Huge decline in console player numbers, Hull Seals consider disclaimer & drop support.

[Kwoung]

Oh and BTW, since you are basing this all on ED... My ESO PC guild over the past year has joined over 100 new members who restarted on PC from console. So if an assumption was to be made (and I already said how I feel about those), I would say that console usage in general is declining and those players are moving to PC. These ESO folks had years in on console, max level characters and had to start over from scratch. They couldn't even keep their crown store items purchased with cash... so there must be something wrong with console gaming in general IMHO... if so many are willing to give up so much to dump them.

 

[PRORABBIT67]

God no that would be useful.

 

[Manticore]

Why don't you list them all though, so the forum has an opportunity to look at all the statistics that you are referring to?

It does make you sound very important though making a statement like that.

And for clarity, I'm not arguing against your supposition, I just think one of two statistical examples is a poor effort to draw a conclusion from - in case you think I'm having a go at you like you normally do.

I wonder if it's correlation or causation. As in, would some people here live happier if they attended a statistics 101 course?

No; any sesne of reality or statistical precision would interfere with their delusion(s).

 

[Ian Phillips]

People other than moderators are unable to ask for civility or focus on the topic rather than insulting people?

People may not try to steer or control the discussion to have a result they wish, hence the no "Backseat moderating" rule.

A discussion thread is for discussion, however that ends up going.

Make points and reply to points made. It's really simple!

 

[[Cancelled Consoleer] boppa_]

People may not try to steer or control the discussion to have a result they wish, hence the no "Backseat moderating" rule.

A discussion thread is for discussion, however that ends up going.

Make points and reply to points made. It's really simple!

Sorry I'm confused. So using phrases about other players such as (quote) "gobsh****s", "fools" and "muppet"s is not ok? or is it?

That's what I was objecting to, rather trying to control the discussion. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough, though?

 

[PRORABBIT67]

 

[Bottom Hat]

Sorry I'm confused. So using phrases about other players such as (quote) "gobsh****s", "fools" and "muppet"s is not ok? or is it?

That's what I was objecting to, rather trying to control the discussion. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough, though?

Starting an argument with a mod is going to do well for you.

But you didn't answer the question I asked you on the previous page, before you claim something else. Can you answer for the thread please?

And have you applied for the hull seals? They didn't seem that impressed by your claims on their behalf, going so far as asking you to remove your claim from the title of the thread.



And just for clarification, your quotes are incorrect

 

[Manticore]

Starting an argument with a mod is going to do well for you.

But you didn't answer the question I asked you on the previous page, before you claim something else. Can you answer for the thread please?

And have you applied for the hull seals? They didn't seem that impressed by your claims on their behalf, going so far as asking you to remove your claim from the title of the thread.



And just for clarification, your quotes are incorrect

Now that that is sorted can we concentrate on statistics:

Standard deviation is one measure of dispersion. It has the same interpretation regardless of the distribution. Standard deviation informs you how much data drawn from a particular distribution will be, on average, "spread out" from its mean.

As others have mentioned, the normal distribution doesn't make much sense here. We sometimes use a normal distribution, despite the possibility of negative values that don't make sense, when the probability of such values under the normal distribution is very small. But here the standard deviation is greater than the mean, so that probability is not small at all

There's another issue that the other answers are not addressing. In applications like this one you're often not interested in the standard deviation, since it is a non-robust statistic with a breakdown point of 0%, which means that for a large sample size changing a negligible fraction of the data can result in an arbitrary change in the statistic's value. Instead, consider using quantiles, common ones being the inter-quantile range, which are more robust statistics. Specifically, the 25-th and 75
-th quantiles both have 25% breakdown point, because you need to change at least 25% of the data to arbitrarily affect them.

This is particular important in your consideration, because of a number of factors:

1. Communication delays are often caused by one-time events that result in a down-time rather than a normal delay, and of course such down-times are very long in comparison. For example think of power outages, server crash, even sabotage...
2. Even if there are no down-times in your data, other factors could have a significant impact on your measurements that are completely irrelevant to your application. For example, other processes running in the background might slow down your application, or memory caching might be improving the speed for some but not all runs. There might even be occasional hardware activity that affects the speed of your application only now and then.
3. Usually people judge a system's responsiveness based on the average case, not the average of all cases. Most will accept that an operation might in a minority of the cases completely fail and never even return a response. An excellent example is the HTTP request. A small but nonzero proportion of packets get totally dropped from the internet and the request would have a theoretically infinite response time. Obviously people don't care and just press "Refresh" after a while.

