test content
Logo
What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc
"We have 40+ employees....".......doing what exactly?
centersolace
Member Posts: 11,178 Arc User
Somewhere I remember seeing either Branflakes or DStahl mentioning that Cryptic has around 40 - 50 employees and they were still hiring. I don't think they're still hiring, but that still leaves us with around 40 - 50 employees. This is all very well and good...
...but what the heck are they doing?
What I want to know is how many employees are working on a given task at a given time. How many ship artists? How many systems guys? How many pencil-pushers are there? I think if the community had a better idea of what the team was made out of, we could understand the limitations better. If there was only one guy making costumes, then it would make sense as to why those are such a once and a while thing, but if there's five of them.....
...but what the heck are they doing?
What I want to know is how many employees are working on a given task at a given time. How many ship artists? How many systems guys? How many pencil-pushers are there? I think if the community had a better idea of what the team was made out of, we could understand the limitations better. If there was only one guy making costumes, then it would make sense as to why those are such a once and a while thing, but if there's five of them.....
Post edited by centersolace on
0
Comments
Seriously I'd like to think at least some of them busy creating more missions on par with "Temporal Ambassador" along with whatever DStahl is touting as being too big to be called a "season" release.
Rommies release and klingon faction upgrades (FIIIINALLLY!), we know for 90% certain from the anniversary videos and the friday 'screenshot'.
you know like everything else he talks up, it will be a mediocre release, and probably gonna disapoint everyone.. not to mention.. they can barely roll 1 mission out the door without the servers crashing hardcore.. if they actually do release a "large scale" release, their building might blow up...
the reason for this crashing is due to there being one server for the whole planet (which usually is not a good idea)... if it was split up into regions things might be more stable...
VESTA MULTI-MISSION SURVEILLANCE EXPLORER - U.S.S. HOPE IN HELL NX-902013-A
Well, I saw Tacofangs dancing at ESD a while ago.
I assume the rest are at home with their loved ones since it's a Friday nigh there.
lol, this is true, this is true... i still think someone tripped over the power cord for the fans on the servers hahaha..
Well that, and they don't/can't bite the bullet to massively upgrade their hardware setup into something more resembling what WoW/EVE uses. Heck, they hit 2 million players. Now they kind of need it.
I don't buy the whole 2 million players claim to be honest, and I suspect the figure includes a lot of dead accounts/characters.
I've played a lot of MMOs over the years, and all of them make statements about having millions of players etc, but when you actually get in-game, you can find no evidence of this at all.
Good One ... more likely the new Romulan Adventure Zone on Nimbus, which was already confirmed 2 months ago ...
The reason is, when they release Story Content ONCE a year ... everyone wants to play it ... because ... well they had to wait for a year :P
Probably this ... it's getting hard to believe in the whole "biggest Season yet", "more Staff than ever" - Stuff after 1,5 years without results ... Season 7 was supposed to be "the biggest Season yet, with revolutionary ways to advance Story Content yadda yadda yadda" ... all we got is 5 short Cutscenes and Bunny Chasing ... so if you seriously believe you'll get 1,5 new factions in Season 8, you have my deepest sympathies ...
Don?t worry, when the giant lazer nears completion we are sure to hear all about it. Probably when cryptic present their demands to the UN.
keep in mind that even though they now have a staff of 45 people, it does not mean that everyone of their new people came in and knew exactly how to use their systems. it takes time to be trained up and feel confident in how to use it and use it well.
you also lose time from the other guys having to waste time training up the new team members, so for the first 6 months you might as well not even have new members. now they are trained up we are starting to see results.
I Support Disco | Disco is Love | Disco is Life
it was 2 million captains.
i have 12, my son has 1.
if we take approximately 3 captains pro a real person it would mean we do have like 660.000 accounts
if we stay very pessimistic, it would be something between 400-500k active players
Or to make it short ... , take DStahl's 'quote of the day' literally with "Season 8 is dead to me" .
Take a good look at the number that shows up under that vaunted "Captains -- 2 Million in command" -- it says = 100.000 .
'Cause 100.000 players spread across multiple maps / instances would look more like what we have today , instead of that ridiculous millions number .
You do realize that is a key stating that one little captain figure dude represents 100k captains, right? Ten little captain figure dudes on two lines is twenty little captain dudes, and if each one is 100k, then that graphic says 2mil captains.
I Support Disco | Disco is Love | Disco is Life
I realize that that is one way to interpret that graph , but I also realize that if you ran a test of placing a tester person in each of the game's zones (27 maps + social hubs) during average peak hours -- by adding up the instances in them (+ active STF maps) you'll likely to count a number that is less then 100.000 active players .
