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Worlds continuing to drop in population?


Acheron.4731

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@"Sovereign.1093" said:games bleed over time. and gw2 bleeds by losing players. its the wayThis is simply untrue. I don't get why that line of thinking keeps popping back up every now and then.

World of Warcraft may be a poor comparison to GW2 when it comes to prospective players counts. However, being the biggest and among the oldest fish around makes WoW a very good example of how MMO works. It took five years for WoW to reach its peak. Since then, the game may no longer have climbed endlessly but there were still as many players in 2016 as there were in 2006. Instead, the best conclusion to draw from the data is that the quality of the continued development of an MMO has a large impact on numbers of players. When there have been bad updates players have been leaving. When there have been good updates players have come back. If there are no updates players tend to leave and if there is competition players may leave and either/or come back depending more on how the former game does than how the new.

b0j1aag43j821.jpg

It goes completely in line with what the genre is all about, continued development, that the quality and reception of the continued content is what affects player data first and foremost. Many other MMO display similar statistics, just not with the same volume and stability over time. So bad MMO tends to die because the core game is bad. Good MMO tends to die when there is a drought in quality updates. GW2 has a proven good core game. It isn't the problem.

This also suggests a couple of simple things. If ArenaNet stops drinking their own kool-aid and actually accomplishes good things player numbers will improve. If they accomplish good things for WvW then the player numbers in the mode will improve. If they accomplish good things for guilds in WvW then the player numbers of players in guilds will improve.

That's the big thing with this thread, with the "my server"-threads, the "grrr linking"-threads and with Alliances. The trend that people in general here seems to have a very hard time to understand is not necessarily that total player numbers are hemorrhaging. The problem is rather what this picture from the Alliance announcement lets us illustrate.

a3c5eWvW_image1.png

The problem is that players in the blue and the orange have been hemorrhaging and have been replaced by players in the green. The total is likely a deficit, the mode is shrinking, but the big problematic drain is that the few changes that have been made over time and the neglect in general have caused balance issues between the orange, blue and green dots (updates have been vastly insufficient and when attention has been given it has often focused on green dots, which is a problem). The Warclaw is a typical green-dot update (and thus is also mostly a divise topic of discussion among green-dot players).

The problem is that the orange and blue constitues the vast majority of content production in the game mode. Among the green are anonymous pickup players and solo roamers. Among them only the solo roamers produce content and they are rather few. The green dots in total are not few. They may even be a majority today but that is the problem since they make up such a small portion of the content production. They are primarily consumers of content. That is regardless of whether the content is private or public. The blue and orange constitutes the vast majority of both untagged content, closed tagged content and openly tagged content.

That is also what the player migrations are all about. They are about blue (and orange) players moving away from green players to regain access to a higher degree of blue (and orange) players. To shake off a green majority. Then the new server stacks to full as green players follow. That is the problem we are facing right now. It adds to the general issues because every time a migration happens and blue (or orange) players get jammed up in the migration you also risk losing those players, adding to the loss of blue-orange players who create content (with other blue-orange players).

That is also the problem that Alliances faces now that it has taken such an incredibly long time to complete (or even talk about) the project. The blue-orange population is growing so small that even in a cloud (world, server) like in the picture they may risk making up a minority on most (if not all) clouds by the time that the project reaches completion and that means that the same situation we have now risks being recreated with an insufficient minority being relied upon to create content for the cloud.

The mode hinges on far more of the green dots turning into blue and orange dots over time. That is what will turn the negative spiral into a positive spiral again. That will improve the mode. That will improve the game and so forth.

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As a little addendum: This can be used to analyze any current stacks (at least in EU, I do not know enough about NA to be accurate). They are almost always stacked by relatively small GvG guilds first, larger "fight" guilds second, players within the loosely defined communities of those groups third and everyone else last. I'm just not going to spend time doing it since some people likes to play the "matchup card" to lock threads, delete posts and waste our effort.

A rather new occurence is that some fight guilds are now comparatively large enough (note: the guilds have not grown) to stack smaller servers alone. However, those secondary or tertiary stacks in no way shape or form compares to the stacks proper. They may not be falling far behind in numbers on the server transfer list but they tend to be far behind in terms of content (both quantity and quality) and matchups between them are rarely good.

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@subversiontwo.7501 said:

@"Sovereign.1093" said:games bleed over time. and gw2 bleeds by losing players. its the wayThis is simply untrue. I don't get why that line of thinking keeps popping back up every now and then.

