Neverwinter player counts

jase2cool

@nitocris83 @mimicking#6533

I was saying this for the love of the game i wanted to bring to your attention.

According to Steam player count records now its 2470 its all time low, chances are ARC player count be similar.
I understand that its end of year and people tend to go holiday and all... but this record was lowest since the game started on December 2013 its clearly show is something is wrong with the game direction.

These figure include those who log in invoke get VIP key and logout, quite few people i know will not even login after their VIP expired.

https://steamcharts.com/app/109600

Please do look into what's going on and save the game .

mentinmindmaker

There is no reason to believe the Steam charts are not correct. While they only represent a percentage of the NW players, there is no reason to not believe that percentage is fairly constant. So as an indicator of the trend the Steam charts probably are fairly reliable.

There are also other indicators that the player activity(and the associated income for Cryptic) has dropped dramatically:
* The number of veterans in game is a lot lower than it used to be.. you get a lot of green players in REQ and RTQ these days, and it is painful. Low gear and no tactics knowledge. It seems the game as it is to a lesser degree is able to keep people until they become veterans. This could be because a lot of complexity and challenge was removed with mod 16.
* The AD to Zen conversion rate used to be 1M Zen/day. Now it seems to be down to 0.4M Zen/day.
* Guild activity is all over low.

Mod 18 will be decisive. When and if it comes.

tchefi

mentinmindmaker said:

The AD to Zen conversion rate used to be 1M Zen/day. Now it seems to be down to 0.4M Zen/day

Though i agree with the feeling Neverwinter population has dramatically droped since the launch of mod16 (and even more if you go back to the first months of Barovia), the AD/Zen exchange rate is not a good indicator, especially because we are closer and closer to the big black friday sales.
First, if there are less sellers, there are also less buyers...
And second, it's the same every year, before Jubilee and Black friday : once you are around one month before, the Zen/day rate is much lower (usually half) than in between (let's say septembre, or february/march) those two big sales events.

hustin1

The number of veterans active in our alliance has absolutely crashed. The trend started with Mod 16 and really picked up with Mod 17. From what I'm seeing in our alliance, there were multiple reasons:

1. Mod 16 reduction of most combat to long series of at-wills with occasional encounters and very rare dailies,
2. Repetitiveness of day-in, day-out expeditions ad nauseam and nothing else to do (as no one in our alliance can handle ToMM),
3. Demoralizing effect of seeing our active membership drop,
4. Inability to do things like Saturday stronghold events (dragonflight and marauders) due to lack of people,
5. Inability to do alliance dungeon runs (once again due to lack of people)

Some of these effects are positively reinforcing: the more people leave, the greater the effect. Looking outside the alliance, how can I tell that player numbers have dropped? The most glaring indicator to me has been the number of instances in various maps. I've never seen them this low. In Chult, there's often only a single instance. In the River District, there are usually only two instances, with instance #2 usually only partly filled. You never see more than four active instances anywhere except for Protector's Enclave and Yawning Portal. Contrast this to when Chult launched and there were dozens of active instances, or when Storm King's Thunder launched and there were over a hundred.

Are there new players? Yes. Just in the past week we've added several to our guild and have had several more inquiries. I've had to cull the roster to make room. Will they stick around? I hope so, but the lack of veterans is going to be a real problem. Aside from myself, there is rarely anyone else to help new players along, or help them group up when they reach max level.

