113 replies to this topic

[Tarl Cabot]

BlaizerP, on 02 December 2020 - 11:55 PM, said:

I agree completely, dropping group size to 2 would be an acceptable compromise, in the short term.

Groups of 2 or 3 but only one mech per weight class, then matching weight class per team. Right now, even a 2-man can field 2 Urbies or 2 Mist Lynx or 2 Jenner to 2 Madcat II or 2 Cyclops or 2 Stalkers. With each group forced to spread out in weight classes reduce issues with weight class matchup. Before the Soup queue was introduced that was how that portion of the MM worked for the Solo queue.

[Nearly Dead]

Groups belong with groups. You will never get growth thru attracting and retaining new players as long as premades are dropping in the "solo" queue.

The key problem is you need a large player base to have a good game experience, but the game experience currently repels players and prevents growth. Catch 22.

It might make sense to split the queues while really making an effort to promote the game, improve the new player experience, generate some buzz with new maps, mechs, adjust modes and start points etc. in the hope of growing the population, and then try and make it up to all the group players that they would piss off by going back to a separate (long wait) group queue once the player base grew enough. If they could grow the population enough group queue would be viable as well as solo queue. And you could even have functional match making again with proper lances and mech balance.

If they split the queues and put the match maker back to sanity I would at least try playing again.

[GARION26]

The player population has been dropping for many years prior to the group merge.

If anything can be said about the current game status (group que merge, reset PSR) the trend has been for increasing total number of players in the game and more new players in the game. I suspect those changes may not be statistically significant changes but the trend appears to be there, and there is no argument that those same player metrics were definitely dropping prior to recent changes.

You can look at the data yourself:
https://leaderboard.isengrim.org/stats

Edited by GARION26, 03 December 2020 - 07:32 AM.

[John Bronco]

Yes, everything is due to game changes and not the ebb and flow of the global pandemic lol

[Anomalocaris]

Monkey Lover, on 02 December 2020 - 10:05 PM, said:

You understand group q died correct? This is only 2 more 4 mans than 8v8 but still didn't work.

How many team games did you play when it was 8v8? Because I know we ended nights early and went to sync dropping towards the end when we couldn't find matches.

People will not sit in q for 20 minutes when they can just sync drop.

Well which is it? If you've got groups in every soup queue drop right now then there are clearly enough players. Or is it like the old days when there weren't enough players for an 8v8 match? You can't have both. The only edge case would be wrong sized groups not allowing the MM to easily construct groups of 8, which limiting to groups of 2 or 4 would take care of.

[Anomalocaris]

GARION26, on 03 December 2020 - 07:30 AM, said:

The player population has been dropping for many years prior to the group merge.

If anything can be said about the current game status (group que merge, reset PSR) the trend has been for increasing total number of players in the game and more new players in the game. I suspect those changes may not be statistically significant changes but the trend appears to be there, and there is no argument that those same player metrics were definitely dropping prior to recent changes.

You can look at the data yourself:
https://leaderboard.isengrim.org/stats

Lol, you clearly didn't match up events with the chart. At the start of the wuflu lockdowns player base growth was dramatic. March and April saw substantial growth, and that was prior to PGI mucking about with anything. Come May we had the queue merge and growth continued at the same pace (the slope of the line is almost identical). But once people got a taste of soup queue, despite ongoing pandemic issues, player base started to drop. We got a slight boost during PSR reset (people hoping for better things?) and then it dropped again.

We've only seen a recent increase again, which I attribute to PGI getting everyone's hopes up about starting development on the game again. Now that the truth has come out (a ploy to help with the sale of the company), numbers are already dropping again according to steam charts.

You can attempt to argue about the causality of those growth numbers, but what you can't argue is that the growth started well before the major changes and players numbers have fluctuated dramatically since PGI implemented them. At best you can say no impact IMO. But given that PGI provided objective data that the merge reduced match quality, I say negative impact is pretty clear.

[GARION26]

Agreed there are multiple issues that could contribute to what we are seeing now. Causality is unclear and I agree you could try and pin specific changes to specific seasons on the graph to try and figure out how they might have effected things - but likely at any given time point multiple changes are effecting player base in multiple directions.

But fundamentally we aren't seeing a drop in players/new players now. We're seeing an increase with the game state as it is.