World of Warcraft may be a poor comparison to GW2 when it comes to prospective players counts. However, being the biggest and among the oldest fish around makes WoW a very good example of how MMO works. It took five years for WoW to reach its peak. Since then, the game may no longer have climbed endlessly but there were still as many players in 2016 as there were in 2006. Instead, the best conclusion to draw from the data is that the quality of the continued development of an MMO has a large impact on numbers of players. When there have been bad updates players have been leaving. When there have been good updates players have come back. If there are no updates players tend to leave and if there is competition players may leave and either/or come back depending more on how the former game does than how the new.

b0j1aag43j821.jpg

It goes completely in line with what the genre is all about, continued development, that the quality and reception of the continued content is what affects player data first and foremost. Many other MMO display similar statistics, just not with the same volume and stability over time. So bad MMO tends to die because the core game is bad. Good MMO tends to die when there is a drought in quality updates. GW2 has a proven good core game. It isn't the problem.

This also suggests a couple of simple things. If ArenaNet stops drinking their own kool-aid and actually accomplishes good things player numbers will improve. If they accomplish good things for WvW then the player numbers in the mode will improve. If they accomplish good things for guilds in WvW then the player numbers of players in guilds will improve.

That's the big thing with this thread, with the "my server"-threads, the "grrr linking"-threads and with Alliances. The trend that people in general here seems to have a very hard time to understand is not necessarily that total player numbers are hemorrhaging. The problem is rather what this picture from the Alliance announcement lets us illustrate.

a3c5eWvW_image1.png

The problem is that players in the blue and the orange have been hemorrhaging and have been replaced by players in the green. The total is likely a deficit, the mode is shrinking, but the big problematic drain is that the few changes that have been made over time and the neglect in general have caused balance issues between the orange, blue and green dots (updates have been vastly insufficient and when attention has been given it has often focused on green dots, which is a problem). The Warclaw is a typical green-dot update (and thus is also mostly a divise topic of discussion among green-dot players).

The problem is that the orange and blue constitues the vast majority of content production in the game mode. Among the green are anonymous pickup players and solo roamers. Among them only the solo roamers produce content and they are rather few. The green dots in total are not few. They may even be a majority today but that is the problem since they make up such a small portion of the content production. They are primarily consumers of content. That is regardless of whether the content is private or public. The blue and orange constitutes the vast majority of both untagged content, closed tagged content and openly tagged content.

That is also what the player migrations are all about. They are about blue (and orange) players moving away from green players to regain access to a higher degree of blue (and orange) players. To shake off a green majority. Then the new server stacks to full as green players follow. That is the problem we are facing right now. It adds to the general issues because every time a migration happens and blue (or orange) players get jammed up in the migration you also risk losing those players, adding to the loss of blue-orange players who create content (with other blue-orange players).

That is also the problem that Alliances faces now that it has taken such an incredibly long time to complete (or even talk about) the project. The blue-orange population is growing so small that even in a cloud (world, server) like in the picture they may risk making up a minority on most (if not all) clouds by the time that the project reaches completion and that means that the same situation we have now risks being recreated with an insufficient minority being relied upon to create content for the cloud.

The mode hinges on far more of the green dots turning into blue and orange dots over time. That is what will turn the negative spiral into a positive spiral again. That will improve the mode. That will improve the game and so forth.

show me that the wvw population is increasing. :) i am willing to change my position if u got evidence. else, i stick with my idea that games bleed players over time.

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@Sovereign.1093 said:

@Sovereign.1093 said:games bleed over time. and gw2 bleeds by losing players. its the wayThis is simply untrue. I don't get why that line of thinking keeps popping back up every now and then.

World of Warcraft may be a poor comparison to GW2 when it comes to prospective players counts. However, being the biggest and among the oldest fish around makes WoW a very good example of how MMO works. It took five years for WoW to reach its peak. Since then, the game may no longer have climbed endlessly but there were still as many players in 2016 as there were in 2006. Instead, the best conclusion to draw from the data is that the quality of the continued development of an MMO has a large impact on numbers of players. When there have been bad updates players have been leaving. When there have been good updates players have come back. If there are no updates players tend to leave and if there is competition players may leave and either/or come back depending more on how the former game does than how the new.

b0j1aag43j821.jpg

It goes completely in line with what the genre is all about, continued development, that the quality and reception of the continued content is what affects player data first and foremost. Many other MMO display similar statistics, just not with the same volume and stability over time. So bad MMO tends to die because the core game is bad. Good MMO tends to die when there is a drought in quality updates. GW2 has a proven good core game. It isn't the problem.

