No, elite is not for everyone. Keep in mind that the accept button to start a que is allready a to big challenge for manny players. Elite should be the challenged version for skilled players.
This game is not an auto reward model. People que for the path of least resistance, the all marks boxes in alerts also made most good and\or fun ques obsolete or less quick to start.
If people want the elite rep stuff, and never ran the normal version, they shouldnt start right away in elite.
Its not all because of just a season change alone, players also contribute in dead ques:
People go for easy rewards, thats why the ques don't fill up.
Also those annoying screamers who invest more time in cursing and screaming on people instea of learning the objectives keep players on normal (just add them auto to ignore list, no TRIBBLE for you, and they stay with their own anger)
People stop doing ques when reps are maxed
People want to register for ques which start the quickest or who have several in them, also keeping the regged numbers low for other ques. And keeping the non starters as non starters.
And no, i don't run everything elite. only the fun ones, and the ones ive learned. Others i start on normal and will try advanced later on.
Ques should have a learning curve, and should be fun. Even when u don't need the marks annymore. If you join a sportsteam, you don't get a position in first team also cause you just play the game (que) for the first time, you (l)earn your way to join the elite/league.
If everyone just joins elite cause its dead, it will be alive. Untill people quit, because they never complete the que. And those players quit elite or sto for good.
Learn the ques with some friends, and have fun.
"Reports of our depression are vastly exaggerated." "Anyaway, we don't often see a sense of humor in Section 31."
The problem with MMO PVE/Raid type 'victory conditions' is their overall stupidity and lack of 'reality' to the type of orders you will EVER get from 'High Command'. I mean really, you must destroy all three Dreadnoughts within one minute of each other, you cannot allow even one percent of healing on that generator, you must destroy x before y, etc.
'But to be logical is not to be right', and 'nothing' on God's earth could ever 'make it' right!'
Judge Dan Haywood
'As l speak now, the words are forming in my head.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
Firstly, the newbies: You're not noobs automatically, yet you need to improve your gameplay experience and fine tune your build even after putting a ship or a captain together and reaching level 60 and splitting a few traits, specialization points around.
Generally speaking : You need to learn. Catch via playing Elite Queues and following DIRECTIONS. It helps alot in finding out what you need to make and where you can cut-corners and get the most out of your build/actions.
DPS-wise: Time will tell and you got plenty of places to inspire yourself from. Don't feel overwhelmed or disarmed. Reaching a 10-30k parse is more than reachable. And it's a great number to have, as a casual user.
Now, I'm gonna address the other class, that usually hits 50k+ and has some strong grasp of the game itself.
You should be helping newbies to learn how to use their builds and carry them to a certain extent. You're totally a product of carrying, especially to this point. This is a team-game and each and everyone of us has been carried to an extent in our STO experience. Maybe help out with some freebies, if your EC can. Throw in some Plasmonic Leeches or some space/ship traits to help people out.
As following your general consensus and the SCM / CLR statistics, I rate on an average on all of my toons as a 50-100k dps user. That means more or less that I've spiked the top 10% in the PVE area, at least DPS-wise. People who rank at least here or higher should learn to help and carry people around.
Advise and carry people to an extent. Make it an enjoyable experience, especially now, when the game is more playable than ever.
Classes are balanced way more than before for pve and everything is playable as f**k with so many possibilities to exploit and play. Make the most of it!
Sorry, no. I won't queue for elites. That's for me fleet content. It is actually fun and a reward in itself if you can complete the queue with some newbies.
The difference is people speak to each other, will give pointers in a respectfull way instead of typing l2p noob in chat before they leave the group.
Unbfortunately many fleets are dead. And for a good part this is due to those silly DPS channels.
STO is a bit like a conveyor belt where at the bottom are new players wanting to learn to play and at the top are the top end 10% of players who can handle the elite maps. Now there needs to be a steady stream of new players being fed onto that belt and slowly working their way up to the top end (or getting off where they are content) because there are always players disappearing from the top end and all along the belt due to losing interest and leaving the game. So the players working their way up can keep at it and gradually improve to reach a level they are happy with. And many of the top players may choose to help them on the way, pulling them along faster or helping them walk along that belt faster under their own power. But, there are also some top players who will happily sit in the middle of that belt and yell/TRIBBLE/whine at the new players coming up; even demanding they get off and stay away from the top end. They are like a troll throwing players off that belt just to protect their own elite kingdom. That sort of thing can be avoided and should be. Top players should be helping players work their way up that conveyor belt, and you know why? Because if players stop coming up along that belt then the top end will eventually dry up. Players leave over time so new ones must be encouraged, without new players being helped and encouraged the game dies, simple as that.
