PC Micro Transactions

CHangWOlf is exaggerating a lot. The game is far from dying (yet). But the player base has been declining consistently over the last year or so and this new patch has not been enough to change that trend so far.
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I suspect that it is people playing fortnite. If i recall correctly, a hot game comes along, fan base dies down a bit. Hot game cools, fan base comes back.

I could very much be wrong, and people will make fun of me if i am.

It is interesting that the fan base had been declining during the same time frame that a16 was ongoing. It could very well be that it took too long between updates.

But a cooldown is not an indication that the game is dying. I am not playing my time in Portia right now. Not because the game sucks,but because i am playing other games. I love my time in Portia, but i do not have time to play every game i love at once.

 
But a cooldown is not an indication that the game is dying. I am not playing my time in Portia right now. Not because the game sucks,but because i am playing other games. I love my time in Portia, but i do not have time to play every game i love at once.
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Exactly. The game is not dying yet. But the most telling thing is that contrary to Roland's claims, the game is still not trending back up post A17 stable release. It has barely remained stable for the last few days and is still overall trending down for the last month. Usually it would be spiking again. That's is an indicator that this patch is not successful and players are not persisting with it. It would be an indicator of that without throwing the ability to roll back into the mix. That just complicated things even more as we don't know how many players have just decided to play A16 out of nostalgia. Myself, I took a break when they first started teasing the first update features cos I wanted to play with the better graphics and combat not the current. Now I have come back to check out the new update, but am instead just playing A16 again because it's no longer the less desirable version of the game.

Reading the statistics as anything other than bad for this patch is just incorrect.

 
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I am 200% fully against micro transactions in 7 days to die.

If you suck, you deserve to lose.

oVKhM


 
No they are not. Every patch people return to the game in a slow stream and the numbers consistently rise to a peak. This patch they have only stayed stable, even with the recent sales bringing in new players. This means that players are not sticking with it. Rather they are trying it and abandoning it and the numbers will most likely soon drop once the stream of players trying it out dries up. Anyone who has experience with reading statistics can see that this patch is not successful.

Heck, if you look at the last 30 days, post stable release numbers are also down just from this time last month. It's a flop, no amount of spin is going to change that.
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The guy said “constant downfall”. You are looking at a snapshot instead of the trend. Instead of looking at the initial reaction to recent major changes look at the entire history of the game and it trends upward. There were several sales during the course of A16 that made no difference to the player numbers. The last 30 days have been up compared to the last year so it isn’t the sale. It is A17 that accounts for the difference. It is the only factor that changed and since it came out numbers have been way up over what they were pre-A17.

But in fairness the higher numbers now is also just a snapshot. A trend is a direction over time and if you look at the whole length of time the trend is upward. Now in six months we will have a clearer picture as to whether we peaked and are now sliding downward or if this was a momentary dip and the trend continues upward.

https://steamcharts.com/app/251570

Make a line of best fit and it slopes upward still. It is disappointing that we didn’t peak at a new record but that doesn’t mean the game is in a tailspin. It does mean that a second look at those changes is necessary which Rick Huenink just posted they are doing.

 
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No Roland it does not trend upwards. It trended upwards till about mid A16, and has trended downwards since, and continues to do so. Saying anything otherwise I a complete misrepresentation of the statistics, which are publicly available so there is no point trying to spin them as something they are not.

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The game has trended consistently downwards for over a year now.

I'm going to assume that you are just unfamiliar with analysing statistics and calculating regression lines because I'd like to hope you aren't just outright trying to lie so you can put a positive spin on a negative situation. But the fact is the only time periods from the last period that don't have a significant negative trend are the last 48 hours and past 7 days. And maybe 3 months but looking at it I think it would still be a net negative regression. The rest are so clear you can make it out with just the naked eye and no real understanding of regression lines.

 
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When A16 was dropped TFP had sold around 1.5-2 million copies.

Now TFP has sold 3 million copies and we still have less active players than release of a16.

If we were to follow the trend of a 16 we should have 20,000-25,000 Avg. Players now.

 
When A16 was dropped TFP had sold around 1.5-2 million copies.Now TFP has sold 3 million copies and we still have less active players than release of a16.

If we were to follow the trend of a 16 we should have 20,000-25,000 Avg. Players now.
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This.

Because I'm bored and have nothing better to do I'm going to plug into excel some values from the available charts on steam and generate a regression line for each period so TFP staff can't continue making such claims without the real data being available for all to see and easily read.

So I was getting an error with the chart ends when viewing the stats on my phone and the number have picked up more than i thought. I am still not sure it is as much as Roland believes though. We will know when I'm done calculating some rough trend lines. It is still clear however that the overall statistics are on a negative trend currently. This patch has peaked(and yes it is already dropping again) at 5k less users than A16 did, despite the amount of copies sold since. Every single other version update has higher numbers than the one before.

 
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It is interesting that the fan base had been declining during the same time frame that a16 was ongoing. It could very well be that it took too long between updates.
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This was the case for myself and a whole bunch of my Steam friends. We watched a dev video from Joel in I think June which insinuated that A17 was very close. We were expecting August. So we stopped playing because we knew there would be a wipe. We were all going to start up again when A17 dropped. When it eventually did, most of us stopped playing after less than an hour due to the horrendous performance drop, micro-stuttering on strafe, and lack of FOV slider.