This also suggests a couple of simple things. If ArenaNet stops drinking their own kool-aid and actually accomplishes good things player numbers will improve. If they accomplish good things for WvW then the player numbers in the mode will improve. If they accomplish good things for guilds in WvW then the player numbers of players in guilds will improve.

That's the big thing with this thread, with the "my server"-threads, the "grrr linking"-threads and with Alliances. The trend that people in general here seems to have a very hard time to understand is not necessarily that total player numbers are hemorrhaging. The problem is rather what this picture from the Alliance announcement lets us illustrate.

a3c5eWvW_image1.png

The problem is that players in the blue and the orange have been hemorrhaging and have been replaced by players in the green. The total is likely a deficit, the mode is shrinking, but the big problematic drain is that the few changes that have been made over time and the neglect in general have caused balance issues between the orange, blue and green dots (updates have been vastly insufficient and when attention has been given it has often focused on green dots, which is a problem). The Warclaw is a typical green-dot update (and thus is also mostly a divise topic of discussion among green-dot players).

The problem is that the orange and blue constitues the vast majority of content production in the game mode. Among the green are anonymous pickup players and solo roamers. Among them only the solo roamers produce content and they are rather few. The green dots in total are not few. They may even be a majority today but that is the problem since they make up such a small portion of the content production. They are primarily consumers of content. That is regardless of whether the content is private or public. The blue and orange constitutes the vast majority of both untagged content, closed tagged content and openly tagged content.

That is also what the player migrations are all about. They are about blue (and orange) players moving away from green players to regain access to a higher degree of blue (and orange) players. To shake off a green majority. Then the new server stacks to full as green players follow. That is the problem we are facing right now. It adds to the general issues because every time a migration happens and blue (or orange) players get jammed up in the migration you also risk losing those players, adding to the loss of blue-orange players who create content (with other blue-orange players).

That is also the problem that Alliances faces now that it has taken such an incredibly long time to complete (or even talk about) the project. The blue-orange population is growing so small that even in a cloud (world, server) like in the picture they may risk making up a minority on most (if not all) clouds by the time that the project reaches completion and that means that the same situation we have now risks being recreated with an insufficient minority being relied upon to create content for the cloud.

The mode hinges on far more of the green dots turning into blue and orange dots over time. That is what will turn the negative spiral into a positive spiral again. That will improve the mode. That will improve the game and so forth.

show me that the wvw population is increasing. :) i am willing to change my position if u got evidence. else, i stick with my idea that games bleed players over time.The "evidence" that you are looking for is in the post or you can simply Google "MMO data points" or "online game data points". Some companies release official data, others list concurrent users and for other games less reliable metrics are used. However, in most cases you are unlikely to see a slope and more likely to see a bough with fluctuations throughout the bough. If you see that, that is my point illustrated in a diagram.

No one is making the argument that the WvW population is increasing. It is decreasing. However, I am making the argument that it is decreasing far more over the blue and orange colored subsets of the WvW playerbase than over the green. At the same time, I am making the argument that the diagrams look the way that they do because games do not naturally bleed out. There is no linear (or close to linear) relationship between initial release and decrement. Instead, when MMO games (and game modes) recieve regular and good updates then player numbers rise. GW2 WvW has not recieved regular or good updates and as a result the playerbase has been declining. So we agree that the playerbase is decreasing, you are just wrong about the reason as to why or the potential of changing that trend :) .

Simply put, natural bleed-out makes good updates pointless. Metrics across the genre suggests that good updates are essential and effective.

 

