With every new patch, this forum gets -2 stability
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Every for the last 30 days the post patch day is the lowest. Before that it was relatively stable. A 12% drop isn't insignificant. Bury your head sand all you want.
What was the % increase for all games within the top 50 most played? A lot of them will show variences, its one weekend. That stat means nothing on its own. At all. That's not burying my head in the sand. That's a fact.
Forums generally have stability problems because they are Republics, and everyone knows Republics are unstable compared to Monarchies.
Like arguing with a brick wall. I don't think you understand what a fact is. Presenting statistical evidence something is happening is a fact. Just repeating it doesn't mean anything followed by a bunch of sentence fragments is not. To answer your question, some games get more popular, some less, and some stay the same. Each has its own reason. If 1.5 was going over as well people claim it is, it seems awfully strange less people are playing the game.
Good, and here I was hoping that we'd struggle to establish that non-contextual claims of stats have no meaning when people start up with the "vocal minority" nonsense again.
Too true. The design changes have trumped some of the more...universally acknowledged as not ideal things
.
I don't have any strong feelings about this patch I haven't really played it so I can't attack or defend it. But you got me curious about the stats so I went and looked at them.
Technically the stats you cite are correct but it's also incredibly intellectually dishonest the way you present them. If you look at the number of users playing the game it peaks mid January and falls every week after. Did the number of players fall after the patch? Yes but they had been falling for a month before that, the week after the patch wasn't even the biggest decline in the last 30 days.
I know I stopped playing as of about 3 or 4 weeks before the expansion came out. Wouldn't you expect a massive spike of players right after the expansion?
It peaks the weekend after the DLC (Jan 18-19) and then starts it's downward trend. Mid January is when most US schools start back after winter break so that may also be a factor. My point is the number of players had been falling for a month before 1.5 so I'd caution reading too much into it.
Keep in mind that the person who initially extrapolated that this means the patch is unliked was responding to someone who was trying to extrapolate that people liked the patch because of high sales figures (from before the patch came out, no less). Regardless of the relevance of the data as far as patch enthusiasm goes, it definitively destroys the notion that the enthusiasm of past sales numbers can be stretched out to include enthusiasm for the 1.5.
I don't know what it is about video game fora. People who post about being unhappy are generally doing so because they want to improve the game, yet there's always a core of fanatics who will jump on a poster as soon as a criticism is made. Constructive criticism helps.
In my experience, Paradox games are pretty poor on release and are tweaked and tweaked and tweaked with patches until they turn into something good. Substantial changes seem to me to be par for the course, though if it's true that things are being changed back and forth, that's not part of my past experience.
They had an open beta where we found literally every problem with this patch, reported those problems, and were ignored.
Great post, Solo.
I was a "whiner" in the past on Creative Assembly's forum in the past because I really want their games to be good. I no longer buy CA games. They release lousy, bug-ridden products long on hype and ambition, but very short, on AI in particular.
I wish it weren't so, but I rather think you might be right.
I was a "whiner" in the past on Creative Assembly's forum in the past because I really want their games to be good. I no longer buy CA games. They release lousy, bug-ridden products long on hype and ambition, but very short, on AI in particular.
I wish it weren't so, but I rather think you might be right.
Oh I certainly grant you it's unreasonable to suggest sales are good because people heard about 1.5.
Republics become unstable when some guy has a messianic complex and wants to crown himself the King of Truth.
Fanboys vs Whiners
I had to laugh, its actually accurate of the perceptions of each group, as far as labels go. Then I realized that Fanboys dont mind being called Fanboys (even though they are compulsive liars with no souls) and people who want a better game (aka whiners) dont like being called whiners.
Europa 4 is boring. I play on hard ai and at no time am I really concerned about being conquered. Maybe when Ive invaded someone else, I might worry about somoene else attacking me, but by and large the Ai is passive, cannot expand, and generally stupid.
This is why dumb people always say "play a smaller country". Well I have started the game as the Date Province in Japan...so Ive done that but IF THE AI/GAME WERE INTELLIGENTLY MADE, bigger countries would be *more* difficult because they would have more problems! Angry minoritys, costly wars with other large countries (France vs England, Ottomans vs HRE, Russia vs Japan), more ports to secure etc etc.
So how do you cover your a55 with an Ai someone spent 5 minutes on? Ottoman Ai losing land to Albania etc etc. Just embarassing to watch.
Enter Coalitions. Massive Coalitions. Instead of countries "beating" you they just mass larger numbers and then still lose. What do you get for beating coalitions? Nothing. Interesting! Coailtions make sense but when you are coalitioned after gaining 1 province as a 1 province country in Japan....you are using coalitions to cover up your AI- your bad terribly bad AI. Sorry if that is too direct.
But that still doesnt take up enough game time. OK we'll do massive rebellions when you get OE and take years to core stuff, and huge diplomatic costs to change cultures. Use that fast forward button over and over. Lets not forget the massive number of stability destroying events that you cannot discourage or avoid. When your leader dies -1 stability, but if the leader lives to be 100, do you get +1 stability? No.
Because Europa is about filling up time, getting penalized for activity, and doing mindless busy work (rebel hunting), without much ambition or interesting gameplay aspects from an AI that may have come from a Cracker Jacks box.
I had to laugh, its actually accurate of the perceptions of each group, as far as labels go. Then I realized that Fanboys dont mind being called Fanboys (even though they are compulsive liars with no souls) and people who want a better game (aka whiners) dont like being called whiners.
Europa 4 is boring. I play on hard ai and at no time am I really concerned about being conquered. Maybe when Ive invaded someone else, I might worry about somoene else attacking me, but by and large the Ai is passive, cannot expand, and generally stupid.
This is why dumb people always say "play a smaller country". Well I have started the game as the Date Province in Japan...so Ive done that but IF THE AI/GAME WERE INTELLIGENTLY MADE, bigger countries would be *more* difficult because they would have more problems! Angry minoritys, costly wars with other large countries (France vs England, Ottomans vs HRE, Russia vs Japan), more ports to secure etc etc.
So how do you cover your a55 with an Ai someone spent 5 minutes on? Ottoman Ai losing land to Albania etc etc. Just embarassing to watch.
Enter Coalitions. Massive Coalitions. Instead of countries "beating" you they just mass larger numbers and then still lose. What do you get for beating coalitions? Nothing. Interesting! Coailtions make sense but when you are coalitioned after gaining 1 province as a 1 province country in Japan....you are using coalitions to cover up your AI- your bad terribly bad AI. Sorry if that is too direct.
But that still doesnt take up enough game time. OK we'll do massive rebellions when you get OE and take years to core stuff, and huge diplomatic costs to change cultures. Use that fast forward button over and over. Lets not forget the massive number of stability destroying events that you cannot discourage or avoid. When your leader dies -1 stability, but if the leader lives to be 100, do you get +1 stability? No.
Because Europa is about filling up time, getting penalized for activity, and doing mindless busy work (rebel hunting), without much ambition or interesting gameplay aspects from an AI that may have come from a Cracker Jacks box.
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Ok, let me be clearer. What you are presenting is indeed "statistical evidence" that less people were playing the game after the patch. However, NOT statistical evidence that less people are playing because of the patch.
To do that you would need to do a focus group with those that left. The fact that all games, Eu4 included, have tail off week after week (look at the stats each week since release, its declining each week anyway, patch or no pacth), means that it is more likely attributed to other reasons, such as "people playing other games", like they tend to do. Fickle consumers that we are......of course, the stats on their own don't "prove" that either. The just prove that EU4, and the majority of other games on steam are recieving less players each week.
There. Is that better? Less like a brick wall?