So about new players coming into game I have my doubts

[Chain_shot]

I made a new account on the European server to check it out. Started/ing as a newbie with no premium ships. Played through the mandatory missions in coop to get to randoms. In the time playing coop I saw maybe one other human per match most times it was just bots. Got to play random at forget what captain level, when I made it through required things. Seems the posted comments about a lack of new players at lower levels is true.

At random level tier 2 it was me against bots. In a 10 vrs 10 game, 9 bots and me. Smaller games  the same thing was happening I was solo against bots.

There used to be a constant influx of players at lower levels and there were times in randoms where you were only playing against players. Not anymore.

I mean its a wasteland at the lower levels.

I can only conclude the game is not sustaining itself well with new accounts and in time will be unable able to regenerate itself depending on experienced players.

There's nothing feeding of the roots so to say for this game at the moment. - its pretty bad.

 

[Capt_Ahab1776]

SeaRaptor has done a YT video of the then current state of the player base census. It showed some ebb and flow. One server would do more another one less. There wasn’t a spike nor a drop off on any of the four servers at that time. 
 

I would think due to lots of people forced to stay home the census would show more game time.

That is just a guess.

[Navalpride33]

I been posting about the decline ever since patch 0.8.0.1

Its not going to change unless WG does some major reflecting on its priorities.

[AVR_Project]

I did a re-roll 2nd account 3 years ago.  There were a few 'other' rerollers mixed in there with me.

You could tell the experienced ones as they knew how to handle a DD and work it strategically.

Meanwhile,  I was in my Chester and St. Louis beating the crap out of them and dodging torps since I knew they  were coming.

[mellowsdad]

As a new player, I started 2 weeks ago roughly. I can vouch for this.  It was at tier5 when I started getting consistent people instead of bots; yes in random.

[Fel0niusMonk]

3 minutes ago, mellowsdad said:

As a new player, I started 2 weeks ago roughly. I can vouch for this.  It was at tier5 when I started getting consistent people instead of bots; yes in random.

Yes, this is because until you play a certain number of battles (~100?) or reach T5, you're in protected matchmaking, which only puts you with bots and other players also in protected matchmaking.  Because you can get through that stage pretty quickly, there are never all that many people in protected matchmaking at any given time.  If you were to go back and play T3 or T4 now, you'd probably still see some bots in randoms, but unless you're playing at odd hours, the majority of the players will be humans.

[_Swearengen_]

19 minutes ago, Navalpride33 said:

I been posting about the decline ever since patch 0.8.0.1

Its not going to change unless WG does some major reflecting on its priorities.

Like maybe forgetting about submarines? I think that will drive off a ton of players...

 

[Navalpride33]

12 minutes ago, _Swearengen_ said:

Like maybe forgetting about submarines? I think that will drive off a ton of players...

 

Naaa Subs were only for testing.. The Mc Rib of WOWS.  It actually attracted players from other gaming platforms.

One thing for sure... I just made a very condensed list... AS much as you or others  have have negative feelings concerning subs..  Its negative impact was minuscule and its temporary benefits was gone like the wind, once it was over. Just like the Mc Rib.

The overall list is longer then the one item I posted...

[SoothingWhaleSongEU]

On this account which I created in October I had 3 mandatory co-op games, the 10 random battles to get to tier V and out of low tier matchmaker. They *were* naturally very good games XP wise as as an experienced player mostly slapping very harmless bot piñatas.

https://wiki.wargaming.net/en/Ship:Update_0.9.6#Low-Tier_Matchmaker_Changes

Spoiler

Low-Tier Matchmaker Changes

When playing low-tier ships (Tiers I through V) in Random Battles, teams often entered battle with an incomplete roster. Such a situation could occur due to the fact that most of the activity in our game take place at higher tiers. Now, if the waiting time spent by the first player in the queue exceeds 3 minutes, the remaining places in the teams will be occupied by bots.