The shelf life of MMO with good core gameplay out there also suggests that good updates are essential and effective. If you look at this overview for example (I can't attest to its voracity or metrics, but just let it be an example of an article and how the discourse goes), you will see that there are games released in 2003 and 2004 that are still as big as GW2 and GW2 is still the fourth largest MMO on the market despite being 7 years old and still relatively equal in size to all of it's more recently released direct competition (ESO, BDO, AA and FFXIV). FFXIV is considered to do unusually well and is only 20% larger than GW2 by the estimates of that article. So, the PvP game modes in GW2 for example only need to affect some 100k players to make a difference that essentially spans the top 10 MMO list. The decline of the PvP modes thus means the decline of the game whereas the reinvigoration of the PvP modes could mean that GW2 regains its rightful place at the #2 spot. GW2 is enough of a better core game than ESO and FFXIV to reclaim that spot. Reclaiming that spot and being the #2 alternative to WoW will regain attention and spiral more players in and overall the game will be considered very healthy within the genre. Has GW2 lost up to 100k players in WvW and sPvP due to years of neglect? Yes, that is pretty likely. Are there 100k players who languish in the large-scale or open-world PvP subsets of other games that could be convinced to play GW2 WvW if the core issues in it were properly adressed? Yes, that is almost a certain. There are 300k "WvW" players in EVE Online alone, then take all those who enjoy RvR gameplay in ESO or AA or battlegrounds in WoW and you can easily see where simple potential lies. Then there's the people who follow New World, Crowfall, CA or whatever else. Also, while some people suggests that WvW players do not buy in the gem store enough so they are taxed through aggressive monetization instead, I believe that WvW players are more likely to buy stuff in the gem store than the player who logs in every two months to play through the free story. There may be casual players who are very invested in their accounts and characters, but the type of player who only enjoys the bi-monthly LW cadence is hardly them. The kind of casual who represents the current design direction is logically not the kind of casual that buys stuff.

 

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@subversiontwo.7501 said:

@Sovereign.1093 said:games bleed over time. and gw2 bleeds by losing players. its the wayThis is simply untrue. I don't get why that line of thinking keeps popping back up every now and then.

World of Warcraft may be a poor comparison to GW2 when it comes to prospective players counts. However, being the biggest and among the oldest fish around makes WoW a very good example of how MMO works. It took five years for WoW to reach its peak. Since then, the game may no longer have climbed endlessly but there were still as many players in 2016 as there were in 2006. Instead, the best conclusion to draw from the data is that the quality of the continued development of an MMO has a large impact on numbers of players. When there have been bad updates players have been leaving. When there have been good updates players have come back. If there are no updates players tend to leave and if there is competition players may leave and either/or come back depending more on how the former game does than how the new.

b0j1aag43j821.jpg

It goes completely in line with what the genre is all about, continued development, that the quality and reception of the continued content is what affects player data first and foremost. Many other MMO display similar statistics, just not with the same volume and stability over time. So bad MMO tends to die because the core game is bad. Good MMO tends to die when there is a drought in quality updates. GW2 has a proven good core game. It isn't the problem.

This also suggests a couple of simple things. If ArenaNet stops drinking their own kool-aid and actually accomplishes good things player numbers will improve. If they accomplish good things for WvW then the player numbers in the mode will improve. If they accomplish good things for guilds in WvW then the player numbers of players in guilds will improve.

That's the big thing with this thread, with the "my server"-threads, the "grrr linking"-threads and with Alliances. The trend that people in general here seems to have a very hard time to understand is not necessarily that total player numbers are hemorrhaging. The problem is rather what this picture from the Alliance announcement lets us illustrate.

a3c5eWvW_image1.png

The problem is that players in the blue and the orange have been hemorrhaging and have been replaced by players in the green. The total is likely a deficit, the mode is shrinking, but the big problematic drain is that the few changes that have been made over time and the neglect in general have caused balance issues between the orange, blue and green dots (updates have been vastly insufficient and when attention has been given it has often focused on green dots, which is a problem). The Warclaw is a typical green-dot update (and thus is also mostly a divise topic of discussion among green-dot players).

The problem is that the orange and blue constitues the vast majority of content production in the game mode. Among the green are anonymous pickup players and solo roamers. Among them only the solo roamers produce content and they are rather few. The green dots in total are not few. They may even be a majority today but that is the problem since they make up such a small portion of the content production. They are primarily consumers of content. That is regardless of whether the content is private or public. The blue and orange constitutes the vast majority of both untagged content, closed tagged content and openly tagged content.

That is also what the player migrations are all about. They are about blue (and orange) players moving away from green players to regain access to a higher degree of blue (and orange) players. To shake off a green majority. Then the new server stacks to full as green players follow. That is the problem we are facing right now. It adds to the general issues because every time a migration happens and blue (or orange) players get jammed up in the migration you also risk losing those players, adding to the loss of blue-orange players who create content (with other blue-orange players).

That is also the problem that Alliances faces now that it has taken such an incredibly long time to complete (or even talk about) the project. The blue-orange population is growing so small that even in a cloud (world, server) like in the picture they may risk making up a minority on most (if not all) clouds by the time that the project reaches completion and that means that the same situation we have now risks being recreated with an insufficient minority being relied upon to create content for the cloud.

