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Steam chart numbers worrying
mynaam
Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 937 Arc User
The 12 month steam charts are really scary. Before i say anything else yes i know not all players use steam. Steam however is a good indication of mid level and lower level players (non BIS). These are normally the players that still need items and as such spend money on the game. the dramatic drop in players just indicates what a disastrous 2019 the game had.
At the end of 2018 (December) there was 2,236 average players
At the end of 2019(December) there was 1,406 average players
That is a (doing it in my head so might be wrong) 37% drop in player base year to year. This is a clear indication that what was done in 2019 was WRONG. a Large % of this drop was during mod 17
Mod 17 seems to be worst than mod 16
August : 1675
October : 1398 (thank fully the holiday had a bit of increase but that tends to be temp players)
This is a clear indication that BIS only mentality and harder is better is not a smart move. Please listen too 100% of players not just 1%. The 1% have almost all they need already and thus do not need to buy zen with real money. lower level players and lower geared players need to spend money. If these players are not happy the game loose money if the game loose too much money no more game. We don't want that !!!!
At the end of 2018 (December) there was 2,236 average players
At the end of 2019(December) there was 1,406 average players
That is a (doing it in my head so might be wrong) 37% drop in player base year to year. This is a clear indication that what was done in 2019 was WRONG. a Large % of this drop was during mod 17
Mod 17 seems to be worst than mod 16 August : 1675
October : 1398 (thank fully the holiday had a bit of increase but that tends to be temp players)
This is a clear indication that BIS only mentality and harder is better is not a smart move. Please listen too 100% of players not just 1%. The 1% have almost all they need already and thus do not need to buy zen with real money. lower level players and lower geared players need to spend money. If these players are not happy the game loose money if the game loose too much money no more game. We don't want that !!!!
There are more than BIS players in this game
RIP Real Tiamat, RIP Real Demogorgon RIP real Temple of the spider. Why remove non bis content to give to bis players ????
FORCING the majority of your player base to play 4 mod old dungeons and trial will have a bad result on player base
Changes are getting so bad i would rather prefer no new changes (RIP ICE FISHING in winter fest)
RIP Real Tiamat, RIP Real Demogorgon RIP real Temple of the spider. Why remove non bis content to give to bis players ????
FORCING the majority of your player base to play 4 mod old dungeons and trial will have a bad result on player base
Changes are getting so bad i would rather prefer no new changes (RIP ICE FISHING in winter fest)
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Comments
Mostly it's because the last few modules have made me feel that my characters aren't 'mine' anymore, they're Cryptics' gamepieces being used in a shell-game trying to force me into playing some strange "Cryptic approved play style". They also leave me with no notion of where Cryptic is taking this new approved playstyle of theirs, other than "it's not what you're doing now".
Changes to gear, stats, companions, crafts, mechanics and entire class rebalances that seem to have little point other than "now you have to do things differently" make me feel disconnected from my characters history and from my interest in future progress. When a gaming company starts making changes, not based on a clear vision of growth for the game, but basically just because they feel something needs to change, I lose interest.
I'll likely wait until I feel Cryptic has something more in mind than shuffling parameters around before I start playing again.
If you look closer at the stream charts, in fact you can see 4 "era" for NWO.
1- The prime youth 2013-2015 : quick declining courb immediately after the release (which is pretty standard), then kind of a plateau as the game stabilized on his public.
The teenage rebellion/crisis happened in april 2015, when huge changes coming with the raise of the level max to 70 and mod6. Population numbers of NWO crashed down (-40% to -50% roughly) in a matter of months
2- The late teenager phase 2015-2017 : the game has find another plateau (lower than the previous one) and is trying to find new marks with this new weird and clunky body that had evolved too fast, bursting some acnee pimples, and speaking with a cracked voice.
It reached the adulthood around november 2017, with mod12.5. Everything was fine, friends, girlfriend (with whom he time to time had little or big arguments, like any couple), people having now a bit more interest in NWO than right after mod6
3- adult : mod13 and mod14 came as a new a job and a new car, maried his girlfriend (which was still arguing time to time, because NWO wasn't doing the dishes or getting the garbage out as frequently as she would like). Future seemed to be full of promises, nothing has been brighter since the mod6 crisis. But NWO get a bit "stay-at-home", like an old couple with his players. Mod15 was not as great as the 3 previous ones, NWO was kind of eyeing too much at virgin girl butts who very much like HAMSTER and hemoroid jokes, and neverwinter's wife was not so happy with that...