So getting people into queues to populate them and breathe life into the game should be in everyone’s interest, even if it means playing with newbies or failing occasionally. Without people playing, nobody is moving along that conveyor and the game is getting more and more dead.
So getting people into queues to populate them and breathe life into the game should be in everyone’s interest, even if it means playing with newbies or failing occasionally. Without people playing, nobody is moving along that conveyor and the game is getting more and more dead.
And that's what fleets were good at. Then the DPS channels became a thing.
problem is, that if there is a fail condition in said queue that whole plan falls apart and it is an exercise of frustration to play the game.
Thx, but no thx...if you want to do elite queues, just join a freaking dps channel, it ain't that hard to find people to do elites there anyway. Why queue up for an elite if you are quite likely to fail the whole objective and not just the optionals?
Also, you are basically asking people to do content they'd probably won't be able to enjoy due to perma death or failure of the mission.
If no fail conditions are attached, yes why not...but it would still be an unenjoyable experience for a lot of players to do content above their skill-level.
The problem with MMO PVE/Raid type 'victory conditions' is their overall stupidity and lack of 'reality' to the type of orders you will EVER get from 'High Command'. I mean really, you must destroy all three Dreadnoughts within one minute of each other, you cannot allow even one percent of healing on that generator, you must destroy x before y, etc.
Despite STO spoonfeeding absurdly detailed instructions all the time, not everything in the mission is actually controlled by "high command."
The ISA generators-can't-be-healed is a stupid objective. But then it was only ever designed to be a meaningless extra cookie points optional that got elevated to a real mission objective because Cryptic was too lazy to come up with a better one. Most of the fail condtions that actually got designed as fail conditions rather than elevated from cookie point objectives make perfect sense.
If you must destroy three dreadnoughts and two of them will escape in 1 minute after the first one dies, you must naturally destroy them all within 1 minute or they won't be around for you to destroy anymore. If X is giving Y infinite HP regen, you obviously must kill X before it's possible to kill Y. You must kill an enemy in time, before it escapes or uses it's universe-destroying superweapon, etc, etc...
If we're talking about really unrealistic mission design, it's all the newfangled autowin missions. You fluff around doing whatever you want for 10 minutes or something and then the enemies apparently get bored and leave. Never mind everything on the map died including you a couple dozen times and you failed all the objectives, that was all optional. Congratulations, a War Hero is You!
That is still warped, because most players will never show up in that statistic.
A Statistically significant number of the player base is in that chart. So makes the chart statistically accurate for this discussion.
No, because the selection is biased.
but your guts aren't or what?
It isn't guts, it is basic logic. ISA is played by three types of people: 1. Some of the people who need Omega marks (a rather small number, because most players have the reputation finished, the gear isn't that attractive, and Red Alerts give them, too), 2. people who play it for the rewards or the fun a higher number than the first, but still quite low, because CCA is better in terms of rewards, and variety adds more to the fun of any non-mind-numbed player) 3. people who care for their DPS. The latter group will logically be the largest, especially when someone is present who parses (after all, at least 20% of the people on the graph will ALWAYS be DPSers, others won't upload the data anyway; and that is the lower boundary for DPSers to warp the statistic).
Say you have 1 100k-DPSers who plays along with 4 1.5k-DPSers. According to each and every of his uploads, 20% of the playerbase will do 100k DPS. You don't see how that warps the statistic?
Therefore, the above chart must inevitably show too high numbers. How much too high? I can't say. But it is fair to assume that the "average STO captain" is way below the above numbers in their DPS.
yes, according to your opinion...don't equate your opinion to "basic logic", just because it makes sense to you.
according to my logic for instance, in every ISA queue I join there is 1 parser (sometimes 2, since I parse almost always) and mostly 4 people that seem to not give a TRIBBLE about DPS at all.
Having said that, now my "basic logic" somewhat contradicts your "basic logic"...so wouldn't you agree that it ain't basic logic at all, but simply opinion based on subjective observation, where as the data in the graph is actually the only objective source of info available?
plz, be reasonable, you can't possible be that arrogant to assume your opinion is better than everybody elses.
