Where do you see that massive drop-off in those charts?
The only thing I see isthat since LOR, the player numbers over all have dropped after a good increase, and now there is another spike around the time of Delta Rising.
The player numbers are now still better than the preceding weeks.
LOR had 2,656.1 players on average in its month on release, DR has 2,499.8 (but DR has not yet had a full month.)
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Where do you see that massive drop-off in those charts?
The only thing I see isthat since LOR, the player numbers over all have dropped after a good increase, and now there is another spike around the time of Delta Rising.
The player numbers are now still better than the preceding weeks.
LOR had 2,656.1 players on average in its month on release, DR has 2,499.8 (but DR has not yet had a full month.)
On average. With DR you would expect a big spike on average, right?
I had switched to Dyson ground, Nukara ground, Romulus ground/tau dewa patrol, Dyson sphere Undine battleground, and whatever borg red alerts I stumble across/defari. I swing by and do the fleet daily, and...hit a part of the delta patrol/episodes for the bonus mark box when I'm in the area.
What I do depends on where my characters happen to be and, what...if any, marks they are out of.
Instead of various queues, a half dozen times a day (per character (5)), I do what's handy and play the exchange market.
Mission is harder, takes 3 times longer, gives half the reward, and you're wondering why the queues are dead?
Well if the idea is to turn STO into an "events only" type of game , then it's clearly on the right path ... .
Cryptic *is* labeled PWE's R&D arm , and the nonpaying F2P players *are* a part of the product , so I would not be all too surprised to see that this is all in all just one more "research project" .
Where do you see that massive drop-off in those charts?
The only thing I see isthat since LOR, the player numbers over all have dropped after a good increase, and now there is another spike around the time of Delta Rising.
The player numbers are now still better than the preceding weeks.
LOR had 2,656.1 players on average in its month on release, DR has 2,499.8 (but DR has not yet had a full month.)
I would suggest looking at the whole picture, looking at the numbers critically, and as "indicators" (i.e. that's only Steam but it is indicative of movements up or down, and proportionally between one period and another).
The top graph shows the "highest number on at once" and from that you can see a large hump with a long 'tail' to the right showing that LoR had the highest total on plus a long time (two months) to lose that. This seems to have been the model they should have built upon to maintain momentum.
December/January and May seem to be the Winter event/Summer event 'humps', that likewise show a lower, yet still sustained, hump each.
There's a tiny hump (hover over to see Sep 1) which I suspect is the R&D launch.
Then there's the latest hump, which shows a two-week rise to the mid-5ks, followed by a tail right down to mid-4ks (which was the level of the winter and summer events but these were sustained).
On these "Highest players on at one time" then LoR was far more successful than the DR two week hump. Looking at these figures, the drop-off from last week to this week is something like 18 percent.
Looking at Average Players is a bit difficult because we're within that DR hump at the moment. If we were to take May 2013 as LoR's main period and "Last 30 days" as DR's, then LoR was still more successful by about five percent. Yet, reading together with the upper graph, it appears that LoR had a longer tail as DR seems to be dropping off already into "summer event" territory.
If you click into "Seven Days" and compare hour-on-hour, there also appears to be a fairly steady drop-off in login status. Ditto with "One Month" but it starts getting tricky to read there because the points are so close together.
Of course, the success also depends on "who" logged in, how much was spent in dollar terms, costs of the various 'launches' to determine an actual percentage Return on Investment. These are figures we simply don't have. However, the figures we do have (as limited as they are) suggest that LoR was most successful at gaining and maintaining momentum for at least a little time, and that DR seems to have suffered both from an inability to reach LoR's top-level of engagement, as well as potentially suffering from an early heavy drop-off in player interest.
Time will tell but these figures wouldn't make me say that DR is any sort of unqualified success, and I'd go further and say that if that drop-off is allowed to continue, DR will be a minor blip in STO's history of highlights.
I wanted to try some ground builds and , from a quick check up, the only quite active queues were bug hunt , normal and advanced and borg disconnected .... colony invasion and rhi'hoo not bad ... Dyson always populated like a big city mall. Why?
Because I guess people, right now, are busy doing 2 things:
1. grinding delta marks
2. leveling up
STFs and ground in general are not good to level up, so , to do so, they do patrols ... and grinding dilithium is never bad all times of the season.
The queues are dead and puging advance is still quite pointless with crystalline catastrophe the one exception. No word from cryptic so it might be working as intended? If so that's pretty sad.
Empty queues mean casuals have nothing to do. Whales can't show off all the gear they bought. The game dies because there's nothing to hold anyone's interest.
Yeah , except in STO , many a whale lives in their own self-segregated community ... , be they Fleets , high DPS channels or PVP players .