A new game can survive on new players alone. I'm not sure if that's the case with a mature one, though, when player numbers have been observed to crash. Something must be done with the next mod.

thefiresidecat

yeah on xbox it's painfully obvs we've lost the vast majority of our endgamers. if mod 17 had been released in the middle of mod 14 or 15 I'm certain it would have been hoppin. on xbox which I'm pretty sure is a lot more vibrant than pc. the number of players that are even a little close to being actually ready to go in there seems like it's probably about 200 for all of xbox. there was a time when this would have been a super popular thing to try for. right now it seems like there is one or two dedicated groups from each of the bigger alliances and that's pretty much it. a few other ppl who are intent on forming groups in yawning (that will never get much past phase 2) I look back on the groups going to do codg when it was first released and a bit of a challenge compared to most dungeons because of the pp. the alliance would have had about 5 to 8 groups that were pretty much dedicated at any given time. this is not like that. I find it very worrisome and kind of sad. I spent millions outfitting my toon for a party that just never happened. in all honesty I'm about ready to leave the game myself. because of inactivity. don't have anywhere else I particularly want to be but all I'm doing is sitting around recruiting for my guild at this point. there is just nothing to do in game. i've put out some feelers for starting a new dedicated group in alliance and have gotten zero hits. the game feels very dead to me.

mentinmindmaker

tchefi#6735 said:

mentinmindmaker said:

The AD to Zen conversion rate used to be 1M Zen/day. Now it seems to be down to 0.4M Zen/day

Though i agree with the feeling Neverwinter population has dramatically droped since the launch of mod16 (and even more if you go back to the first months of Barovia), the AD/Zen exchange rate is not a good indicator, especially because we are closer and closer to the big black friday sales.
First, if there are less sellers, there are also less buyers...
And second, it's the same every year, before Jubilee and Black friday : once you are around one month before, the Zen/day rate is much lower (usually half) than in between (let's say septembre, or february/march) those two big sales events.

Yeah, I know. But this has been going on even since this summer, if anything I think the Black Friday saving up has caused the conversion rate to drop even lower.

And the nice thing about the ZAX queue as a measurement is that it ties directly into Cryptics income. As long as you can assume that the same percentage of purchased Zen hits the ZAX, it is a direct indicator of Cryptic's income from NW.

chidion

The problem as I see it is too much changes in Neverwinter too often for many players and I'm not speaking about changes brought about by new content, but it seems with the release of any new content, changes to existing content are also being implemented. My first experience with this was the roll out of Mod 6, where the Epic level 60 gear that I paid real world cash to obtain became immediately obsolete, not only for the new content but existing content where it used to work just fine.

Areas like Sharandar and the Dread Ring, where my character used to be able to mostly hold his own against mobs and bosses in those areas. Not only was the gear I had suddenly not sufficient, but my character stats were now insufficient due to increases in mob and boss powers. A couple of times of being "one shotted" in areas less than half way through, where I used to be to complete, even if it did take me a time or two coming back at a respawn point was not a pleasant experience.

It was also my first indication that spending real world money to purchase things to help my character play stronger might not have been my wisest investment and even though many veteran players said they intended to quit, I stuck it out and even lost some of my animus because the new content was dropping better gear that replaced the now obsolete gear I spent money to procure.

However there have been other changes that reaffirmed my reluctance to spend real world money for game gear, companions, mounts and such because of subsequent game changes after new Mod releases. Why spend money on anything for my player progression if those items are to (too quickly in my opinion) be made obsolete and virtually worthless with the next Mod release even in content supposedly not directly affected by the new game content?

Since then there have been numerous other "nerfs" not only to player gear, but to mounts, companions, runestones, enchantments, refinement objects, and player skills, stats and feats... not to mention augmentations to new and existing content mobs and bosses.

It's not hard to imagine that any player who invested time, effort and especially money in the game to procure items allowing them to successfully navigate existing content might feel a tad disaffected when what they had is suddenly made obsolete or nearly so with a future update.

mentinmindmaker

Just a data point for those that care:
My oldest waiting transaction on the ZAX was put into queue on Oct 10th. At that time the queue was around 8M Zen. It should be coming out soon, but I am still waiting.

That is 26 days ago.

That gives a ZAX queue processing rate of less than 0.31M Zen/day.

It likely is particularly low now because people are hoarding Zen for Black Friday, but I never saw it this low.

darthpotater

I play only on PC but I dont feel the sky falling.

