The reality is that this game has an “addictive quality” that can and is being exploited with zest. Long time players are increasingly vociferous in terms of lack of enjoyment, excessive grind and so on. But despite these protests they continue to play at an unhealthy level, and more importantly they continue to spend. By doing so they inadvertently fund increased grind, monotony and frustration. It’s very clear that the devs are non plussed about fixing anything if they can instead release more appalling content that might generate revenue. Many players have invested heavily and cannot justify sacrificing their investment. The company know this and exploit this every chance they get. So, while the gravy train is booming forget any ideas of actually participating in a game that is anything like the enjoyable prototype. Anyone who spends simply accelerates the demise of this game in terms of a fun experience
Not a dev, obviously. But there is literally zero chance that any dev will divulge that information publicly. You’re asking for confidential, privileged information that protected by NDAs. Beta testers don’t get this information either, nor will they ever.
Sometimes, I wonder about the context of that statement. While that statement was absolutely made on-stream, I don’t believe it applies to people that post on this forum as we are not “average” gamers. The average gamer is likely a casual player.
To that extent, the 26 game statement could be interpreted differently. For example, multiple posters on these forums believe that this statement means that Sirrian believed that players are playing too many matches. Another possible interpretation could be that Sirrian pondered that the average casual gamer was needing to invest too much time into matches to make the intended casual-level advancement per day, which could have been potentially reduced for casual players via new microtransactions in future updates to speed up casual player progress.
Personally, I do not believe that the 26 games per day statement has any relevance to late or end-gamers at all.
Again, not a dev, here. But, as someone who is experienced with many gacha games over a long time period, the broad trend of how gacha games tend to operate regarding end-gamers tends to hold here. Self-sufficiency in combination with full-completion of end-game content are the antithesis of gacha games. If an end-game player can clear everything by themselves, then there is no reason for them to make any purchases. This is bad for business. As long as end-game players can keep clearing the highest walls and the can handle the highest loads of required effort, those walls will continue to get steeper and the loads heavier over time.
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QFT. How many times on these forums have posters vigilantly proclaimed that after the some previous new faction weekend, that they would never go through the time and money madness of clearing a future new full faction event? Yet, these same players are often here making the same proclamations month after month while “only” buying Tier 7 seven to ten times for the following month’s new faction event? Yes, these purchases could have been made purely with passive income with no actual real currency changing hands. That doesn’t make the situation or this behavior any more palatable for those individuals.
I have 5-9 floors of delve event left to do in the next <90mins ('cause who knows with Valravens…). Which is doable I guess but the pressure is not appreciated.
Yeah, I was really upset when I ran out of time on Lyrasza’s Lair, after multiple failed Pure Faction events. But that’s another conversation I want to have.
While the details are certainly privileged information, there may be ways of saying things that protect that privilege while also satisfying some of us doing the asking.
More important, I really want to see the World Event and Guild Wars NEVER run concurrently again. And the only way I can see to promote that change is to encourage the devs to actually look at the data. I’m just not convinced that they actually are examining the data and asking the right questions.
As for spending real money, I suspect that depends entirely on players’ budgets and mentality. These things don’t really change over time. For example, I’m never going to pay $60 for a Mythic (or whatever it is). OTOH, I did pay $5 for the Steam pet, particularly because I got more VIP points than I paid for.
The new Battle Pass is, at least, priced attractively. But I’m still not going to buy it.
Depends on what the right questions are. To the business, the right question is probably, “Is player engagement/spending increasing?”
I’m not sure what “examination” is required beyond that. Bug fixes are slow to come (if they come at all) and localization issues are almost a running joke on this forum. The only examination is being done by accountants. That has been obvious for a while.
I would posit that the vast majority of the playerbase doesn’t care about playing Guild Wars competitively if at all. I blew through all my battles in a little over an hour total this week and my guild is in Bracket 7. Having GW run alongside another event didn’t bother me AT ALL.
Me either, because I won’t support predatory monetization practices on top of a game that is becoming increasingly consumer-hostile.
However, I have no doubt that the battlepasses have been selling like hotcakes, so stay tuned for even more “OuTraGeOuSlY gOoD dEaLs” in the future, possibly run concurrently with each other, now that people have shown the scale at which they’re willing to pounce on them.