It never happened i tell you not a single Q has died, everything is just fine in the continuum, now if you would excuse me, I have business to attend to on Kabali Prime...
The battlezones are probably next in line to be nerfed so it fits in with their metrics. I wouldn't remind them of it too much. If it spikes in their metrics guaranteed nerf.
That why they changed the Borg elites, they rewarded disproportionally more than the other queues based on a time/reward metric.
They may feel the changes to current end game last but I think they feel it eventually.
Well I cant's speak for every Fleet certainly , but apart from the many similar sentiments that are expressed on the forums as well , some fleets have the "we shall overcome" attitude ... , along with "Cryptic has to wake up eventually" .
Heck , Jupiter Force had a public event this weekend , so it seems to me some ppl are trying to generate fun (much like the VPVP channel) in places where Cryptic dropped the ball .
I just hope we won't have to wait for some Quarterly revenue statistic before the changes and award reversals take place .
Or a way to artificially beef up their login metrics. If players have been boycotting heavily and numbers dropping at such a crucial time, they need to lure people back in somehow. If only to show the PWE bosses running things how 'healthy' and active the playerbase is.
Well I cant's speak for every Fleet certainly , but apart from the many similar sentiments that are expressed on the forums as well , some fleets have the "we shall overcome" attitude ... , along with "Cryptic has to wake up eventually" .
Seems to reflect the ones Im in pretty well but even in there players act differently. For the most part when they look at pve endgame they tend to me. B4 DR there was never an issue to carry any group through an stf with 1-2 good players in team. Now its a mess. While advanced groups can deal with the advanced contend easily weak teams dont bother trying.
Whats so sad to see is that the so called average team, a mixed group seems to suffer the most.
And as this thread is titled, simply taking 2 fleeties and going on a pug has become almost no option anymore.
Problem with that is the direction of the expansion is not a new or a stand-alone concept.
For the past 2 years they have consistently reduced or even just deleted all features they felt benefit the players.
Starting out with eSTF that used to drop everything for free put behind time-gates and a 30,000 dil price tag per drop - that sort has consistently happened to every feature in the whole game but it did take them 2 years to do to everything.
When you look it over you will see quite clearly it's everything ranging from doff upgrinder to vendor trash to exploration to leveling through mirror event to running alts.
The only thing they all had in common was benefiting the players.
It's been so dramatic and significant that everything in the whole game has been reduced to useless - the queues' nerf of dil for example is the 3rd pass nerf of dil with a huge increase in work load.
For the most parts all those terrible decisions were coped with, developers were what you had to live with - if you could - and now it's to the point there is nothing left in the game, not even the queues.
I cleaned out my locker today, put all mail items in inventory to prep for long time in-activity - haven't played one single map since the japori block and nerf, nor will I.
This recent waste of our time just about does it.
As much as I was willing to cope with them deleting mirror event, tour the galaxy, upgrinder, exploration, console fabrication, doff colonization etc. etc. I now want it back.
I want our dil from the queues back and I want our drops on eSTF pre s.7 back.
This is no longer about the levels they stole from people but about everything they've stolen over the course of 2½ years.
It's scary how much I agree with all of this .
Not so much with the wanting it all back (not because I don't wan't it , but because I see it as likely as I see the old STF'S returning) -- but as to the rest of it ... -- that is what (sadly) Taco's & Jem Jamz's pretty art hid for far too long .
It's all there , all the theft we had to put up with "for our benefit" in one single post .
... I'm sure stuff is missing , like the removal of our Rep powers that only allow us to slot a few , but the gist of it is there ... .
10,000,000 people could have logged in over the weekend. It doesn't mean diddly if none of those people bought anything.
think some do forget that and being online and buying nothing cost cryptic/PWE money someone got to pay to keep the server going electricity is not free
Crypic: "Look we made the STF's and other endgame content harder for you!"
Players: "But we can't finish them, they have too many HP's our ships can't manage that!"
Cryptic: "but look we've added a nice new crafting system to get your gear up to Mk XIV epic quality"
Players: "but we can't afford to use the crafting system, we need resources but those are locked behind the new harder STFs. How do we get good rewards to pay for the crafting!"
Cryptic: "look the new harder STFs pay out the best rewards, they will pay your way"
Players: "........!
Endless loop ensues.....
.
At this point more then a few players are at this point :
Players: "Cryptic , do you see this mint $10 ?"
Cryptic: "Yes we do . Please buy Zen ."
Players: "We would rather torch this bill then buy Zen." /$10 bill gets set afire/
Cryptic: "Would you like a Zen discount , or some free Lobi perhaps ?"
Yes you are right. Queues look empty. Takes me ages to get into a pug group. Lots of admirals forced into early retirement because of the idiotic reward nerfs and balance not to mention the annoying bugs. My pet bug is the one where the power tray disappears whenever I go to a ground mission.