Some players left, thats true, but that was true also with every mod. My son started to play 2 days ago, and he is leveling a char, so I see what he sees. In every map there are hundreds of new players like him, I even told him that I could help with Charthraxis the dragon in graveyard but I saw there were more than 20 players in that spot, some of them newbies, others not so much.

I was surprised by that because I remember allways void instances in this leveling maps. Also checked other low maps and were full of new players with white / green gear and low level. This new players may not be able to do ToMM in 2 months, but they are what the game needs to be more healthy.

Also low level queues are instapop too.

Maybe the changes with mod 16 / 17 were drastical and not targeting an instant change, but progressive player influx looking for the future. This new players spend more money in the game than most of the veterans, we will see.

Im more optimistic than most of you really.

kitkathd

jase2cool said:

@nitocris83 @mimicking#6533

I was saying this for the love of the game i wanted to bring to your attention.

According to Steam player count records now its 2470 its all time low, chances are ARC player count be similar.
I understand that its end of year and people tend to go holiday and all... but this record was lowest since the game started on December 2013 its clearly show is something is wrong with the game direction.

These figure include those who log in invoke get VIP key and logout, quite few people i know will not even login after their VIP expired.

https://steamcharts.com/app/109600

Please do look into what's going on and save the game .

I have played atleast 5 months out of every year of Neverwinter. Over the years I have always come back and caught right back up and have enjoyed all the changes and the seasonal events and new modules. I say all this cause I recently tried to return again as I always do and the complete class overhauls and level increase completely ruined it for me. Its not that I didn't like the game anymore, its that I was completely and utterly lost. There were no tutorials, I had no character slots available to start a new character to possibly go through a new tutorial, and the game looked insanely empty. I tried to do old tasks and wound up getting roflstomped by HAMSTER I normally could annihilate. I sat for an hour wasting respecs and browsing the web trying to get my primary character respectable again and wound up realizing my respec was poorly decided. I got so frustrated that I gave up and quit and haven't come back since. I trully believe that whatever module that overhauled the classes like this is an extinction level event akin to the Combat upgrade patch for Starwars Galaxies. Its just impossible to come back now. The game requires Real life money and it doesn't provide us with any way of figuring things out without wasting a ton of time and resources. They made a huge mistake.

thefiresidecat

darthpotater said:

I play only on PC but I dont feel the sky falling.

Some players left, thats true, but that was true also with every mod. My son started to play 2 days ago, and he is leveling a char, so I see what he sees. In every map there are hundreds of new players like him, I even told him that I could help with Charthraxis the dragon in graveyard but I saw there were more than 20 players in that spot, some of them newbies, others not so much.

I was surprised by that because I remember allways void instances in this leveling maps. Also checked other low maps and were full of new players with white / green gear and low level. This new players may not be able to do ToMM in 2 months, but they are what the game needs to be more healthy.

Also low level queues are instapop too.

Maybe the changes with mod 16 / 17 were drastical and not targeting an instant change, but progressive player influx looking for the future. This new players spend more money in the game than most of the veterans, we will see.

Im more optimistic than most of you really.

baby players aren't end game and end game is where we are at. eventually some of those newbies will make it to end game but it's gonna take along time before we see the numbers we had a few seasons ago. the game is chock full of 21000 players with a full compliment of R9-11... that isn't gonna cut it for doing end game stuff. good for them, but it makes the end gamers pushed out because there aren't enough of us to really do much.

thefiresidecat

kitkathd said:

jase2cool said:

@nitocris83 @mimicking#6533

I was saying this for the love of the game i wanted to bring to your attention.

According to Steam player count records now its 2470 its all time low, chances are ARC player count be similar.
I understand that its end of year and people tend to go holiday and all... but this record was lowest since the game started on December 2013 its clearly show is something is wrong with the game direction.

