PA Stats usage statistics

For what its worth the main time I've had trouble is weekend nights British time; I presume there is some US driven spike after I go to bed. Though I would think that would have already begun by 1-2 am (well into the evening for much of the US).

Wow I wouldn't have expected that. I usually have a look over the PA Stats gamelist when I get up (at the end of the EU evening) and there always looks to have been a lot of activity...

Edit: of course I don't play during that time so I'd really have no idea

The last thing i'm going to say for the night is that it is really unfair and disingenuous to paint me as some kind of sky is falling PA is doomed person on the basis of this particular disagreement. I really don't like how you as a moderator respond to any hint of negativity by labeling the person as a sycophant. The folks who know me from the Realm TS know that I am anything but a negative nancy. I've made quite a few posts here and else where singing the praises of PA and countering the negativity hype circle jerk.

This no-dissent mentality from the community leaders does no good for us. I saw some clear trends in the data that you seemed to be willfully overlooking and spoke truthfully about them. You started this entire thread as a giant finger wagging exercise on the basis or brief discussion in the balance forums.

single player only data isn't really the point, this is about the size of the only communiy. I am not trying to determine their sales based on my data, I am trying to make people realize they far too negative about the size of the online community, as that has clearly not decreased, apart from typical downwards trends. The idea is that hopefully Uber will be able to push more updates like the GW update and the release update that attract players to try PA again.
Why should they do that? Because I think everyone agrees there is a large group of people whose expectations for PA have not yet been fulfilled and who already own PA. If uber pushes some patch that promises improvements people are bound to give PA another try, as it will cost them nothing.
I'll attach all csv data I used in a few min when I gathered them again, I think i was lazy and overwrote some, give me a few moments to recreate them and tell me if I switched them up xD.
Though this:

makes me think all you want is analyze some tiny part of the overall data to show that tiny part has a decline. (EDIT: And I was wrong to think that, as can be read below)
You might as well analyze only the decline after the gw update or that other spike between release and gw update.
I can tell you, even by drawing regression lines with my mouse cursor free hand: Yes there is a decline there. Surprise

EDIT:

I am sorry if you feel attacked by me directly like that. You've created an image of a negative person in my mind with earlier posts already. I might be wrong on that, I can only get an impression from random posts you make. I've grown aggressive towards constant negative bantering. Also I did not intentionally try to look at the data in a specific way. In fact I get the impression you are trying to hard to do so, i.e. by going after some decline in the recent weeks and make it to be the ultimate explanation of why it's all bad.
Also look at the graph that shows the amount of new active players. They made up a quite big part of the release peak.

Sorry, i'm not in the business of selectively distorting data, but nice of you to take that parting shot at my character.

edit: the bolded part meant that I won't be able to get around to it until after november as I am swamped at work currently. An uncharitable mis-read on the uber forums? Well I never...

I thought you said there was a clear downwards trend? This contradicts that.

Change in acquisition is a second derivative - change of change. You can have a slowdown in growth, while continuing to grow. This discussion isn't about change in growth, it's about growth itself.

Sorry, but I too can't help but get the impression from this, above, and your previous posts that you are seeming to look for specific statistics that make the situation look bad. Especially when those statistics deviate from what the point of the OP is (eg., talking about change of growth, or revenue as you did earlier)

Sorry for misunderstanding you, I didn't mean to misread this like that. I obviously have a mindset about you and a few other people, it's bad that I have it, but it's hard to get rid of it when all posts I see of these people usually make the impression of "oh hey this thread seems to be full of positivity, I am gonna tell them why it's actually all bad". This mindset was not created from our disagreement here. I already had that mindset based on other stuff you posted and that influenced my reactions to your posts in a negative way.

I've made this thread to have an objective view on statements that go "this community is shrinking so bad nobody plays" and I still think the data I have shown proves such statements wrong. Certainly this data is no a perfect proof of massive growth and certainly after peaks there are declines, but I really can't see why anybody would be that negative about it. What's clear is there are not really fewer players than month ago from all I know, so people telling us the community size is decreasing are not seeing the whole picture.
I guess I failed to stay in a purely objective area the moment your post started with "your biased and have an agenda".
That read like "all you say is invalid, because you say positive stuff and that can't be right" to me, especially when I consider what kind of posts I have seen before from you.

My post history contains a mixture of positive, negative, and neutral statements. I'm going to take this as a halfway apology, thank you. I have no idea where you got the idea that I primarily post negative things. It sounds to me like you are overly sensitive to negative posts and ignore the positive. Goodness knows there are prominent community members who spread a whole heck of a lot more doom and gloom than I do. You might (not) recall I made a post right before release asking everyone to calm down and lower expectations to smooth out the ride. Maybe if you and the rest of the "A-team" stop seeing legit, civil disagreement as unabashed negativity the community wouldn't teetotal from crisis to crisis. In the past two weeks a lone I have complemented you numerous times for various awesome modding projects... and I have also seen you post plenty of complains. I don't have the impression that either of us are biased towards negativity, but you are biased against it. Anyways we disagree about the overall conclusion supported by the data and I don't see that being resolved in this thread. I wish you could reconcile the fact that belief in poor growth =/= negativity.

I wouldn't bet on single player being that huge, since we don't have a campaign. I spend a ton of time having fun in the SupCom and Forged Alliance campaign, but I am not a huge fan of vs AI skirmishes. The same applies here.