Every time I've logged in I see those announcements that some player has gotten the new lock box ship popping up what seems like every two or three minutes. So a lot of people are still spending money.
as you ppl love to so point out you get lockbox key by grind oh then you got the one with one bill EC on multiple toons
10,000,000 people could have logged in over the weekend. It doesn't mean diddly if none of those people bought anything.
If those theoretical ppl would each have made some Dil during the Dil weekend , which would at a later date would have fueled the game's Dil based economy + they would have provided the owners of Zen an opportunity for lower Dil exchange rates .
I didn't read the whole thread so I apologize if this was mentioned before.
Isn't it possible that with the recent changes in both difficulty and the ability to grief teams by deliberately failing optionals that players have chosen to exercise the option of forming private teams rather than risk the queues to saddle them with unprepared puggers or worse griefers?
I didn't read the whole thread so I apologize if this was mentioned before.
Isn't it possible that with the recent changes in both difficulty and the ability to grief teams by deliberately failing optionals that players have chosen to exercise the option of forming private teams rather than risk the queues to saddle them with unprepared puggers or worse griefers?
Thought so as well but the endgame options as in space pve have come to a such sad state that everyone not contributing some 10k dps is basically grieving.
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It's scary how much I agree with all of this .
Not so much with the wanting it all back (not because I don't wan't it , but because I see it as likely as I see the old STF'S returning) -- but as to the rest of it ... -- that is what (sadly) Taco's & Jem Jamz's pretty art hid for far too long .
It's all there , all the theft we had to put up with "for our benefit" in one single post .
... I'm sure stuff is missing , like the removal of our Rep powers that only allow us to slot a few , but the gist of it is there ... .
Don't forget Club 47 and Deja Q. Pretty art doesn't do it for me when there is nothing left to do in the game due to the Dilithium and loot rewards being so completely shafted. I definitely agree with the post you quoted as well.
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Comments
Think that one alone would be the greatest improvement which could be done and I do believe it would solve a lot of other problems on the fly.
I for one never had to worry about XP the past few years when I was able to run end game the way it way available. Same counted for Dil and marks.
Players seem to have REJECTED the advanced contend on a large scale.
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Where do you see that massive drop-off in those charts?
The only thing I see isthat since LOR, the player numbers over all have dropped after a good increase, and now there is another spike around the time of Delta Rising.
The player numbers are now still better than the preceding weeks.
LOR had 2,656.1 players on average in its month on release, DR has 2,499.8 (but DR has not yet had a full month.)
I dont think the relevant numbers are the ones from the moth of an actual release but rather those from the moth after the release.
New stuff always attracts players, question is if its good enough to keep em in game.
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On average. With DR you would expect a big spike on average, right?
I had switched to Dyson ground, Nukara ground, Romulus ground/tau dewa patrol, Dyson sphere Undine battleground, and whatever borg red alerts I stumble across/defari. I swing by and do the fleet daily, and...hit a part of the delta patrol/episodes for the bonus mark box when I'm in the area.
What I do depends on where my characters happen to be and, what...if any, marks they are out of.
Instead of various queues, a half dozen times a day (per character (5)), I do what's handy and play the exchange market.
Sarah Knightly - Co-leader; Frontier Explorers - U.S.S. Witchblade
Rias Gremory - Leader; Frontier Marauders - I.K.S. B'ullwinkle
Well if the idea is to turn STO into an "events only" type of game , then it's clearly on the right path ... .
Cryptic *is* labeled PWE's R&D arm , and the nonpaying F2P players *are* a part of the product , so I would not be all too surprised to see that this is all in all just one more "research project" .
I would suggest looking at the whole picture, looking at the numbers critically, and as "indicators" (i.e. that's only Steam but it is indicative of movements up or down, and proportionally between one period and another).
The top graph shows the "highest number on at once" and from that you can see a large hump with a long 'tail' to the right showing that LoR had the highest total on plus a long time (two months) to lose that. This seems to have been the model they should have built upon to maintain momentum.
December/January and May seem to be the Winter event/Summer event 'humps', that likewise show a lower, yet still sustained, hump each.
There's a tiny hump (hover over to see Sep 1) which I suspect is the R&D launch.
Then there's the latest hump, which shows a two-week rise to the mid-5ks, followed by a tail right down to mid-4ks (which was the level of the winter and summer events but these were sustained).
On these "Highest players on at one time" then LoR was far more successful than the DR two week hump. Looking at these figures, the drop-off from last week to this week is something like 18 percent.
Looking at Average Players is a bit difficult because we're within that DR hump at the moment. If we were to take May 2013 as LoR's main period and "Last 30 days" as DR's, then LoR was still more successful by about five percent. Yet, reading together with the upper graph, it appears that LoR had a longer tail as DR seems to be dropping off already into "summer event" territory.