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Path of exile is proof that you can have microtransactions in a great game, the outcome depends on what kind of devs are in charge
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PoE is free to play which is why I support them with transactions. If a paid game thinks they are going to introduce microtransactions, they can eff right off.

 
I've realised there is no fair way to do this with the information available. I can't use daily averages as they don;t seem to have an option to display them. If I use peaks, that is going to show a better scenario than is real, if i use troughs that will show a worse than. As either method completely disregards the rate of change before and after each point (the last 5 days have high peaks, but they are very steap, meaning the average over each day is much lower/people aren't playing long). Basically not having every data point means anything I choose to use will be open to accusations of using biased points. I'd also have to attempt to explain what each regression line actually represents (linear, polynomial and exponential) what R values mean.

I will still show the overall trend line bases on the peaks over the entire life of the game though. As that does show how this update is performing to previous.

EDIT: So this is what we have when looking at the entirety of 7DtD and the last year. Red dotted lines are best fit polynomial regressions as they best display the change in trend over time. Blue dotted line on second image is linear regression which shows average trend over the period (there is no point doing linear for all time as anything that starts at 0 will always be positive). As you can clearly see the game has been trending down since July 2016. Even with the current spike, they haven't hit the same numbers as previous update releases, despite the extra copies sold.

Yes, the user base is currently trending up as it should be, but it still hasn't hit the same peak as this time last year. And while there may have been a sale last year there was no patch to bring old players back, so there was not even a proper peak at that period of time. As such when you look at the overall trend for that period (blue line) it is still trending down for the whole period. Again, despite how many extra copies have been sold in the last year.

If we were to put these metrics alongside sales statistics and do a multiple regression then this would be a much worse image for the state of the game. But thats too much work and tbh I can't believe I bothered to do this.

7dtdyeartrend.jpg

7dtdalltrend.jpg

 
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This was the case for myself and a whole bunch of my Steam friends. We watched a dev video from Joel in I think June which insinuated that A17 was very close. We were expecting August. So we stopped playing because we knew there would be a wipe. We were all going to start up again when A17 dropped. When it eventually did, most of us stopped playing after less than an hour due to the horrendous performance drop, micro-stuttering on strafe, and lack of FOV slider.
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Was that the one where he showed off the zombie pathing and jumping in a cabin, then some combat with a shotgun? Thats the one I saw then stopped playing A16 because I thought A17 wasn't far off.

 
Was that the one where he showed off the zombie pathing and jumping in a cabin, then some combat with a shotgun? Thats the one I saw then stopped playing A16 because I thought A17 wasn't far off.
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I can't remember exactly. Joel made some comment like he guessed they were a month away from experimental, and being June, we thought to ourselves that August would be a safe bet because if I recall, the A16 experimental phase only lasted a week.

 
This just isn't true. The overall trend is upward. This last patch has been controversial but quite a few people are sticking with it and adapting and the devs are still working on balancing it as well.
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Player base has doubled since a17 (from 10.000~ to 20.000~). This is mostly due to the fact that the devs know quite well when to stick to the vision and when to bend a little from feedback. I approve. If only there were 7 kinyajuus 4 faatals and 3 madmoles spiced with a few Gazzs and Ricks here and there.

 
Player base has doubled since a17 (from 10.000~ to 20.000~). This is mostly due to the fact that the devs know quite well when to stick to the vision and when to bend a little from feedback. I approve. If only there were 7 kinyajuus 4 faatals and 3 madmoles spiced with a few Gazzs and Ricks here and there.
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Actually... player base is 5k down from A16 (32000 to 27000) because the devs have done a 180 and are not listening to feedback at all.

 
Player base has doubled since a17 (from 10.000~ to 20.000~). This is mostly due to the fact that the devs know quite well when to stick to the vision and when to bend a little from feedback. I approve. If only there were 7 kinyajuus 4 faatals and 3 madmoles spiced with a few Gazzs and Ricks here and there.
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I dont know where you got those numbers from. But steam chart provides this data:

Average players a16 release month= 16,224.7

Average players a17 release month= 12,949.3

There is too little data to make any assumptions on what effects the numbers.

What we know is that there are less ppl that owns the game that plays it now compared to a16..

And that there are less ppl playing now than a16

Why this is. We dont know.

Could be that a16 was so bad new and old players left for good.

Could be that a17 wasn't what the player base wanted so they left.

Was it the marketing of a new alpha that was failing?

Also. Compared to sold copies on a16 we should have reached a player peak at around 40k+ by now. Why we haven't. Hard to tell.

I personally dont think it's just because of the overhaul of a17.

 
...you must have not read Richard's post, contradicting your incorrect assumption. I could act like you and say something spiffy like "I must assume you do not comprehend simple reading", but instead I'll just link you the post.
https://7daystodie.com/forums/showthread.php?102621-The-State-of-Alpha-17

...not that this will stop you from trying to argue though. Seems kub is part of a triplets set.
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I was intentionally exaggerating on the not listening at all part in order to match the ridiculousness of the blakes post. They're listening some, when it comes to tweakable things, just not at all on most the issues that the community considers game breaking.

EDIT: Did you miss that MM is still trying to pass off much of the criticism as casuals whinging in that thread?

 
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