Hmm, maybe deny posting rights to people that haven't logged into the game in the last 30 days?
Pay2Win made it to Elite
- Thread starter Einar Donarsson
- Start date
Yes, but I'm pretty sure that LEPers are a minority nowadays. Personally I hope that Frontier rescinds and gives the LEPers early access too. I can't imagine that it would bring in all that much money to exclude them from the early access.
Probably useful as a general trend on that launcher... Epic doesn't display anything, nor do Frontier from their launcher, so, in truth, who knows?
Frontier knows the actual number of players active, but don't share that!
Who knows? There were more copies given away on Epic than the total sold on steam or Frontier launcher, steam gives concurrent player numbers for the time slice chosen
Doesn't the internet love contrary behaviour? (In other words, I have no idea!)
It probably doesn’t work because game development costs are rising exponentially whereas players numbers aren’t. Don’t get me wrong, I have been very critical of some of Frontiers decisions in the past, and maybe an Odyssey that had been released on time relatively bug free that worked on old conlsoles would have made a healthy profit, but Frontier simply aren’t capable of reducing time scales by more than half. I’m sure Frontier was guilty of mis-management, and that they need to improve, but I also believe that the Elite Dangerous was in the right place at the right time, at launch, with very little competition, and now finds itself in a more competitive market place where it struggles to find and retain the best developers.
There are plenty of ships lacking variety in paint jobs as well.
Always were.
Steam figures should be extremely representative. The sample size is enormous, as in orders of magnitude larger than needed to produce quality statistics. There are also no clear indicators that would suggest Elite: Dangerous' Steam demographics are significantly different than for licenses acquired anywhere else, except perhaps the earliest backers, who are themselves a tiny minority and far less representative of any trend that the mass of Steam licenses.
For the record, I despise the Steam business model and have not had my own Steam account, nor given Valve a single cent since 2004, and I'll stop playing PC games before I patronize them....I'd still have to be willfully ignorant of the most basic statistical principles to discount Steam statistics.
No one with any sense dismisses Steam statistics when talking about player trends for this game.
... and no Raider Kit for the Courier, although that may be a little too "specialist" for general acceptance!
I think Frontier's strategy has evolved, for reasons you've already mentioned. Why make significant new content to monetize when you can monetize what you were going to make anyway, or what already exists?
Frontier almost certainly does not envision this game being one of their main revenue generators over the long term. It makes sense for them to milk it for all it's worth, while keeping expenses as low as possible, as they transition to new properties.
So, the old strategy won't work any more because it's competing with a more efficient one. It doesn't matter if they could have been profitable doing what they were doing, the moment the expense/return ratio seems to be better doing something else, they are obliged to do something else. Obligations to shareholders trumps any obligation to customers.
I’d like a Raider kit for my Cobra IV! ;-)
Envy level rises... (My fault entirely, of course, I stopped playing anything for over 3 years as all I was doing was working and sleeping, so missed the kickstarter / Horizons launch window)
If that is the case, why are Frontier working on PP2 and the new mystery feature?
I actually bought the game just in time, and didn’t play it until October 2017, so rather lucky to have one of the worst ships in the game, although it has now become a useful utility on foot mission runner, even better now either SCO FSD.
Let’s hope they find that sweet spot where decent continuous development by a smallish enthusiast dev team can still make a nice little profit.
That's true - but then, they rolled Horizons into the base game after five years too.
A very substantial fraction of the income of any expansion is going to come in the first few months anyway (while it's still at full price or maybe shallow sales) ... and on the other side, adding extra value to Odyssey later to tempt holdouts there has its advantages.
I expect they'll see how it goes and adjust both the pricing and exclusivity period for the next ships accordingly.
You can check them versus other trends - squadron leaderboards and traffic to the third party EDDN tool are also available as an in-game and out-of-game measure of certain types of activity.
In general:
- for a basic "up or down" on a month by month basis it's obviously generally representative of the direction for the reasons Morbad gives [1]
- Steam tends to show bigger swings (both up and down) than the other two measures.
- part of that is the other two only counting subsets of the more established players (who change their playing habits more slowly)
- part of that is that concurrent player counts can at least in theory change entirely independently of active player counts and in practice I think will tend to double-count changes at least somewhat.
- which is "more accurate" depends on what you're trying to measure: the more established players also contribute a very disproportionate fraction of the in-game activity
The big problem with them isn't with the quality of measure itself, but when people take a Steam concurrent player count (whether average or monthly peak hardly matters) of say 5000, assume that that's anywhere near the number of active players on say a weekly or monthly basis, and then make further conclusions from that bad assumption.
(On the other side, for actual bad statistics, you get the occasional person wanting to show ED has lots of players pulling out the infamous "we literally make these numbers up" 3rd-party website)
[1] And has likely got more so over the years, with Frontier I think trying to encourage its use as the primary platform for PC purchases.
Because in their current state, keeping any profitable franchise going is essential, and PP2 is certainly an obvious thing to try in terms of boosting player activity and therefore the number of people who are around to buy the cosmetics.
I don't think they'll cancel all development that's already in progress; if most of the work is already done, there is little reason not to finish it. I don't know what the new mystery feature entails, but PP2 should not require significant new assets.
Some new content, with new assets, wouldn't be surprising either, but if Arx for extant in-game assets does well, the balance is going to shift heavily in that direction.
I don't think someone even has to own the game to post on the forums. I believe they just need a Frontier account. If that's the case, they really outta fix that.Hmm, maybe deny posting rights to people that haven't logged into the game in the last 30 days?
I'd test my theory, but I remember running into a problem trying to log back in after my last forum logout. I don't remember enough for that to be any easier now.
My own opinion is that they don't worry over much about postings on the forum - it gives folk somewhere to socialise, complain, commend and make new and lasting friendships.
The rest is just icing on the cake as there are many diverse opinions over almost everything in this game as to make any topic a potential clash of views. This topic illustrates that perception beautifully (as does the pre-built topic)
I haven't logged in for the last four months. After some seven years of playing, my current circumstances are not overly compatible with the time requirement of this game. I still dearly love this universe despite its flaws, and would like to see it only improve for if I get the chance to return.Hmm, maybe deny posting rights to people that haven't logged into the game in the last 30 days?
I have also convinced myself that giving feedback on the forums and participating in discussions based on my years of playtime will contribute to this. Possibly futile, but I'd bet it has a hell of a lot better odds than denying posting rights based on some insane purity test. Nothing was ever solved with less communication (unless the goal is to create an echo chamber).
I hope you make it back and have a bundle of fun when you do.
Normally I would agree with you; but if you last played the game before engineers, for example, you kind of lost the privilege to have a strong, loud opinion on the current form of the game, because it's essentially completely different than seven years ago.