Actually it's all very complex and TL;DR.... but having an education in statistics helps.

The data provided by the OP exhibits an f number that's way too big to provide statistical significance.

 

[Kwoung]

And have you applied for the hull seals? They didn't seem that impressed by your claims on their behalf, going so far as asking you to remove your claim from the title of the thread.

Oh dang... I missed that bit, ouch. Posting and making claims about a group you are not even in, serious gaming no no. Even if you are in the group, posting that sort of thing without the leaders permission... generally gets you removed.

 

[Dextio]

Sorry I'm confused. So using phrases about other players such as (quote) "gobsh****s", "fools" and "muppet"s is not ok? or is it?

That's what I was objecting to, rather trying to control the discussion. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough, though?

To be fair, I think @Bottom Hat was trying to explain something to me with some of that ;-).

You seem to be pressing all sorts of buttons, for all sorts of people (people who don't usually get so riled up). It might be advantageous to reflect upon why.

Regardless, I might be careful not to push the mod's patience too far.

 

[[Cancelled Consoleer] boppa_]

Oh dang... I missed that bit, ouch. Posting and making claims about a group you are not even in, serious gaming no no. Even if you are in the group, posting that sort of thing without the leaders permission... generally gets you removed.

I think you'll find the poster you're quoting has mixed up "Fuel Rats" and "Hull Seals".

I'm not pushing anyone, mod or otherwise. I'm trying to discuss a particular topic. It'd be nice if we could do that, without resorting to name calling?

 

[Kwoung]

I think you'll find the poster you're quoting has mixed up "Fuel Rats" and "Hull Seals".

I'm not pushing anyone, mod or otherwise. I'm trying to discuss a particular topic. It'd be nice if we could do that, without resorting to name calling?

Oh? The thread title says Hull Seals, your post a page back or so says you are willing to join them... so you are already a member then and I misread? Also, pretty sure I didn't call you names.

 

[[Cancelled Consoleer] boppa_]

Oh? The thread title says Hull Seals, your post a page back or so says you are willing to join them... so you are already a member then and I misread? Also, pretty sure I didn't call you names.

No, you didn't you're quite right. Sorry if it came across as my implying you did.

I think what that poster was trying to refer to was one of the Fuel Rats asked that it be clarified that they are not considering dropping support for consoles. I've added that to the OP.

To be clear, while I've no wish to join the Fuel Rats, I have offered my services to the console arm of the Hull Seals.

 

[Snowymonk]

In the case of console players the decline began around the time that the first Odyssey delay was announced in January - in Winter. That decline has continued.

Also don't forget that not everyone in the world has summer in July...

For me, the writing was first put on the wall in August 2020 with the first Odyssey Reveal trailer & the subsequent round of games magazine interviews.

to paraphrase:
interviewer: PC looks good, are you planning anything for the new generation of consoles that are about to be released?
Response: Nope, no plans for Xbox series X or PS5.

since then, nothing to give console players any reason to believe that Frontier care about Console players.

I get that Frontier developers have to prioritise certain things but zero detail on what Frontier want to do with consoles. Zero idea of what they think ‘good’ will look like on console. Currently no timeline when it’s coming to console and zero engagement with console players.

I do not understand why with all this intent flowing about from the community managers about communicating more with the community, that some time isnt spent engaging with console players.

this week’s community schedule:

• Monday - Forum post update on the Odyssey fixes - PC
• Tuesday - super cruise news where the CM talk about the post the PC Odyssey fixes
• Wednesday - Stellar Screenshots - where the CM show the best screenshots in the past weeks - predominately PC
• Thursday - CM discuss things, probably play a bit of Elite - it’ll either be PC private group or PC open
• Friday - Commander creations - show off your commanders - that’ll be photos of Odyssey commanders stood in front of various stellar sights - PC DLC

nothing to encourage consoles.
other Frontier games (looking at Planet coaster…) dedicate time for consoles during the week. Elite doesn’t. …and people wonder why there is so much doom around in the console community.


*Edit - corrected Aug 2019 to Aug 2020. It's been a long lockdown

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Seriously folks. This isn't rocket science. If the reason for the drop is "summertime" is it consistent with other summers?
[...]
So, given the major gaps in all the data sets, it should still be pretty easy to see of there are drops during summer. I'm not looking it up because I don't care, but this should be easy to figure out.

EDDN FSDJump events ... are so heavily influenced by "was there a major release recently" that if there is any seasonal effect it's unnoticeable

Colonia traffic levels ... higher in NH summer than in winter in 2020, 2019 (excluding the brief spike from DW2 passing nearby) ... lower in summer than in winter in 2018 ... about the same in 2017. No clear pattern associated with the month or season.

