Vrain Matari
ZionTCD
Legacy Rising
448
   |
Posted - 2013.03.11 15:01:00 -
[1] - Quote
This is the issue at the heart of whether our DUST longship is gonna be seaworthy enough to cross the deep water and land us on the shores where the fatter, weaker FPS's live so that we can pillage their playerbases.
I'm worried and not worried.
Worried because http://dustboard.com/global says 1,810,327 peeps have downloaded the DUST client and set up a character(that's my assumption about what that number means, please correct me if i'm wrong).
It is a safe bet to assume peeps who have created a merc have also tried the game. 1.8 million of them, in fact(yes there are duplicate characters, and peeps with multiple accounts, but not enough to change the argument here). The frightening part, to me at least, is that at peak load on weekends, Tranqility( http://eve-offline.net/?server=tranquility and http://games.chruker.dk/eve_online/server_status.php) has at most ~60,000 peeps on. Of those, more than half(66% is my estimate) are EVE players. You can verify this by checking the player count on EVE's login screen and subtracting that number from what the Tranquility-tracking websites are reporting. This gives us a peak of about 20,000 for DUST players, with maybe an average of 10,000.
Most(the vast majority) of those characters have been created since DUST went open beta on January 22nd, so say 50 days for ease of calculation. Derating that 1.8 million to maybe 1.5 million, we can see that the %age of peeps playing DUST at any one time is AT MOST 20,000/1,500,000 or 1.3%. Is this good, bad or normal?
If we assume all players put only one hour a week into DUST, what would we expect? This gives us an average player count of 1500000/(7*23 hours), or 9316 players, pretty close to what we're seeing from the server stats. At this point we run out of data. The first question to ask yourself is how many hours are you putting into the game? And from your observations and conversations, do you think the average DUST player is putting in more, less, or about the same time each week?
This is where I start to worry. I'm putting in about 20 hours a week(don't judge me, i'm a fps noob and gotta learn the hard way, ok? Plus there's the skillpoint grind). I know from chat channels i'm in that many peeps put in similar hours. If my experience is typical then the implication is many peeps try DUST and never play it again.
And we know from the wide word of formus why peeps are turned off - it's the 1999 look/feel of the game. It's the unreliable core mechanics. Those are the two main complaints I see out there, anyway. Plus maybe the uber-pawnge peeps have to take as new players.
The estimate I've seen as to the PS3 fps playerbase is 10 million people. At the same retention rate we've had so far that means we'll end up with a playerbase of about 5 times what we have right now.
Is that enough for DUST to survive?
I'm not worried because I expect 95% of all people who try EVE to quit it too. New Eden is definitely not for everybody, or even most people. But it has an undeniable depth, quality and even reality that some peeps find hard to resist.
And the silver lining to sending so many players away is that those who stay are generally invested in New Eden and good competition.
I'm not worried about DUST because each major build is stepping up the quality of the core mechanics noticeably, and if CCP doesn't lose the plot version 1.0 should be reasonably polished and playable. That should improve retention and get some peeps back.
I'm not worried about DUST because for my money, it's the only real war availiable online. Everything else is arbitray and feels like cheap game mechanics to me. I'm sure others feel the same way. Even if another great company writes such a game, what vibrant online economically-driven world could they connect it to? WOW? Second Life? What else? Any company trying to follow in CCP's footsteps would have to invent it all from scratch. And that will prolly happen sooner or later, but they're going to have to go through all the growing pains that CCP has weathered and learned from.
I'm not worried because as much as we complain, it's obvious that CCP is deeply engaged with the playerbase, but at the same time is commited to and creatively driven by their own dark vision. That's a very good sign.
Aplogies for all that. In the end, I just don't know yet. I think a lot is riding on release 0.8, and I think the heart of it is core mechanics. That's what' driving players away. |