• In Tier I–IV battles, bots are equal in strength to the bots in Co-op Battles.
• In Tier V battles, bots have received improved AI and fight at the skill level of those in Operations.

Matchmaker Changes for Newcomers

• The number of battles a player needs to fight in order to be placed in the general queue for Random Battles has been increased from 69 to 200. Thus a new player will gain more game experience before moving on to general Random Battles. If any newcomers decide they are ready to fight with experienced players, they will be able to enter battle playing Tier V ships:

• A player who has played 200 battles or less and enters battle playing Tier I–IV ships will be placed in the queue for newcomers only.
• A player who has played 200 battles or less and enters battle playing a ship of Tier V or above will be placed in the general queue.
• Players who have played more than 200 battles will always be placed in the general queue.

• If the waiting time spent by the first player in the queue exceeds 3 minutes, battles are possible where there is only one live player mirrored by a bot. In this case, the rest of the player’s team will be filled out with bots, and the opposing team will also be filled with bots, mirroring the player’s team in terms of ship tiers and types.

Matchmaker Changes in Low-Tier Random Battles

• In Tier I–V Random Battles, bots will be added until complete teams are formed if the waiting time spent by the first player in the queue exceeds 3 minutes. A battle will only be matched if the general queue contains at least one pair of players playing ships of the same tier.
• If players have ships of different types, then after 3 minutes of waiting in the queue, they will be mirrored by bot ships of the same types and tiers, and the teams will be complemented with bots within the limits for ship types and tiers for this particular battle tier. It means each team will have the same number of bots.
• A visual notification about the maximum waiting time and possibility of matching bots to the battle has been added to the battle loading screen.

Honestly I'm not sure exactly *how many* new players with <200 games I'd expect to be playing the same tier and queue at the same time. I was also playing on NA whilst 5-8 hours ahead of the UK.

[Utt_Buggly]

35 minutes ago, Fel0niusMonk said:

Yes, this is because until you play a certain number of battles (~100?) or reach T5, you're in protected matchmaking, which only puts you with bots and other players also in protected matchmaking.

Yes, but that’s precisely his point: protected matchmaker is where you would see the new players, or the lack thereof.

[_Swearengen_]

28 minutes ago, Navalpride33 said:

Naaa Subs were only for testing.. The Mc Rib of WOWS.  It actually attracted players from other gaming platforms.

One thing for sure... I just made a very condensed list... AS much as you or others  have have negative feelings concerning subs..  Its negative impact was minuscule and its temporary benefits was gone like the wind, once it was over. Just like the Mc Rib.

The overall list is longer then the one item I posted...

That's because like the McRib, it was only temporary...

 

[Navalpride33]

2 minutes ago, _Swearengen_ said:

That's because like the McRib, it was only temporary...

 

So are subs, so far.

[EraserNZ1]

I tried to get some friends into the game, The bots were only really a problem for t1 to t3. t4 to t6 the problem was the amount of 4 cv games that turned my friends off the game.

[clammboy]

 

2 hours ago, Chain_shot said:

I can only conclude the game is not sustaining itself well with new accounts and in time will be unable able to regenerate itself depending on experienced players.

There's nothing feeding of the roots so to say for this game at the moment. - its pretty bad.

 

You base this on your opening a new account on the European server ? This is all conjecture on your part .

[Snargfargle]

There were 10,160 new accounts on the NA server last week according to the data I have access to. And, yes, some of these could be rerolls. However, I've noticed that rerolls oftentimes immediately buy a Premium ship or Premium time to move more quickly to their favorite tier so they are quite likely providing a new revenue stream for WG in this sense.

It's interesting that "the game is dying" threads are present on almost all gaming forums, and they usually pop up about a week after the game has done public. All games die out over time, some sooner than others. I'd say that WOWS has at least five more years of life in it. Average player numbers are still slightly higher than over the entire life of the game. It may not be growing but the game isn't circling the drain either.

[shinytrashcan]

5 minutes ago, Snargfargle said:

There were 10,160 new accounts on the NA server last week according to the data I have access to.

