but it does say who played at least once this season.

Now the 60204 is the number in the overall leaderboard

https://mwomercs.com...age=3010&type=0

Your point about how many people are actually playing at any one time is a fair one if the world population that played at least once in a month is 60K and I play a few hours a week and am at 22K for the number of games, I have played just over 50 games this season, then I can see there being less than 1000 players at any one time playing and on a good day we may get 10000. Of interest I looked at the top 1000 players by number of matches and that person in 1001 place has played nearly 500 games so around about 25 games per day compared to my 2.5 per day and over 10000 have played 100 matches or more

My point that you have kind of reinforced is that the community is too small and that we need a better method of bring it together and at the moment we have too many ways to split it up that was my point. The exact number as you say don't really matter but I think it is hurting the game and it is often the pointing to many of there problems for PGI that we are often revisiting the same issues over and over again rather than looking at new features of game play. There seems to be a love of the minutiae rather than what are you trying to do with the game. The game itself is so damage and kill orientated that it will not promote variety of builds and the maps are such that they mostly have same elements and no variety of objectives

So I feel that the game should either abandon FW or QP or harmonise the two such that they are one game mode set. Which is why I proposed something closer to Living legends where you have something that is more immersive and with objectives to as well as the whole kill and damage thing. As I am tier 4, playing a light make less sense since I get better match score and rewards as a heavy because of damage and kills and KMDD if I scout it really does not make you a lot of money or XP and that is one of the issues with variety. It means that many light mechs have bigger alphas than some heavies to make them viable in game.

Now if the player base is so small and yet diverse and only the best players get to call the shots it would tend to be in favour of the best players. I would have thought that PGI have figures on what they want to do. They have to monetise the game some how to pay the bills.
There are lots of options in terms of monetising the game, we could go with the F2P model or a subscription model and that may move the game from being mech orientated to game mode orientated for a while.

[DAYLEET]

How many of those only did the ten game required for the events?

Theres between 400 and 1.8k players online at any given time. I don't care how many are on the leaderboard, the fact is very few people are online at any given time.

There will be a surge of player when the xp system hit. Cant wait to see how it will look a month after.

Edited by DAYLEET, 20 February 2017 - 02:02 AM.

[Jehofi]

Sunstruck, on 19 February 2017 - 12:38 PM, said:

Theres no way its 60K its more like half that, a lot of people have multiple accounts, one for Clan one for IS.

Why are you playing the guessing game?

Just use the information that is available:
http://i.imgur.com/PhpXDca.png
https://www.reddit.c...player_numbers/

Seriously im sick an tired of people being to lazy to search for valid data and if they get it presented not understanding statistics.
This is not about what YOU think!

[Alistair Winter]

We've known for at least 4 months that the MWO population is likely somewhere around ~50,000. As others have mentioned, many people are using alt accounts.

50,000 is pretty good, considering this is a 5 year old niche game. It's also clearly relatively stable, the numbers aren't dropping fast.

The sky doesn't appear to be falling down.

[SQW]

Jehofi, on 20 February 2017 - 02:05 AM, said:

Seriously im sick an tired of people being to lazy to search for valid data and if they get it presented not understanding statistics.
This is not about what YOU think!

Not sure what OP was smoking but PGI hasn't seen 60K for at least 2 years - even the link OP provided doesn't work.

I did a quick calculation back in 2015 using steam's unique player number plus a bit of inference and showed player number is about 30-40k. Since then, player based has drop a few more percentages so it should be just over 30k atm - something the new leader board just proved.

Anyway, if you are a investor, you don't look at the current number - it's the future growth that shows the health of a company. PGI/MWO has been losing players consistently year-on-year for at least 3 years and soon, the all-important whales will start migrating too. Mechcon pretty much fizzled in terms of bringing in new blood and while MW5 got a bit of buzz but nobody is willing to bet the house on PGI's competence so.... Heck, sharing artwork with HBS's Battletech probably did more to promote MWO than anything PGI has ever done for their own game.

There are enough people to keep the lights on and pay the bills but it's been abundantly clear for years MWO is probably close to life-support rather than moving towards a brighter future. The halt in map creation, the half-arsed FW features and the delay in a half-baked skill tree implementation just shows there wouldn't be any major improvement/features coming to MWO.

MW5 will be PGI's 'last hurrah' at making some decent money out of their licence. My advice: don't spend any real money in MWO unless you feel the game in its current form is everything you've wanted in mechwarrior.

[Vellron2005]

Yeah, that 60K figure seems wildly exaggerated to me.. PGI should REALLY invest in marketing..

[DovisKhan]

If that was 60k unique users that would be a massive number, like a new AAA title size number. After several years it's even more impressive.


Google Call of Duty

http://steamcharts.c...?q=call+of+duty


MWO is considerably more popular (much higher player base), even though it has nowhere near the publicity

[SQW]

DovisKhan, on 20 February 2017 - 02:37 AM, said:

If that was 60k unique users that would be a massive number, like a new AAA title size number. After several years it's even more impressive.


Google Call of Duty

http://steamcharts.c...?q=call+of+duty


MWO is considerably more popular (much higher player base), even though it has nowhere near the publicity

Apple and oranges.

1. COD is a console powerhouse - it's never been that popular on PC.

2. COD/Battlefield are annualized releases. They are expected to lose majority of their players quickly so people would actually buy the next year's title.

3. COD makes its money upfront from every one of the players. MWO needs a far bigger player base to have a sustained income since only 2-5% of f2p gamers actually spend money.

4. You need to look at other f2p games to see what is a healthy player base vs studio size/expense ratio and where PGI sits. Look at DOTA 2's player base and it's earning and do a ratio back onto MWO's numbers and you'll get a better idea if PGI is swimming in money or just doing okay.

5. 30k is a small number for f2p no matter how you cut it. MWO is lucky it has the mechwarrior licence and decade of fan nostalgia to cash in on.