These figure include those who log in invoke get VIP key and logout, quite few people i know will not even login after their VIP expired.

https://steamcharts.com/app/109600

Please do look into what's going on and save the game .

I have played atleast 5 months out of every year of Neverwinter. Over the years I have always come back and caught right back up and have enjoyed all the changes and the seasonal events and new modules. I say all this cause I recently tried to return again as I always do and the complete class overhauls and level increase completely ruined it for me. Its not that I didn't like the game anymore, its that I was completely and utterly lost. There were no tutorials, I had no character slots available to start a new character to possibly go through a new tutorial, and the game looked insanely empty. I tried to do old tasks and wound up getting roflstomped by HAMSTER I normally could annihilate. I sat for an hour wasting respecs and browsing the web trying to get my primary character respectable again and wound up realizing my respec was poorly decided. I got so frustrated that I gave up and quit and haven't come back since. I trully believe that whatever module that overhauled the classes like this is an extinction level event akin to the Combat upgrade patch for Starwars Galaxies. Its just impossible to come back now. The game requires Real life money and it doesn't provide us with any way of figuring things out without wasting a ton of time and resources. They made a huge mistake.

this is where I'm at for destiny. lol. did you do the yawning portal, basically you learn what you need to do by doing the yawning portal quests. you get some great comp gear that helps you meet your stats.

kitkathd

I couldn't get past my respec and playing around in Ravenloft/Dread ring just to test builds. The game just isn't fun to play now. My DC and Paladins are so badly changed I just don't get the vision they were going for. They should have made a sequel instead of such a dramatic change.

ecrana

thefiresidecat said:

I spent millions outfitting my toon for a party that just never happened

I feel your pains. Went through the same. It's been weeks and I would say the big hold up isn't learning mechanics, it's getting the same 10 people together to get in more practice runs.

jules

About the newbies in lvling instances: yeah those 10 ppl in Neverdeath were me and some of my friends kicking dragons in the shins.

I am spending a few minutes everday on my recruitment alt, and while it IS true that there are new players there a) aren't that many new players around compared to busy times of the game
b) new players on guild or new players I befriend or try to help made me see that they are not sticking around. Really.
I know 2 that started with M16 and while their progress is smooth and they are already gearing for tomm (how funny tbh but thats another topic) they ARE weirded out by how buggy <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> is. Especially events. Or the crazy RNG.
Lately, one of those saw vids of old builds and dung runs and was like "Oh my god, you aren't just a grumpy <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font>! The game waa REALLY that much different!"
And the other new ppl? Often leave. Like ppl leave ftp games all the time. Simply finding out NW isn't their piece of cake. Nothing new.
So. For those few new players that are not actually vets in alt disguise we had to alienate other parts of the player base? I don't see this great restart happening.

chidion

kitkathd said:

I couldn't get past my respec and playing around in Ravenloft/Dread ring just to test builds. The game just isn't fun to play now. My DC and Paladins are so badly changed I just don't get the vision they were going for. They should have made a sequel instead of such a dramatic change.

I don't know if it can be done but I've always thought if they are going to change things in the game, like character scaling they should make those changes applicable only on new Mods or content... don't mess with existing content unless there is something terribly wrong.

Building up one's character to be able to play a campaign or existing quests, dungeons or skirmishes one week (month, whatever) then come back a few days later and find everything changed, mobs and bosses tougher, player characters weaker, player stats and powers reduced from what they were previously, add-on enhancements like enchantments and runestones not as powerful as they were before those changes is in my opinion is not only disappointing but counter productive in my opinion.

Why would anyone fork out the time, effort or cash to upgrade their character (mount or companion) when there is every chance - based on what's happened before - for those investments to be nerfed and not as effective in the same content as they were when they were purchased? I can see items needing to be upgraded for new Mods or content but for them to be powered down for content where they used to be effective tends to teach players there is no rationale for spending anything if their items and stats are going to be downgraded while in the same content where they used to work well.

Anyway that's my 2¢