Squadron scores ... no clear seasonal pattern at all, and the different leaderboards don't even move in sync with each other most of the time. You could perhaps suggest that Trade tended to be higher in NH summer, but Exploration shows the opposite pattern. The reasons for both of those patterns are nothing to do with the weather, of course.

Active squadron counts ... again, no clear seasonal pattern in how fast these change. NH Summer is if anything slightly ahead of winter here, with the exception of the squadron season containing Epic Giveaway week.

CG participation numbers ... hasn't been running for a full year yet in the new plot, but postulating a seasonal effect for something which had a large step change in mid-May while being fairly consistent on either side of that date seems pretty dubious. (And they never used to show particularly large seasonal effects in the old plot)

So that's 5 with no visible or consistent seasonal effects whatsoever, versus 0 with.

 

[Manticore]

Oh dang... I missed that bit, ouch. Posting and making claims about a group you are not even in, serious gaming no no. Even if you are in the group, posting that sort of thing without the leaders permission... generally gets you removed.

Funny I've been playing ED for years, both on the PC and now on the PS4 and I've never used the Fuel Rats at all (or joined that group):

 

[[Cancelled Consoleer] boppa_]

The data provided by the OP exhibits an f number that's way too big to provide statistical significance.

Do you have any none-TL;DR statistical observations to add here:-

Question: Are Console player numbers declining?

For

• Anecdotal evidence from various communities - some of those I'm part of, some I'm not - are that console CMDR numbers are significantly down at the moment.
• Statistical evidence from various third party upload tools show a marked decline in the number of console CMDRs uploading data, and by assumption, also playing Elite Dangerous at the same time. Source: EDDN.
• A lack of a clear roadmap or release date for Odyssey on console from the developer.
• Statistical and anecdotal evidence from larger player groups such as The Hull Seals and The Fuel Rats (Source: links in OP) appear to show a steady drop in console CMDR numbers.
• Hull Seals adding a disclaimer around recovery time for console players. Again suggesting a drop in player numbers.

Against

- a 3% increase in console players logging in to Inara in July, compared to the previous month of June.

Ruled Out/Irrelevant

- No clear pattern associated with the month or season. (Source: Colonia collated data from the wonderful web site of @Ian Doncaster )

 

[StuartGT]

For me, the writing was first put on the wall in August 2019 with the first Odyssey Reveal trailer & the subsequent round of games magazine interviews.

to paraphrase:
interviewer: PC looks good, are you planning anything for the new generation of consoles that are about to be released?
Response: Nope, no plans for Xbox series X or PS5.

You mean June 2020? That's when the first Odyssey trailer (announcement) arrived.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wu8oqlXUag

 

[Dextio]

Do you have any none-TL;DR statistical observations to add here:-

Question: Are Console player numbers declining?

For

• Anecdotal evidence from various communities - some of those I'm part of, some I'm not - are that console CMDR numbers are significantly down at the moment.
• Statistical evidence from various third party upload tools show a marked decline in the number of console CMDRs uploading data, and by assumption, also playing Elite Dangerous at the same time. Source: EDDN.
• A lack of a clear roadmap or release date for Odyssey on console from the developer.
• Statistical and anecdotal evidence from larger player groups such as The Hull Seals and The Fuel Rats (Source: links in OP) appear to show a steady drop in console CMDR numbers.
• Hull Seals adding a disclaimer around recovery time for console players. Again suggesting a drop in player numbers.

Against

- a 3% increase in console players logging in to Inara in July, compared to the previous month of June.

Ruled Out/Irrelevant

- No clear pattern associated with the month or season. (Source: Colonia collated data from the wonderful web site of @Ian Doncaster )

Ever wonder why people aren't responding when you pose your argument in this format? Is it...that you're legitimately stumping people, who can't respond to your argument?

Or can it possibly be that the amount of effort one must take to argue against a strawman argument, with someone who is unwilling to compromise or change, outweighs the desire to do so?

 

[[Cancelled Consoleer] boppa_]

Ever wonder why people aren't responding when you pose your argument in this format? Is it...that you're legitimately stumping people, who can't respond to your argument?

Or can it possibly be that the amount of effort one must take to argue against a strawman argument, with someone who is unwilling to compromise or change, outweighs the desire to do so?

I can see why summarising in a factual manner and not responding to the usual dramatics would stump a certain type of poster, yes.