Is some of that pandemic free time- absolutely.

Were we seeing a drop prior to roughly spring 2020 - absolutely.

What this game was doing prior to the pandemic (no combined Que, no PSR reset) was definitively not working to maintain even a steady state player base. We are doing better now - you certainly can't point at player base size evidence that the PGI initiated changes in the last few months have dropped those player base size metrics.

Edited by GARION26, 03 December 2020 - 08:47 AM.

[D A T A]

mommy, please, stop people from playing as a group in a game that is DESIGNED on groups and collaboration between players......because i suck and i want the game to be adapted to me rather than getting better and improving like a normal person would do.

[RickySpanish]

D A T A, on 03 December 2020 - 09:58 AM, said:

mommy, please, stop people from playing as a group in a game that is DESIGNED on groups and collaboration between players......because i suck and i want the game to be adapted to me rather than getting better and improving like a normal person would do.

Haven't you heard? Teamplay is SO 90s. The modern gamer will do everything in their power to play, yet NOT interact, with other players. This is the age of the Massively Single-player Online Game. Ask players to organize themselves? No. They'd rather hug their unicorn blankets and cat ears and cry and moan until someone else fixes the problem.

Edited by RickySpanish, 03 December 2020 - 10:08 AM.

[Kroete]

D A T A, on 03 December 2020 - 09:58 AM, said:

because i suck and i want the game to be adapted to me rather than getting better and improving like a normal person would do.

So tell me, who sucks more, the ones that whined enough about big bad groups in the groupqueue until they got the option to farm solo pugs or the ones that just wanted to pug play on a even playground with no groups involved?

In your words:
To bad for groupplay, not good enough for solo pug play!
So the game adapted to an easy farming groud for groups.

Edited by Kroete, 03 December 2020 - 11:13 AM.

[Nightbird]

The PSR and Matchmaker is designed to benefit groups of skilled players. It doesn't rate their skill as highly as it should, so they will repeatedly be put against lesser skilled pugs and teams to farm.

[Anomalocaris]

D A T A, on 03 December 2020 - 09:58 AM, said:

mommy, please, stop people from playing as a group in a game that is DESIGNED on groups and collaboration between players......because i suck and i want the game to be adapted to me rather than getting better and improving like a normal person would do.

Wow, looks like Git Gud disease really messes up one's reading comprehension....

Groups screw up the matchmaker. That's been clear since the queues were merged because group skill isn't properly being taken into account when making teams. Above or below average, they make matchmaking worse. And I know you are aware of this, which means you're shilling for a downgraded game. Why?

Besides, the population clearly preferred dropping solo because its the only queue that didn't cough up a death rattle long ago.

The attempts by soup queue enthusiasts to shame people into supporting that mess are pathetic.

[Anomalocaris]

GARION26, on 03 December 2020 - 08:46 AM, said:

of that pandemic free time- absolutely.

Were we seeing a drop prior to roughly spring 2020 - absolutely.

What this game was doing prior to the pandemic (no combined Que, no PSR reset) was definitively not working to maintain even a steady state player base. We are doing better now - you certainly can't point at player base size evidence that the PGI initiated changes in the last few months have dropped those player base size metrics.

I can point out that we dropped pretty steadily the month after soup queue introduction, with a slight blip for PSR reset. We dropped 10% a month for 3 out of 4 months after soup queue was created. Despite the fact that the world was still in lockdowns. That drop reversed itself when PGI announced they were going to take another look at MWO and asked for community input.

Now that the truth about that is out, we're down again for the month. We'll have to wait and see if that holds. But while I cannot prove causation, the timing is very interesting. And even with the MWO "revamped" spike in Oct/Nov, we're still no better off than we were in May, despite all the "improvements" like soup queue and PSR reset.

I leave it for the reader to draw their own conclusions.

[Nightbird]

Anomalocaris, on 03 December 2020 - 01:23 PM, said:

I can point out that we dropped pretty steadily the month after soup queue introduction, with a slight blip for PSR reset. We dropped 10% a month for 3 out of 4 months after soup queue was created. Despite the fact that the world was still in lockdowns. That drop reversed itself when PGI announced they were going to take another look at MWO and asked for community input.