It's based on the 8,337 unique players that were on the table at the time of pulling the data.
Regardless if they're parsing or not, if anyone on the team does and hits upload, they all go up there.
ISA has been one of the few queues always popping over the years, Borticus even tweeted that it was one of the top 5 queues, so I'd say the data gives us a good idea of what performance level the playerbase is at.
That is still warped, because most players will never show up in that statistic.
A Statistically significant number of the player base is in that chart. So makes the chart statistically accurate for this discussion.
No, because the selection is biased.
Biased only to those that play ISA. The system in which that data is pulled is not strictly of DPS League players. But of any player that got recorded using that software in that specific Queue. Non DPSers will be recorded in that effort. And the number of non-DPSers recorded is significantly large enough to be statistically relavent and be considered statistically accurate representation of the entire player base.
I'm sorry...but the average STO player does not do 15-30k DPS. The average person on a DPS channel maybe.
That data was from SCM pre-S13, so the numbers may be a bit off right now. Anyone in an ISA run with someone parsing that uploads will be uploaded if they meet the requirements. This means the DPS tables have quite a bit of data on players that don't participate in the DPS channels.
Now, looking at the data again, we have less than half the parses since S13 than we did between S12 and S13.
This is the current distribution of DPS based on the current SCM table.
Top .2%: >200k DPS
Top 1%: >127.8k DPS
Top 10%: >61.3k DPS
Top 25%: >38.2k DPS
Median: 21.3k DPS
Top 75%: >12.1k DPS
So, overall numbers far off from S13, top 10% is where S13 becomes noticeable, with much less activity there due to people not playing at that level post-S13
Where do you think a single target, beam and torp, cannon and torp, or science and torp build that could stay alive in most content with a average player be in that chart. Could it be done with fleet only items or even at all?
From what I see in game is that there is a large part of the player base that plays three or less hours a week. Those of us that play everyday can gather up the stuff for a cheap build within a few days. But for those players it will take a long time to get things togather and get them upgraded. Leaving them flying part of a ship build. Fleet gear can be pickuped without to much trouble and is the cheapest to upgraded. If it could be done it would give them and maybe the role players ship builds that wasn't out of reach and yet still be helpful in a pug run.
I don't have a problem with the dps groups, what little I know I learned from them. But we need to keep in mind that the game was made to let us be part of Star Trek. The dev's are going to have to keep the game within the reach of what most players are doing. Some of the post here show that there are many that have been scared out of the stf's. We can insult the company, the dev's and the rest of players as some have been doing or those that know how can put out some good builds that people want to fly, The one's of having the best chance of making that happen is the dps groups. What it would mean for the dps chase I'm not sure. I would hope some would still push the limits of the game.
Not that I really care about the whole DPS debate, but the "at least 20% of people in the list have parsed" -claim is just plain wrong. It assumes nobody has ever parsed more than one run which is very obviously false.
Yes, in one run that has 1 player parsing with 4 non-parsers, will have 20% of the people parsing. But that same one player parsing 5 runs, each with different teammates, has parsed 21 different people (4 x 5 + himself). 1/21 is ~5%. Given sufficient number of parsed runs, they may have encountered any number of non-parsing players, but the parser himself is still only one player.
Unless the database itself contains record of who has parsed themselves and who got parsed by others, there is no way to know.
Problem is Elite Space mostly cause they've made it far to difficult even for 95% of player base. Elite ground is something else entirely - as many end game players with Mk XIV Ultra or better gear had a fair chance at success...
Elite Space however they've taken to the level of being a bit absurd. An Advanced Space mission offers almost if not more challenge than many Elite Ground missions... Honestly I think the biggest reason many queue's are so quite is solely because they've made far too many too difficult in my opinion.
While people can play the normal queue's those aren't as busy either simply because they don't offer any REP token's you get in Advanced or Elite runs.
Problem is Elite Space mostly cause they've made it far to difficult even for 95% of player base. Elite ground is something else entirely - as many end game players with Mk XIV Ultra or better gear had a fair chance at success...
Elite Space however they've taken to the level of being a bit absurd. An Advanced Space mission offers almost if not more challenge than many Elite Ground missions... Honestly I think the biggest reason many queue's are so quite is solely because they've made far too many too difficult in my opinion.
