Exactly. Everyone has their own opinion, and those who say "the game is ruined because of X" fail to accept that there are those who like X.
The recent AI discussions have highlighted that very well.
Been doing a bit of research, on the numbers of players /active users on the forums.
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Exactly. Everyone has their own opinion, and those who say "the game is ruined because of X" fail to accept that there are those who like X.
The recent AI discussions have highlighted that very well.
To be honest I'm not sure all this obsessing over forum stats steam stats or whatever is particularly healthy or even useful.
I mean folk seem to constantly be trying to paint a picture of the game dying.
ED has already succeeded, it's a great game, it's going to improve, that may or may not go on for another 8 years or whatever.
I mean folk seem to constantly be trying to paint a picture of the game dying.
ED has already succeeded, it's a great game, it's going to improve, that may or may not go on for another 8 years or whatever.
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Having eaten a lot of food does not make you a good restaurant critic.
Doh.
And given the limited data we users have, the popularity of CGs seems to have increased from 5-6k previously to 11k+ in the last few I've attended.
I guess the plea to add more transparancy to the game and the subsequent improvements had some real impact.
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Here are some actual numbers from Steam:
http://steamcharts.com/app/359320#All
Bear in mind however, very few people use steam as a game launcher, so this number has to be multiplied by a lot to get the real numbers.
Oh God.
Yes the game still has flaws, but then tell me a game that doesn't. Someone said it is not the game it was meant to be.....explain pls? This is a remake of the old BBC B game on steroids, Braben has made a game that HE wanted, and some of us bought into that vision on kickstarter to fund it. He has made the game , lots of us love it despite the small flaws.
If you really think the game is that flawed that is is "boring or grindy or whatever" then it clearly isn't the game for you, why whip a dead horse? Constructive criticism is one thing, trying to fundamentally change the game to something else because its isn't the game YOU want is sad and never going to happen.
I suggest moving on - and sorry to tell you this but ELITE has a cult status for many, and is the sort of long term game we will keep dipping in and out of for many years, it has a hardcore following so, I wouldn't worry too much about player numbers (I think lots play solo anyway)
If you really think the game is that flawed that is is "boring or grindy or whatever" then it clearly isn't the game for you, why whip a dead horse? Constructive criticism is one thing, trying to fundamentally change the game to something else because its isn't the game YOU want is sad and never going to happen.
I suggest moving on - and sorry to tell you this but ELITE has a cult status for many, and is the sort of long term game we will keep dipping in and out of for many years, it has a hardcore following so, I wouldn't worry too much about player numbers (I think lots play solo anyway)
There speaks a chap who has never run a business in his life...all well and good for your gaming credentials...but SUICIDE for a game and games firm.............You want people to leave and tell us this is a cult game.........HOW do you propose that FD finance the rest of the 10 year development plan........You know, "Earth Types" are going to need a lot more work than "Rocks"....and you Old Timers wont be funding it as you get all new seasons for free........
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How does your ....lets call it a "thought", work for the business plan? Pretend you are running a large development firm?
Frankly speaking, that's FD's problem, not ours, and i'm sure they spent a long time looking at the financials before deciding to go ahead with making the game. Previous financial statements look good, even a little bullish, so no worries so far. We have no access to the fine grained stats, only FD do, but you can be sure they are keeping a close eye on them.
Your stats are a bit skewed due to how i've configured this forum. There are currently 4,150 people (as of this post) browsing the forums in the past 30 minutes - and that's during non-peak. We have 134,571 registered forum users. Of those 134,571 members, filtering by people who have made at least one post is 68,934. The value there on after shrinks for those who have made 2, 3, 4, 5, and so on posts. The forum is holding close to a 80:15:5 ratio: 80% lurking/visiting, 15% have a forums account, 5% post. Over time, that value will fall back to the 90,9,1 rule. When Elite Dangerous launched, we were seeing around a 70:20:10 ratio.
Regardless, I keep track of what's going on. I wouldn't worry about if we're reading or not reading the forums - I do like my weekends however.
It's good to hear that you have a handle on this. I, and I'm sure a good number of us, was wondering if anyone at FD was even aware of the statistics. Personally, I've mainly seen dismissal of the forum poster's opinions due to it being a small percentage of the base. +1 rep.
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I would expect almost all software development companies have some form of UX analysis, bar the indie solo developer just making his/her game for it's own sake. There is a lot of expertise that can be applied to correctly weight views from different sources - for instance it's amazing quite how small a focus group *can* be representative of a large user base, provided biases etc. are corrected for. But it's almost always better for you to sample that focus group, not have it be self-selecting.
That's the number of concurrent player, I made the same mistake in another thread. ED hovers at around 80K players each month. Also those stats are from Steam only. Check here: https://steamdb.info/app/359320/graphs/
Not as worse as I thought actually, the base ED has succeeded but for funding the continuous development they need to sell Season Passes. I am a Lifetime Pass holder so I don't bring any money to ED, I am already acquired. We'll see with Season 3 soon I guess.
...unless you realise that the majority of forum users is not automatically representative of the majority of the player base.
Those that actively participate in forum debates are usually those that have a strong opinion about a topic, which means the extreme positions (strong content or discontent) are generally significantly over-represented.
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Thats all interesting, good statistical math shows a lot.
I would like to add about our friends here in Brazil, almost nobody in our group speaks English, on arround 50 players only 3 reads here in the forum, and currently only I do posts.
We have an Team Speak that everyone enters when playing the game, so we have some idea on how many active players there is, at this weekend at rush hour we had around 15 to 20 players active, but almost all of they have spoke about stooping playing the game for different reasons, mainly because engineers.
I am looking into the next week to see how many will play the game as well, I think it will show a lot on how things are going on for ED.
I would like to add about our friends here in Brazil, almost nobody in our group speaks English, on arround 50 players only 3 reads here in the forum, and currently only I do posts.
We have an Team Speak that everyone enters when playing the game, so we have some idea on how many active players there is, at this weekend at rush hour we had around 15 to 20 players active, but almost all of they have spoke about stooping playing the game for different reasons, mainly because engineers.
I am looking into the next week to see how many will play the game as well, I think it will show a lot on how things are going on for ED.
You have 20 players? You could be breezing trough Engineers content with a bit of organization.
Solo players have to get all that stuff for themselves and have noone to trade those pesky materials with.
Damn right. A "small" Dev like FD certainly keeps well abreast of usage in all areas, as Brett has clearly emphasised.
They are not going to deviate to any large degree just because some people think they know better. @Sim - the "this isn't a good bizplan, cos I know a good bizplan and this is set to fail" doesn't cut it I'm afraid.
Elite is a long, long term investment in time and money, and I see it going in the right direction.