The mode hinges on far more of the green dots turning into blue and orange dots over time. That is what will turn the negative spiral into a positive spiral again. That will improve the mode. That will improve the game and so forth.

show me that the wvw population is increasing. :) i am willing to change my position if u got evidence. else, i stick with my idea that games bleed players over time.The "evidence" that you are looking for is in the post or you can simply Google "MMO data points" or "online game data points". Some companies release official data, others list concurrent users and for other games less reliable metrics are used. However, in most cases you are unlikely to see a slope and more likely to see a bough with fluctuations throughout the bough. If you see that, that is my point illustrated in a diagram.

No one is making the argument that the WvW population is increasing. It is decreasing. However, I am making the argument that it is decreasing far more over the blue and orange colored subsets of the WvW playerbase than over the green. At the same time, I am making the argument that the diagrams look the way that they do because games do not naturally bleed out. There is no linear (or close to linear) relationship between initial release and decrement. Instead, when MMO games (and game modes) recieve regular and good updates then player numbers rise. GW2 WvW has not recieved regular or good updates and as a result the playerbase has been declining. So we agree that the playerbase is decreasing, you are just wrong about the reason as to why or the potential of changing that trend :) .

Simply put, natural bleed-out makes good updates pointless. Metrics across the genre suggests that good updates are essential and effective.

 

The shelf life of MMO with good core gameplay out there also suggests that good updates are essential and effective. If you look at
(I can't attest to its voracity or metrics, but just let it be an example of an article and how the discourse goes), you will see that there are games released in 2003 and 2004 that are still as big as GW2 and GW2 is still the fourth largest MMO on the market despite being 7 years old and still relatively equal in size to all of it's more recently released direct competition (ESO, BDO, AA and FFXIV). FFXIV is considered to do unusually well and is only 20% larger than GW2 by the estimates of that article. So, the PvP game modes in GW2 for example only need to affect some 100k players to make a difference that essentially spans the top 10 MMO list. The decline of the PvP modes thus means the decline of the game whereas the reinvigoration of the PvP modes could mean that GW2 regains its rightful place at the #2 spot. GW2 is enough of a better core game than ESO and FFXIV to reclaim that spot. Reclaiming that spot and being the #2 alternative to WoW will regain attention and spiral more players in and overall the game will be considered very healthy within the genre. Has GW2 lost up to 100k players in WvW and sPvP due to years of neglect? Yes, that is pretty likely. Are there 100k players who languish in the large-scale or open-world PvP subsets of other games that could be convinced to play GW2 WvW if the core issues in it were properly adressed? Yes, that is almost a certain. There are 300k "WvW" players in EVE Online alone, then take all those who enjoy RvR gameplay in ESO or AA or battlegrounds in WoW and you can easily see where simple potential lies. Then there's the people who follow New World, Crowfall, CA or whatever else. Also, while some people suggests that WvW players do not buy in the gem store enough so they are taxed through aggressive monetization instead, I believe that WvW players are more likely to buy stuff in the gem store than the player who logs in every two months to play through the free story. There may be casual players who are very invested in their accounts and characters, but the type of player who only enjoys the bi-monthly LW cadence is hardly them. The kind of casual who represents the current design direction is logically not the kind of casual that buys stuff.

 

if that is so, then why is wvw not populated? probably pve ppl play not in wvw but that's not the issue though - it's wvw and it's bleeding and dying.

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@subversiontwo.7501 said:

@Sovereign.1093 said:if that is so, then why is wvw not populated? probably pve ppl play not in wvw but that's not the issue though - it's wvw and it's bleeding and dying.That question, too, has already been answered above. I'm losing patience so I suggest you practise some reading.

doesn't answer my question :/ well, be impatient if you will. doesn't change facts.

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@Sovereign.1093 said:

@Sovereign.1093 said:if that is so, then why is wvw not populated? probably pve ppl play not in wvw but that's not the issue though - it's wvw and it's bleeding and dying.That question, too, has already been answered above. I'm losing patience so I suggest you practise some reading.

doesn't answer my question :/ well, be impatient if you will. doesn't change facts.Yes, it does answer your question. The answer is posted above. Since you persist I guess I'll sum it up:

WvW is losing players because there is a lack of good updates. It's at a sharper incline now because more time has passed since the last good update.

WvW is particularily losing players in the blue and orange because there has been a lack of updates targetted towards players in blue and orange.

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