While people can play the normal queue's those aren't as busy either simply because they don't offer any REP token's you get in Advanced or Elite runs.
I'm sorry...but what?!? Elite can be done very much so with mark XIV VR/UR items just fine. I have ships that can do 20% or more of a sucessful elite map with such gear. And they ain't even the lockbox/lobi items either. Just fleet and mission and crafted gear. Advanced mission is a joke that can be soloed by what this game deems to be good players...but in the gaming world would be classified as average to poor gamers. Hell I suck at games and I can solo most of the advanced maps. That ain't right.
yeah, as if gear has anything to do with difficulty at this point...hell I could put most STO players into a maximum geared, maximum specced ship and they'd still only do 10k DPS.
You are correct in your statements, but you completely ignore the fellow in front of the keyboard who is the source of the utter failure.
Consider the player and not the gear and strathkin's statement is spot on.
Another reason why this graph is almost certainly correct: The devs pretty much design the encounters around this DPS bracket...seriously. If you think about it, they definately have data on that too, and the fact that we see encounters coming out specifically designed around the curve we see in that graph should be evidence enough that those are accurate numbers concerning the player base.
Also, what I have read up to now from those trying to dispute the graph are more or less opinions based on subjective observation...saying that this graph makes you biased, so you can't really see the actual truth, is literally the same argument climate change deniers use to dispute the numbers from actual studies on the climate.
"Your data is wrong because I say so and it doesn't fit my own observation" is pretty much their argument here. Being sceptical is one thing, but to just deny evidence in favour of one's own opinion is a sign of ignorance and stubborness.
Obviously Cryptic is designing their difficulties around similar numbers.
Comments
This game is not an auto reward model. People que for the path of least resistance, the all marks boxes in alerts also made most good and\or fun ques obsolete or less quick to start.
If people want the elite rep stuff, and never ran the normal version, they shouldnt start right away in elite.
Its not all because of just a season change alone, players also contribute in dead ques:
People go for easy rewards, thats why the ques don't fill up.
Also those annoying screamers who invest more time in cursing and screaming on people instea of learning the objectives keep players on normal (just add them auto to ignore list, no TRIBBLE for you, and they stay with their own anger)
People stop doing ques when reps are maxed
People want to register for ques which start the quickest or who have several in them, also keeping the regged numbers low for other ques. And keeping the non starters as non starters.
And no, i don't run everything elite. only the fun ones, and the ones ive learned. Others i start on normal and will try advanced later on.
Ques should have a learning curve, and should be fun. Even when u don't need the marks annymore. If you join a sportsteam, you don't get a position in first team also cause you just play the game (que) for the first time, you (l)earn your way to join the elite/league.
If everyone just joins elite cause its dead, it will be alive. Untill people quit, because they never complete the que. And those players quit elite or sto for good.
Learn the ques with some friends, and have fun.
"Anyaway, we don't often see a sense of humor in Section 31."
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
Firstly, the newbies: You're not noobs automatically, yet you need to improve your gameplay experience and fine tune your build even after putting a ship or a captain together and reaching level 60 and splitting a few traits, specialization points around.
Generally speaking : You need to learn. Catch via playing Elite Queues and following DIRECTIONS. It helps alot in finding out what you need to make and where you can cut-corners and get the most out of your build/actions.
DPS-wise: Time will tell and you got plenty of places to inspire yourself from. Don't feel overwhelmed or disarmed. Reaching a 10-30k parse is more than reachable. And it's a great number to have, as a casual user.
Now, I'm gonna address the other class, that usually hits 50k+ and has some strong grasp of the game itself.
You should be helping newbies to learn how to use their builds and carry them to a certain extent. You're totally a product of carrying, especially to this point. This is a team-game and each and everyone of us has been carried to an extent in our STO experience. Maybe help out with some freebies, if your EC can. Throw in some Plasmonic Leeches or some space/ship traits to help people out.
As following your general consensus and the SCM / CLR statistics, I rate on an average on all of my toons as a 50-100k dps user. That means more or less that I've spiked the top 10% in the PVE area, at least DPS-wise. People who rank at least here or higher should learn to help and carry people around.
Advise and carry people to an extent. Make it an enjoyable experience, especially now, when the game is more playable than ever.
Classes are balanced way more than before for pve and everything is playable as f**k with so many possibilities to exploit and play. Make the most of it!
I would, but I'm a noob.