Middlelife crisis happened in april 2019, with mod16, the lvl 80 max, and all the changes and bugs. Suddenly NWO got fat, wanted to ride a bike rather than a car, forgot about the importance of an everyday shower, lost most of his friends, and got divorced. -30% on the population.
4- After middlelife : we are in this era. NWO is trying to have sex with girls way younger than him, while his ex-wife looking at him with a strange mix of nostalgy and disgust.
Life continues, and I can't wait to see the next episode of this serie : the retirement crisis.
I love posts by mynaam, can rely on them blindly without checking. Always info without bias. Objective to a fault. Yup, and the forums do not have a big HAMSTER /sarcasm emoji.
Lets see the numbers, shall we:
And the mod release dates:
M14 Ravenloft June 26, 2018
M15 Heart of Fire November 6, 2018
M16 Undermountain April 23, 2019
M17 Uprising August 13, 2019
If we want to prevent the hype bump of players that get back on a mod to check it out to interfere, and see real overtime trend instead of bounce rate (bounce rate is new players coming but not staying, e.g. m14), we take from a month before a new mod release to the matching month of next mod. End to End / Low to Low.
M14: -3%
M15: -8%
M16: -29%
M17: -1.6%
Or if we take peak to peak, which we shouldn't but lets:
M14 - M15: -30%
M15 - M16: -17%
M16 - M17: -17%
M17 - Current*: -10%
*We don't have the peak of new mod yet. This number will be lower as new players come back to check new mod.
Looking at the graphs:
We can see the same visually, a large drop after initial M14 Hype.
A constant drop during M15.
A sudden drop after M16.
And almost flat line over m17.
So, lets have a lesson in numbers interpretation.
By how Mynnam calculates, peak to peak, we can easily say that those steam charts show that M17 is the best mod so far, keeping players engaged, while Mod 14 was a huge failure, attracting so many players, and failing to keep them.
When these are the actual drop rates of the player base:
M14: -3%
M15: -8%
M16: -29%
M17: -1.6%
And not the bounce rate.
And this is: Simply a lie.
In here, we are talking about PC. Steam is about PC. The impact of ban gate in PC was less than console. It was not as widespread as console. It was patched in PC before the exact detail of how-to was publicly released by THE web site. The surprise was the console version was not patched when they released Ravenloft to console and people knew how-to on day 1.
Caturday Survivor
Elemental Evil Survivor
Undermontain Survivor
Mod20 Combat rework Survivor
Mod22 Refinement rework Survivor
That _is_ pretty scary.
This is also supported by a drop in ZAX processing rate from 1M/day to now 0.5M/day.
My post was to show the lies in the OPs post. You can see repeating of the same multiple times if you check their posting history, and you will see me refuting their claims each time.
They also do so on every social platform available, on many content creators channels and so on. Blaming ToMM for what I assume their ineptitude in guild leadership or some other personal hatred, like friends quitting. With the multiple examples of "players that didn't finish CR / LoMM" which have nothing to do with ToMM.
I will not say that things are great in general, nor I have pink glasses. I've countered false positivity multiple times in the past and will do so.
But skewing any data in any direction to try to create a false biased image hurts the game and the player base. Everyone free to hate any content, and advocate against it, but lying about it, that's a no no.
meh.
Just killing time...
* The normal trend is that average player numbers fall slowly. This is as expected in an aged game that receive limited marketing.
* Then comes a mod, and player numbers soar. How successful a mod as been can be measured in the peak player numbers before and after the mod spike.
From this we can see:
M14 Ravenloft June 26, 2018: 3900 -> 4484. 15% increase, Big success. Also the mod spike was solid, up to 5685. This shows a mod with much attention that the playerbase liked.
M15 Heart of Fire November 6, 2018: 4107->3875. 6% decrease. Not so good. Also the mod spike was very low(4291), almost unnoticeable in the graphs. The decrease can be attributed to the normal over time decay, so the playerbase basically passed over this mod with a yawn.