But that's just my guesstimate -- judging by the numbers I've seen in average peak hours in the social hubs + active STF maps .
well its the only way to interoperate that graph as that is the 2 million divided by 20. its purely a visual representation
however i dont see your point. ignoring for a moment if that is 2 million players or toons (probably toons) the graph never states that its 2 million all on at once. even if you had 50k or 100k on at anyone time, not everyone plays at the same time. some people play once a week, some people play at different time zones or come and go as they please.
by adding up all the hours through a week or a month you might get to 2 millions players/toons playing the game over that time period.
you also cant just judge it on stf maps. every time someone enters any mission in the game, official or foundry you lose track of them.
each MMO in the company has its own seperate dev team. a few might cross between the games, but thats most likely just the PR/Community people as each game is different at the core, even if they run on the same engine and such.
It wouldnt make sense for the company to only have one dev team to be split between Different MMO's.
So you're ignoring a fact that could very well support my position (as in: this game has no 2 Mill players) , just so you could have an argument ?
I never said that there would be 2 Million players on at one time .
What I said was that if you had a group of about 40+ ppl , who were in-game monitoring player numbers at peak times (say 3 times in EU peak time , 3 times in US peak times) -- if you repeated this a few times , you'd get an average player base per game .
(w/certain variables counting for inaccuracy)
Now I personally think this would be pointless because it would prove nothing in the end , just like that 2 Mil number is pointless because it proves nothing without context , and Cryptic is not giving us any context , so it's just a hype thing .
Actually , if you click on the STF tab that says "join matches in progress" -- you can see the matches that are on-going , even those that are full (5/5) .
But I agree , you can't see ppl playing the Foundry and pvp for example , nor can you see ppl playing in game missions .
i was putting it to one side as we dont know. look never mind, perhaps i just misunderstood what you are saying. arguing over what the graph meant did not help.
my point is the number of 2 million characters could be accurate over a given period. i alone will log in with 10 different characters over any given week.
yes we dont know the context and it probably is worded for hype, but the number could still be accurate in its own context. we just dont fully know what it is. so yes its all rather pointless.
Nobody claimed it did. However, 16,500 fleets makes little sense with a 100k playerbase guess either.
My guesstimate from those numbers is that we probably have:
- Around 360k active players, if you define active as playing for a few hours every 3-4 months. Probably about half only play when there's an event announcement or new content release but that doesn't make them inactive.
- This is also pretty consistent with rates on a new lockbox if you imagine that 10% of these folks spend money, about half of those play lockboxes, the average one plays for a couple of hours per week when something new is announced, and 0.5% of the concurrent lockbox spenders are getting a ship. I've used guesses like this before.
- Around 950k STO accounts since launch.
- Average fleet size is probably 20 distinct players per fleet (many much larger and many much smaller but 20 as the mean figure). Hence 20 x 16500 = 330,000.
- The 80 million missions (which probably counts replay) suggests the average is 40 mission completions per player. This along with the fairly low average of 5 ships per player suggests the following is reasonable:
Most people never finished leveling. Most people who finished leveling are still active. Most people who don't finish leveling quit the game. It's pretty much the single most determinative factor.
Now... Let's approach this from another POV. While I can see PWE focusing on reinvestment for a project which demonstrates it has growth potential with reinvestment, I can't imagine they'd let this one bleed money.
Average game designer salary for SF x STO's development team size = around $4 million. That's the bare minimum I can see the game making. That's around $330k per month.
Now with the assumption that 90% of players spend nothing (and I've heard it's 95% classically in F2P games but we've heard 90% floated here), my guess is that average non-stipend spending for 10% of players who spend is between $9 (assuming active players login every month) and $37 (assuming active players only play active one out of every four months).
If we assume there's only 100k players, that means 10k players have to be spending an average of $33 per month for Cryptic to hit payroll and this definition assumes that someone would have to login monthly to be considered active. Which I think is a narrow and unrealistic definition of average.
These are totally ballpark numbers and spitballs which attempt to match reasonable sounding numbers with facts. I give everything I just said a good 40% margin of error. I keep coming back to 360k or so as a reasonable stable number.
And I'll add something:
You take a game like WoW. Which has around 10 million active accounts at a time. (The folks who say that's total accounts ever are in error. That's current active accounts.) I saw an interview awhile back with a former Blizzard employee. The number is fairly stable. But something like 25% of that is old players quitting and coming back, taking eachother's place. And a big part, maybe another 25% is people passing through. There have probably been hundreds of millions of people who have played. That's partly because young Chinese people make up a huge chunk of the world's population and are being replaced fast, even though China is aging. And I'd wager over 10% of Americans have played WoW for at least 5 minutes.
Churn in an MMO is constant. Part of that is people passing through. But I'd imagine a huge chunk of the target playerbase are people who play less than once a month and they're too big a market segment not to target.