I think you and Colin are both making me out to have made a far more black and white statement than I intended. My interpretation was in response to Colin's clear statement that the stats clearly supported healthy and strong growth. I think there are multiple clear signs that this is not a well supported conclusion. It is true that the linear growth of total active players is one growth indicator. I am questioning exactly what conclusions can be drawn from that single metric. The opposite would mean the game was well and truly dead and that for every player gained more were lost. But this type of growth - as pointed out by colin - is almost totally irrelevant to revenue for Uber. If the total rate of new players is not expanding then the game is not growing it's growth. At the end of the day Uber can only make sales (excluding commander purchases) from new players. The second fact is that a large amount of the linear (first order) growth is related to clear major events in development history. What major event can reverse the current downward trend? Maybe a major update and Christmas, but I am (clearly) skeptical on that point. In the end my point is that pointing to the total seen players from alpha until now is not a clear cut indicator of growth, especially when combined with the Steam data. All it shows is that yes, the game did acquire a player base that grew from alpha until 8 weeks ago (at release). Can anyone possibly be surprised by that?

I am not trying to make you specifically a negative person. However I had this feeling, for probably unjustified reasons (edit: after reading through your posts for the last days most my feeling was from your posts in your thread about how pointless the balance forums is, as well as some post where you basically say that the forums, reddit and the server browser are all sort of dead. I heavily disagree with that and tried to find numeric proof of that (so that there are people playing the game and that the number of them is definitely not on a "dead" level), which led to me making this thread.), and your posts in this thread just fit into it.
I am showing you a simple graph that clearly shows that there is no such thing as a decline in online players. How good growth may be or not, the graphs clearly show the size of online players is not declining, rather growing after updates and I personally assume Uber will be able to push out more updates, and since a lot of features in PA are still in massive need for improvement there is a lot of room for big updates.
Now I post this graph and you start dissecting specific parts of the data and try to put it in relation to things like revenue for Uber. I am not trying to discuss that here, that never was my intention. Basically I had the impression I posted graphs that easily show some positive things about the size of the active online players and you start to analyze it to try and find a prove for how sales are dropping. That's the impression I got from your posts. Why not just acknowledge that at least the number of players pa stats can see is overall rather growing then shrinking? Bringing up potential issues is all good and well IF you can actually also give a suggestion of how to improve them. So there is little point in talk about sales, unless you have a clever idea of how to improve them.

If we see more players playing every week that surely would mean there is growth? Combined with the steam data I get the impression the amount of vs AI players is trending downwards, but some of them stay and become online players.

"If the total rate of new players is not expanding then the game is not growing it's growth" that's just A = A, but it's still focusing on growth of growth, instead of growth itself (which was Colin's point). As for revenue, that was not in Colin's original post either (Colin ninja'd).

Growth of growth is always going to decrease after the release of any game, especially when so many people have had the opportunity to purchase beforehand. So using that as your metric is useless, until it causes actual growth to go negative. Basically, you've been arguing that the game isn't growing, purely because the rate of growth is slowing.

It's amazing how much the game has grown since Sept, 2013 (I assume when you started recording and really developing PAStats). Something interesting is that in May, 2014, there was a peak of users that equals that of release, however, it dropped down to just over 1/2 of the peak. After the release spike, the game dropped by only about 1/4 of the spike, putting us on that nice and pretty line that Cola drew.

What worries me is that the spikes didn't increase much, even though it was arguably the biggest event in the game's development. <5000 players isn't all that much, and that's about the most that PAStats ever recorded in one week, which could imply that the general interest in the game itself is near it's peak.

Obviously, if we have another huge update like GW or 1.0, we might be able to get >5000, which would show some good information supporting that the game can still continue to get larger, without merely retaining those that have already purchased the game. New growth is slowing, but we are retaining more and more players, which is something that's quite important as well. I'm very curious to see how this data develops over Dec. and Jan.

Well at the start of september 2013 obviously pa stats had only few users, so it the initial growth is mostly just pa stats becoming more popular among online players. But with hundreds of active users per week pa stats now has quite a few eyes that watch games that happen, so I think it's definitely meaningful data by now.
I agree the real question is: Does Uber manage to push more updates that give gw and 1.0 like peaks? If yes we're in for a long ride of PA.

Upcoming Competitive PA update might bring in the dough, considering...

Custom map editor, and Symmetrical planets. A completely custom editor with any game would instantly peak my interest, and I wouldn't be surprised if others are similar to me.

Thanks Colin, I appreciate that we could get this back on track. I admit that my posts in those threads were overly negative and that I over played my analysis a bit in my first response here. I think you are correct that there is certainly some evidence for total growth and particularly for player retention. I guess I was over stressing the intuition that this might be due to early backers coming back as the game improves, rather than new income, but you are right that focusing too much on revenue is somewhat reading the tea leaves.

Just to add a +1 to my positive comment jar, just played a 2v2v2 that was really fun and felt quite well balanced. On vanilla!

I agree, proper ranked plus map editor and more mod support could be the trifecta that eventually leads to a dota. I am always holding out for such a phenomena!

If Uber can hold out financially and manage to release an 'Expansion' with polish and features, we might be able to get some number of players growing off the back of a new set of more positive reviews.

I'm not so sure, I've played TA, SupCom, SupCom 2, etc. etc. and I always play AI skirmishes and have a lot of fun with it. Very rarely do I play any campaigns or play online. I think PA is a great game and getting better.

Yeah I used to play allot of vs AI skirmish games when I got into TA. I got through maybe the first half of the ARM campaign and then just switched to skirmish and on line games.

Having said that, I did play though the whole of the SupCom FA campaign, as the story was really well written imo (the first SupCom I found a bit dull and never completed it). I like story driven games *but* the story has to be good enough to keep my interest. Warcraft 3 kept me hooked and I completed that, Starcraft 2 on the other hand though, I dunno why but it really didn't do much for me.

Having said that, I do think there would be interest for a big campaign based game in the PA universe, though that would be a big undertaking so would require another Kickstarter or other large injection of funding for it to be possible (which wouldn't be unreasonably as a fully scripted campaign would be a new goal outside of the scope of the original Kickstarter).