Now that the truth about that is out, we're down again for the month. We'll have to wait and see if that holds. But while I cannot prove causation, the timing is very interesting. And even with the MWO "revamped" spike in Oct/Nov, we're still no better off than we were in May, despite all the "improvements" like soup queue and PSR reset.

I leave it for the reader to draw their own conclusions.

https://www.bls.gov/...oyment-rate.htm

US unemployment going down means players going down. Also, during the months of Oct, Nov, Europe went into a second lockdown which means more players. There's always many factors going into pop.

[Nearly Dead]

We used to have a saying at work. "If I have the money, I don't have the time, if I have the time, I don't have the money". If people are laid off they will look for free or cheap games to play. But if they are working they have the money to buy premium time, mechs, skill points etc. I think it kind of levels out more than people think.

Dumping groups into solo was bad enough in and of itself, but in order to do it they completely threw out any attempt to put together teams with appropriate mechs, put the right mechs in the right lances or even balance the teams by something as simple as gross tonnage.

And now PGI is under the gun with a big bonus deadline. There are two ways to improve return on net assets. One is to improve how much money you make for the same asset dollars, the other is to reduce assets. If you have to do it quickly in order to hit some target amount, 99% of managers will cut heads. I have no confidence that MWO will even exist by summer.

[Anomalocaris]

Nightbird, on 03 December 2020 - 01:37 PM, said:

https://www.bls.gov/...oyment-rate.htm

US unemployment going down means players going down. Also, during the months of Oct, Nov, Europe went into a second lockdown which means more players. There's always many factors going into pop.

Indeed. But then you need to analyze who gets counted in unemployment. You only stay on the rolls so long then you drop off even if you're still unemployed. Then there is the work at home switch.

In any event, Covid gave a real nice spike to video game companies. But PGI's ups and downs match up very well with their game changes and prize events.

[GARION26]

Anomalocaris, on 03 December 2020 - 01:23 PM, said:

I can point out that we dropped pretty steadily the month after soup queue introduction, with a slight blip for PSR reset. We dropped 10% a month for 3 out of 4 months after soup queue was created. Despite the fact that the world was still in lockdowns. That drop reversed itself when PGI announced they were going to take another look at MWO and asked for community input.

Now that the truth about that is out, we're down again for the month. We'll have to wait and see if that holds. But while I cannot prove causation, the timing is very interesting. And even with the MWO "revamped" spike in Oct/Nov, we're still no better off than we were in May, despite all the "improvements" like soup queue and PSR reset.

I leave it for the reader to draw their own conclusions.

I'm wondering if we're looking at the data somewhat differently - last data point for me on both new players and total players is up and that's the time period of November2020 which is almost entirely pre acquisition annoucment.

While there's a drop after July because I don't know if the individual month to month changes are statistically significant I'm eyeball the overall trend vs the best fit line - I think the game is doing better post season 45.

But I agree you could look at July, August, September and see a decline in total players.

Edited by GARION26, 04 December 2020 - 07:16 AM.

[CFC Conky]

GARION26, on 04 December 2020 - 04:42 AM, said:

I'm wondering if we're looking at the data somewhat differently - last data point for me on both new players and total players is up and that's the time period of November2020 which is almost entirely pre acquisition annoucment.

While there's a drop after July because I don't know if the individual month to month changes are statistically significant I'm eyeball the overall trend vs the best fit line - I think the game is doing better post season 45.

But I agree you could look at July, August, September and see a decline in total players.

Maybe people were just playing outside during those months, the weather was pretty nice, at least in my neck of the woods.

Good hunting,
CFC Conky

[Anomalocaris]

GARION26, on 04 December 2020 - 04:42 AM, said:

I'm wondering if we're looking at the data somewhat differently - last data point for me on both new players and total players is up and that's the time period of November2020 which is almost entirely pre acquisition annoucment.

While there's a drop after July because I don't know if the individual month to month changes are statistically significant I'm eyeball the overall trend vs the best fit line - I think the game is doing better post season 45.

But I agree you could look at July, August, September and see a decline in total players.

look at steam charts for more granular data

[Dialectic]

My 2 cents, dropping solo into a quickplay and fighting against 3 annihilators on the other team grouped up is lots of fun.... :/