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Are enough people still playing?
kthang
Member Posts: 172 Arc User
Took a six month break, just checking in every now and then and today even with the summer event the game looks more desolate than ever. Counted roughly 3600 people on Risa, 600 at ESD/Academy and 200 at Qo'nos. Are there anywhere near 10-20k players on the server at peak times these days? Looking at the queues I wonder if it is even possible to play these any more?
This is just an observation and question really, no doom'n'gloom.
This is just an observation and question really, no doom'n'gloom.
Post edited by kthang on
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Are enough people still playing...for what?
For the game to exist? Yes.
For them to make new content? Yes.
For there to be people to queue with? Yes, depending on which queues are want to do, as always.
The-Grand-Nagus
Join Date: Sep 2008
DOOOM!
It's time to sing the Doom Song!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sY278K4ljWs
as far as I know... there is people, and if there is people... you have a game... and if you have a game... you can play it... and if you can play it... you are at least making money... and if your making money... there is a game... see where I am going... itz an infinite loop...
but yer... there are people... still... until the game closes... thats for sure...
The queues are a different issue. I would say for the first couple weeks of Risa don't bother except for crystalline and the new Iconian ones.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
For them to make new content, that is good. Though a low server population really affect the queues. I personally love playing those, and Mine Trap is one of my all time favorites but that hasn't really happened in over a year. And there are quite a few of those empty ones.
I really wonder why not just take the ones that does not see any activity out of the game and refresh them with new ones or just cut down on the number of queues altogether to fit with a low-population game.
Thank you, this is the kind of answer I was looking for.
Rather than *removing* queues, I would prefer if they created a bonus reward system and just rotated all the queues through the system. That way all of the queues would still be there for anyone who wanted to try to create a private group if there weren't enough people to pug, but it would also make certain queues more popular while they have the bonus. If we had that type of system, whenever Mine Trap of your other favorites had the bonus, you would almost certainly have plenty of people to play with.
The-Grand-Nagus
Join Date: Sep 2008
Yes i know it was my bridge , but I should have seen one other person
Another time for steam charts:
http://steamcharts.com/app/9900#1y
Not bad...same as always but not as great as pre DR of last October.
I like this idea. I really wish they found some way of revitalizing the old classics a bit, then again perhaps we'd end up like at the beginning when people had no clue which sector they belonged to and we'd have two sectors heavily defended and two lost from the start. ;-D
But... but... what about... Dr. Doom's Doom Ray of Doom?
This seems very low.
I've heard that in MMOs, the average playtime is generally around 20 hours a week but the median playtime per player is around 2 hours.
We had queues during the DR event.
The big impression I'm getting is that desktop MMOs as a whole ARE hurting. However, MOBAs are doing WORSE and the competition is too fierce on app games for it to be as worthwhile as most Wall Street investors think. Over the last year, PWE's investors wanted them out of desktop as much as possible and into mobile and I THINK Michael Chi is determined to buy his company out and take them private because he recognizes:
A) PWE's strengths and competencies are not in mobile and doing mobile basically means so much subcontracting expertise and services they don't have internally that they make no money from it.
I don't think the doors on STO are in real danger of closing anytime soon in part because an MMO is scaleable. It'd be more likely to see Cryptic get sold and a buyer would want their operation intact and live. I might be more worried about Champs; I think they've scaled about as much as they can. STO lost some employees over the last year in layoffs but they're nowhere near the skeleton crew from the content drought.
I did various forms of guessing/tabulating around F2P launch and I guessed around 300k players a month then from reverse engineering lockbox drops, people who did instance counting, etc. Thing is, MMOs are volatile. Even sub games like WoW may have around 50% churn. The amazing thing there is that while their old boast of 12 million was a bit cooked as a stat, there probably are tens of millions in the U.S. alone who played it at least for a month. They're at about 60% of what they were at 5 years ago in terms of players.
I'd guess STO has around 150k players. Maybe about 7-8k who spend money directly.