Sincerely,
Noob #1134
[3/25 10:41][Combat (Self)]Your Haymaker deals 26187 (10692) Physical Damage(Critical) to Orinoco.
The difference is people speak to each other, will give pointers in a respectfull way instead of typing l2p noob in chat before they leave the group.
Unbfortunately many fleets are dead. And for a good part this is due to those silly DPS channels.
Now there needs to be a steady stream of new players being fed onto that belt and slowly working their way up to the top end (or getting off where they are content) because there are always players disappearing from the top end and all along the belt due to losing interest and leaving the game.
So the players working their way up can keep at it and gradually improve to reach a level they are happy with. And many of the top players may choose to help them on the way, pulling them along faster or helping them walk along that belt faster under their own power.
But, there are also some top players who will happily sit in the middle of that belt and yell/TRIBBLE/whine at the new players coming up; even demanding they get off and stay away from the top end. They are like a troll throwing players off that belt just to protect their own elite kingdom.
That sort of thing can be avoided and should be. Top players should be helping players work their way up that conveyor belt, and you know why?
Because if players stop coming up along that belt then the top end will eventually dry up. Players leave over time so new ones must be encouraged, without new players being helped and encouraged the game dies, simple as that.
So getting people into queues to populate them and breathe life into the game should be in everyone’s interest, even if it means playing with newbies or failing occasionally. Without people playing, nobody is moving along that conveyor and the game is getting more and more dead.
And that's what fleets were good at. Then the DPS channels became a thing.
Thx, but no thx...if you want to do elite queues, just join a freaking dps channel, it ain't that hard to find people to do elites there anyway. Why queue up for an elite if you are quite likely to fail the whole objective and not just the optionals?
Also, you are basically asking people to do content they'd probably won't be able to enjoy due to perma death or failure of the mission.
If no fail conditions are attached, yes why not...but it would still be an unenjoyable experience for a lot of players to do content above their skill-level.
A Statistically significant number of the player base is in that chart. So makes the chart statistically accurate for this discussion.
KDF: Dahar Master Kan (Borg Klingon Tactical)::Dahar Master Torc (Alien Science)::Dahar Master Sisteric (Gorn Engineer)
RR-Fed: Citizen Sirroc (Romulan Science)::Fleet Admiral Grell (Alien Engineer)
RR-KDF: Fleet Admiral Zemo (Reman Tactical)::Fleet Admiral Xinatek (Reman Science)::Fleet Admiral Bel (Alien Engineer)
TOS-Fed: Fleet Admiral Katem (Andorian Tactical)::Lieutenant Commander Straad (Vulcan Engineer)
Dom-Fed: Dan'Tar (Jem'Hadar Science)
Dom-KDF: Kamtana'Solan (Jem'Hadar Science)
CoHost of Tribbles in Ecstasy (Zombee)
but your guts aren't or what?
The ISA generators-can't-be-healed is a stupid objective. But then it was only ever designed to be a meaningless extra cookie points optional that got elevated to a real mission objective because Cryptic was too lazy to come up with a better one. Most of the fail condtions that actually got designed as fail conditions rather than elevated from cookie point objectives make perfect sense.
If you must destroy three dreadnoughts and two of them will escape in 1 minute after the first one dies, you must naturally destroy them all within 1 minute or they won't be around for you to destroy anymore. If X is giving Y infinite HP regen, you obviously must kill X before it's possible to kill Y. You must kill an enemy in time, before it escapes or uses it's universe-destroying superweapon, etc, etc...
If we're talking about really unrealistic mission design, it's all the newfangled autowin missions. You fluff around doing whatever you want for 10 minutes or something and then the enemies apparently get bored and leave. Never mind everything on the map died including you a couple dozen times and you failed all the objectives, that was all optional. Congratulations, a War Hero is You!
yes, according to your opinion...don't equate your opinion to "basic logic", just because it makes sense to you.
according to my logic for instance, in every ISA queue I join there is 1 parser (sometimes 2, since I parse almost always) and mostly 4 people that seem to not give a TRIBBLE about DPS at all.
Having said that, now my "basic logic" somewhat contradicts your "basic logic"...so wouldn't you agree that it ain't basic logic at all, but simply opinion based on subjective observation, where as the data in the graph is actually the only objective source of info available?
plz, be reasonable, you can't possible be that arrogant to assume your opinion is better than everybody elses.