M16 Undermountain April 23, 2019: 3684->2632. 20% decrease. The mod spike however was quite high(4464), which shows this was a mod that received much attention, but the result was overall rejected by the playerbase.
M17 Uprising August 13, 2019: 2603->2470. 5% decrease. The mod spike was only at 2889. Very similar to mod 15, the mod was met with a yawn from the users. Decrease can be attributed to normal time decay.
As for the specific question of ToMM(mod 17), I think it is fair to say it has not had much effect, neither up or down. Which represents a wasted opportunity.
From these numbers we can divide the mods in 3 categories:
Good Stuff: M14 Ravenloft
Lost opportunities: M15 Heart of Fire, M17 Uprising
Disasters: M16 Undermountain
We need more of the Good Stuff, that could possibly increase the player numbers somewhat again. Much of the game marketing probably is mouth to ear or on social media.
Base data here:
https://steamcharts.com/app/109600#1y
Sony changed their charts a bit but NW was not in the top ten down loaded FTP games in December or 2019 in general. Sadly, this just gives us an idea of new player downloads.
And I am confident that Magic will take a nice chuck of newer to mid-levels players away from NW at least for a while.
But quite surely, steam NWO population can, for statistic purposes, be chosen as a representative sample for all the NWO players (yeah, maybe it's still a bit biased, Arc users are likely to be more faithful to NWO than steam users maybe for exemple, but I'm confident enough we are not completely missing the target...), especially because the steam population playing NWO is still big enough (remind you that if you play 4h, you are counting as 1 player during 4 hours, and 0 for the rest of the day, the chart shows the peak and the average during 24h, i'm sure you can do at least x6 on the average number to get how many different players has been connected during one day). 10 001 is quite a standard number used in human population survey as a sample for any total population above some few millions of habitants (as an exemple the TV audiences are statistically extrapolated. When channel X says the audience for his show was 3M people in US, in fact it's extrapolated from the fraction of the 25 000 houses equiped with a specific device and who had watched this show).
I don't know how many players are really playing NWO. But I'm quite confident that the portion shown in the steamcharts behaves quite closely to how the total fluctuates.
I am Took.
"Full plate and packing steel" in NW since 2013.
https://steamcharts.com/cmp/582660,109600,238960,306130#1y
All of the above have their own launchers and not exclusive to steam, they also about the same age.
I would say that steam players are significantly less than 40%, probably towards the 10% if not less.
Losing population is not the fatal destiniy of a MMORPG. All depend on what you are releasing.
Let's put another steam charts => Eve Online :P https://steamcharts.com/cmp/109600,9900,706220,8500#All (Yeah, ok, it's another league compared to NWO, maybe, i admit)
To assess 40% or not 40% I don't need to ask people in the game. I can count people. You first attempt with this was better, you just didn't count the new zone on a new mod release, where most of the players were which invalidated the results.
But lets say it is 40%.
1. We are talking trands here and not total population. Because we can argue until the end of time, but we don't know the total.
2. You added the wrong games into the comparison, SA edition for example and not global version. Look at the games I've linked, interestingly, like I've said, they have their own launcher too.
credit:
https://xkcd.com/386/
As to why the above happens, that's above my pay grade, my education in psychology is limited, thought I have some good guesses and they are not flattering.
But you are right, sometimes offtopic is offtopic. It's not relevant how much steam is in % of the players, and it was my mistake to reply about that.
Me, I could care less if 2,000 or 20,000 people log on during any time period. It doesn't change the nature of various quests or campaigns, random content is still random and those who log in to primarily cash in on in-game currency are still going to log in to try increase their currency hoard.
But come to think of it, the player census may be of concern to some of the game "whales" who likely are more concerned with their own personal in-game wealth because with a decline in player population, no doubt will see a decline in people desirous and able to pay some of the overly inflated prices many of their items currently sell for.
I called my whale friends --the ones I have their cellphone numbers-- the response was, maybe this weekend, if I am not busy. Only one decline my invite telling me he is having a party this weekend, and next weekend is the Superbowl. Instead of bantering about the population or lack of it, why don't people who are "worrying about the numbers" call up your friend? I think some of them regret swapping numbers with me.