There's going to be a new dominant desktop online game form in the next 5 years if desktop survives. For a variety of reasons, I think that will be a drift away from MOBAs and facebook games and back towards virtual worlds -- but it won't be exactly MMORPGs. In part because virtual worlds are a competency of the desktop. You can support mobile type games for desktop as a developer but that erodes the advantage and the market for desktop games. The core strength of desktop games is that users have insane amounts of RAM compared to mobile and console.
I think for desktop publishers to really exploit their platform though vs. the next gen of consoles (which finally have 4+ GBs of RAM), we're going to need for the next generation of desktop games to be absolute RAM hogs. Games that target to have 8GB+ of RAM. Which means persuading PC owners to upgrade en masse (a tricky proposition) or...
This is going to sound nutty.
You know how companies are moving towards platforms like Steam and ARC? Also, mobile authenticators due to account hacking?
Here's my prediction:
USB 3.0 "mini consoles" will be the endgame of services like ARC. And they'll have something like 6-8GB of RAM soddered into the device, engineered to be exclusive for use in their particular services (kind of like how a Chromebook works but as a device peripheral).
So you might have an ARC Card with a ton of RAM hard-soddered into it that is used exclusively for ARC services, including maybe a limited web browser partnered with a single VOD service provider like Hulu or Yahoo Screen or Amazon (who will foot some of the bill for the peripheral). And a built-in authenticator, of course.
Each game publisher will have one. You'll probably be able to play traditionally for a long while but basic RAM requirements will go up on newer games, at a massive rate, because that's the big way desktop companies can compete will be to design RAM hog games. Consoles could theoretically do the same but will be more of a closed shop.
You won the i-net imo. Lol!
eh, averrage players for May were down 15% from a year ago, peak players down 20%, thats a lot of players. That is before the usual summer drop-off in June/July. Risa stopped the bleeding (for now; all the events for the past 6 months have had very short bumps, people aren't staying through the events anymore, so the Risa bump may turn out to be quite small). They better have something big in the pipe, and soon.
Cryptic wanted to make it more grindy, the gameplay doesn't justify the effort
Depending on your hour when you took the numbers. Many people could be at work, school, college classes, or took off somewhere. Some places are out for the summer so they could be vacationing. Other parts of the world they could be sleeping and doing the same.
USS Casinghead NCC 92047 launched 2350
Fleet Admiral Stowe - Dominion War Vet.
10pm CEST, prime time Europe. It is when most people are online before falling down drunk later on. World of tanks had 178k logged in on EU1/EU2 at the same hour, which is a fairly normal evening.
Yeah, not to mention some of the gamers might be getting lucky! Oh wait, we are talking about gamers...
<sniff> I miss Gir.
Originally Posted by pwlaughingtrendy
Network engineers are not ship designers.
Nor should they be. Their ships would look weird.
The queue problem is a complicated problem when you got public and private queues, time issues, event issues.
STFs requires very few people to start. The problem is if you can find those right type of people during the time you are playing it. There is always a chance that stuff like Mine Trap are being done while you are sleeping by a group of people. Or if you are doing it at the same time zone, these people are not doing in public queues or if not just finished it when you started looking. This is regardless if the the STF is old.
Players need to start looking for groups especially for old queues to play with or if you want adjust the time you play.
Those who complain about queues just want to be spoonfed in playing queues and force everyone to play at their time of choosing and their STF of choosing rather than adjusting to what, how and when the community plays.
I agree. The removal of hourly bonuses really changed how I personally play the game. I use to get on check the hourly bonuses and play around that. I played very often during the bonus mark event often joining a lot of qs. Now I basically play by myself. It might as well be a single player game.
The P1 team already suggested to Geko the rotating calendar / award system (that we had in the past) , but he nixed it .
Question is why ?
His ego & hatred of anything precived as "old content" ?
The inability to think of anything without the term "new system required" attached ?
Or was there a downside to the old calendar system that we don't know about ?
... who knows , maybe with the new hosts, P1 will do something different and go at it again on this topic ...
you need to get out more, find some friends to ask to your bridge. Imaginary ones don't count.