It's based on the 8,337 unique players that were on the table at the time of pulling the data.
Regardless if they're parsing or not, if anyone on the team does and hits upload, they all go up there.
ISA has been one of the few queues always popping over the years, Borticus even tweeted that it was one of the top 5 queues, so I'd say the data gives us a good idea of what performance level the playerbase is at.
Biased only to those that play ISA. The system in which that data is pulled is not strictly of DPS League players. But of any player that got recorded using that software in that specific Queue. Non DPSers will be recorded in that effort. And the number of non-DPSers recorded is significantly large enough to be statistically relavent and be considered statistically accurate representation of the entire player base.
KDF: Dahar Master Kan (Borg Klingon Tactical)::Dahar Master Torc (Alien Science)::Dahar Master Sisteric (Gorn Engineer)
RR-Fed: Citizen Sirroc (Romulan Science)::Fleet Admiral Grell (Alien Engineer)
RR-KDF: Fleet Admiral Zemo (Reman Tactical)::Fleet Admiral Xinatek (Reman Science)::Fleet Admiral Bel (Alien Engineer)
TOS-Fed: Fleet Admiral Katem (Andorian Tactical)::Lieutenant Commander Straad (Vulcan Engineer)
Dom-Fed: Dan'Tar (Jem'Hadar Science)
Dom-KDF: Kamtana'Solan (Jem'Hadar Science)
CoHost of Tribbles in Ecstasy (Zombee)
Where do you think a single target, beam and torp, cannon and torp, or science and torp build that could stay alive in most content with a average player be in that chart. Could it be done with fleet only items or even at all?
From what I see in game is that there is a large part of the player base that plays three or less hours a week. Those of us that play everyday can gather up the stuff for a cheap build within a few days. But for those players it will take a long time to get things togather and get them upgraded. Leaving them flying part of a ship build. Fleet gear can be pickuped without to much trouble and is the cheapest to upgraded. If it could be done it would give them and maybe the role players ship builds that wasn't out of reach and yet still be helpful in a pug run.
I don't have a problem with the dps groups, what little I know I learned from them. But we need to keep in mind that the game was made to let us be part of Star Trek. The dev's are going to have to keep the game within the reach of what most players are doing. Some of the post here show that there are many that have been scared out of the stf's. We can insult the company, the dev's and the rest of players as some have been doing or those that know how can put out some good builds that people want to fly, The one's of having the best chance of making that happen is the dps groups. What it would mean for the dps chase I'm not sure. I would hope some would still push the limits of the game.
Yes, in one run that has 1 player parsing with 4 non-parsers, will have 20% of the people parsing. But that same one player parsing 5 runs, each with different teammates, has parsed 21 different people (4 x 5 + himself). 1/21 is ~5%. Given sufficient number of parsed runs, they may have encountered any number of non-parsing players, but the parser himself is still only one player.
Unless the database itself contains record of who has parsed themselves and who got parsed by others, there is no way to know.
Elite Space however they've taken to the level of being a bit absurd. An Advanced Space mission offers almost if not more challenge than many Elite Ground missions... Honestly I think the biggest reason many queue's are so quite is solely because they've made far too many too difficult in my opinion.
While people can play the normal queue's those aren't as busy either simply because they don't offer any REP token's you get in Advanced or Elite runs.
yeah, as if gear has anything to do with difficulty at this point...hell I could put most STO players into a maximum geared, maximum specced ship and they'd still only do 10k DPS.
You are correct in your statements, but you completely ignore the fellow in front of the keyboard who is the source of the utter failure.
Consider the player and not the gear and strathkin's statement is spot on.
Another reason why this graph is almost certainly correct: The devs pretty much design the encounters around this DPS bracket...seriously. If you think about it, they definately have data on that too, and the fact that we see encounters coming out specifically designed around the curve we see in that graph should be evidence enough that those are accurate numbers concerning the player base.
Also, what I have read up to now from those trying to dispute the graph are more or less opinions based on subjective observation...saying that this graph makes you biased, so you can't really see the actual truth, is literally the same argument climate change deniers use to dispute the numbers from actual studies on the climate.
"Your data is wrong because I say so and it doesn't fit my own observation" is pretty much their argument here. Being sceptical is one thing, but to just deny evidence in favour of one's own opinion is a sign of ignorance and stubborness.
Obviously Cryptic is designing their difficulties around similar numbers.