Answering questions 1-4 would require having old data saved up to compare. Probably not going to happen.
Answering #5 might be possible only after few weeks (you can compare number of active players vs other weeks on steam, but that wont tell you anything about how many players left).
You would have to search for accounts that:
were created some time ago (>1 year maybe a good point)
nobody has logged onto them for last weeks/months? (hard to point out, if a player is taking a 2 week holiday from a game or has dropped it for good, probably 1 month on absence could be enough to say someone quit game for good)
questions 6-7 cant be answered until you get a good data about group 5…
to sum up:
unless devs have a backup copy of database from month or 2 back, most (if not all) of your questions will be left without answers…
have a nice day
Why wouldn’t they? As a business, they have to keep track of their customers interactions and statistical trends to plan accordingly for the future.
A long time ago when they used to share information on the forums, the dev team (Sirrian?) mentioned that Valkyrie was one of the most used troops and gave a graph chart on troop usages.
None of these game design choices are blindly thrown darts, though I don’t think the pubs, the devs, and the players are on the same page at this time.
Because it’s costly. And it all depends what is being stored in database. What is kept only in logs etc. I realy doubt game database has every player action stored. It would be realy HUGE and SLOW…
If anything i’d suppose lots of data is kept only in logs and deleted after a period of time (week/month). That’s a cost-effective solution and it’s 100% enough to run the game.
If you want to collect data on such thing, you just set up a window and observe how data changes over time. Or set up a separate database and put the data from your database with timestamps to analyze it offline.
Besides as shown in https://gowdb.com/ - numer of times unit was used in pvp is stored in database, next to each unit of a player.
Of course not, but you can always collect a sample of data over time, if you have a thesis to test… and drop it right after you verify the thesis.
Increasing player engagement and spending has two sides:
How much does the game draw the player in?
How much does the game push the player away?
Most devs seem unaware how important the second point is. Psychologically, all those little annoyances build up over time, until it only takes one upsetting incident to lose the player entirely.
As for Guild Wars, I believe I made a very strong argument in another thread, that Guild Wars takes at least as much time as the World Event for the vast majority of players. That is, if you’re doing the events at all, the World Event will roughly take less time than your quick breeze through Guild Wars.
But yeah, all this monetisation sucks.
What’s especially bad is that the devs are woefully understaffed. In other words, the publisher seems to be making them put in all this monetisation and not passing on any of the extra money to the devs!
Campaign isn’t going away. I would like to see a small change in scheduling though to avoid the workload we all had last week. My suggestion would be do the first 5 weeks of campaign then have GW then do the last 5 weeks campaign followed by GW.
Yes this would mean GW slightly less often but it’s a price I’m willing to pay to avoid last weeks’ overload.
True, but devs aren’t paid to care about it. They’re not the ones who make the business decisions. There may even be limits on what type of feedback they’re allowed to pass along.
I do agree with your stance, and those psychological annoyances are what has led me to the conclusion that this game is a ticking time bomb for me now. However, I also believe that decisions are made to most effectively maximize profit, and being less-consumer-friendly has been considered acceptable.
I’ll refer again to the probable GLUT of money pulled in by the battlepa$$es. There is literally no incentive for the company to tell/allow the devs to make more player-friendly changes when they can just maintain the status quo and continue increasing revenue.
This shouldn’t surprise anybody. Profit over people. Maximum profit at all costs.
Activision Blizzard reported record earnings at the end of 2018 and then laid off 800 people in early 2019. The CEO of that corporation is on the list of “most overpaid CEOs” and they laid people off in spite of record earnings. Corporations can be greedy [censored].
The bottom line is all that matters for a lot of corporations, and the parent company that owns GoW is likely no different: maximize profit while minimizing expense. In fact, wasn’t it pointed out when the parent company’s financials were discussed on this forum that GoW was likely financially propping up the parent’s F2P portfolio?
Tanks alot, I almost forgot to shine mine up too!
(Yes this isn’t the only game I play, I play tanks also to help me relax.)
Playing too much GoW can burn you out.