If you click into "Seven Days" and compare hour-on-hour, there also appears to be a fairly steady drop-off in login status. Ditto with "One Month" but it starts getting tricky to read there because the points are so close together.
Of course, the success also depends on "who" logged in, how much was spent in dollar terms, costs of the various 'launches' to determine an actual percentage Return on Investment. These are figures we simply don't have. However, the figures we do have (as limited as they are) suggest that LoR was most successful at gaining and maintaining momentum for at least a little time, and that DR seems to have suffered both from an inability to reach LoR's top-level of engagement, as well as potentially suffering from an early heavy drop-off in player interest.
Time will tell but these figures wouldn't make me say that DR is any sort of unqualified success, and I'd go further and say that if that drop-off is allowed to continue, DR will be a minor blip in STO's history of highlights.
Because I guess people, right now, are busy doing 2 things:
1. grinding delta marks
2. leveling up
STFs and ground in general are not good to level up, so , to do so, they do patrols ... and grinding dilithium is never bad all times of the season.
I thought that was Priority 1's intro theme ...
Yeah , except in STO , many a whale lives in their own self-segregated community ... , be they Fleets , high DPS channels or PVP players .
*giggles*
They may feel the changes to current end game last but I think they feel it eventually.
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Heh ... keep asking for that and they will equalize Dyson ground with space ... .
That why they changed the Borg elites, they rewarded disproportionally more than the other queues based on a time/reward metric.
Well I cant's speak for every Fleet certainly , but apart from the many similar sentiments that are expressed on the forums as well , some fleets have the "we shall overcome" attitude ... , along with "Cryptic has to wake up eventually" .
Heck , Jupiter Force had a public event this weekend , so it seems to me some ppl are trying to generate fun (much like the VPVP channel) in places where Cryptic dropped the ball .
I just hope we won't have to wait for some Quarterly revenue statistic before the changes and award reversals take place .
Well yes and no .
An expected / preforming spike @ content release can be seen as an expected spike in revenue .
In our case , with the decline in player base , the reverse may be true .
Seems to reflect the ones Im in pretty well but even in there players act differently. For the most part when they look at pve endgame they tend to me. B4 DR there was never an issue to carry any group through an stf with 1-2 good players in team. Now its a mess. While advanced groups can deal with the advanced contend easily weak teams dont bother trying.
Whats so sad to see is that the so called average team, a mixed group seems to suffer the most.
And as this thread is titled, simply taking 2 fleeties and going on a pug has become almost no option anymore.
I'm afraid many players would be gone by then.
Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.
They messed with STFs most favorite content in the game.
Now over 75% of the players are upset.
Don't mess with the STFs.
Now is the time to change the STF rewards back.
It's scary how much I agree with all of this .
Not so much with the wanting it all back (not because I don't wan't it , but because I see it as likely as I see the old STF'S returning) -- but as to the rest of it ... -- that is what (sadly) Taco's & Jem Jamz's pretty art hid for far too long .
It's all there , all the theft we had to put up with "for our benefit" in one single post .
... I'm sure stuff is missing , like the removal of our Rep powers that only allow us to slot a few , but the gist of it is there ... .
think some do forget that and being online and buying nothing cost cryptic/PWE money someone got to pay to keep the server going electricity is not free
system Lord Baal is dead
At this point more then a few players are at this point :
Players: "Cryptic , do you see this mint $10 ?"
Cryptic: "Yes we do . Please buy Zen ."
Players: "We would rather torch this bill then buy Zen." /$10 bill gets set afire/
Cryptic: "Would you like a Zen discount , or some free Lobi perhaps ?"
Players: "........
.... not so endless loop ensues.....
as you ppl love to so point out you get lockbox key by grind
system Lord Baal is dead
If those theoretical ppl would each have made some Dil during the Dil weekend , which would at a later date would have fueled the game's Dil based economy + they would have provided the owners of Zen an opportunity for lower Dil exchange rates .
Sadly none of that happened ... in theory .
ya i dont buy in to that
system Lord Baal is dead
Thought so as well but the endgame options as in space pve have come to a such sad state that everyone not contributing some 10k dps is basically grieving.
Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.
Don't forget Club 47 and Deja Q. Pretty art doesn't do it for me when there is nothing left to do in the game due to the Dilithium and loot rewards being so completely shafted. I definitely agree with the post you quoted as well.
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We only did one over the weekend as we all busy leveling ALTs.
With new content and the need to level one would think people are busy.
Now the entire difficulty fiscal sure killed off a lot players.
We lost 5 or so players who said they changed the STFs.
75% of all people in the world don't like change, who knew players are people.