I would be very interested in how many of these accounts are still active in January. The point of OP was not that the game fails to attract new players, but that their experience is suboptimal to the point that people are concerned whether the new players are actually staying with the game or quit after a few battles.

It is not about new accounts being made, it is about battles fought on those accounts and how long they stay active (and for WG: how much they are gonna spend on the game).

[Tokamak_Raven]

7 minutes ago, Snargfargle said:

There were 10,160 new accounts on the NA server last week according to the data I have access to. And, yes, some of these could be rerolls. However, I've noticed that rerolls oftentimes immediately buy a Premium ship or Premium time to move more quickly to their favorite tier so they are quite likely providing a new revenue stream for WG in this sense.

I can see some devious planning in this.

Take some decent players and give them awful MM to tank their winrate/stats.

Now they have to reroll if they want to get gud@boats again, and WG gets their $$.

[Snargfargle]

Just now, Tokamak_Raven said:

I can see some devious planning in this.

Take some decent players and give them awful MM to tank their winrate/stats.

Now they have to reroll if they want to get gud@boats again, and WG gets their $$.

At least in free-to-play games rerolls are, well, free. I played another game for about a decade where you had to buy the thing up front. The company probably loved "smurfs," as they were called there, because some of them had dozens of accounts.

[Chain_shot]

19 minutes ago, Snargfargle said:

There were 10,160 new accounts on the NA server last week according to the data I have access to. And, yes, some of these could be rerolls. However, I've noticed that rerolls oftentimes immediately buy a Premium ship or Premium time to move more quickly to their favorite tier so they are quite likely providing a new revenue stream for WG in this sense.

It's interesting that "the game is dying" threads are present on almost all gaming forums, and they usually pop up about a week after the game has done public. All games die out over time, some sooner than others. I'd say that WOWS has at least five more years of life in it. Average player numbers are still slightly higher than over the entire life of the game. It may not be growing but the game isn't circling the drain either.

So explain why World of Warcraft has not died it can loose a million players and still keep putting on. Everyone has been trying to take it down for 16 years and it keeps putting along.

The 4.8 million still play World of Warcraft. WG is not even close to maintaining that customer base.

[Snargfargle]

20 minutes ago, Chain_shot said:

So explain why World of Warcraft has not died it can loose a million players and still keep putting on. Everyone has been trying to take it down for 16 years and it keeps putting along.

The 4.8 million still play World of Warcraft. WG is not even close to maintaining that customer base.

I don't think many remember when WOW was an RTS game. It was pretty fun too. WOW is like Pewdiepie, it might not be the best thing out there but it's got inertia. Once a game is huge it's harder to break into its market. WOT is doing well in its niche market. The mobile version is doing even better. WOWS is a niche market of a niche market so isn't going to approach something like WOW. However, WG in general has done well enough to make its owner a billionaire.

Quote

Wargaming mobile app revenue in November 2020 was $8 million.

 

[STINKWEED_]

WG doesn't make any money in the low tiers. This is why it tries so hard to get players to tier 10 as fast as possible. Even if it takes selling premium T9 and 10s for cash. It's not about the player base , it's about maximizing profits. This is how business is conducted in Russia and post Soviet states. Get used to it. 

[clammboy]

16 minutes ago, Chain_shot said:

So explain why World of Warcraft has not died it can loose a million players and still keep putting on. Everyone has been trying to take it down for 16 years and it keeps putting along.

The 4.8 million still play World of Warcraft. WG is not even close to maintaining that customer base.

So what !!! There two different games and wows never had that player base so that’s a mute point losing a million players or having a 4.8 million player base . I mean really pull out one of the most successful and longest running games and try to compare to a small niche game like wows to try and prove its dying is crazy  . Where did you get all theses stats from people love to just throw out numbers .  The point is you don’t have any clue where this game will be in 5 more years . It could be still be going strong or it might be gone but  world of Warcraft numbers  has nothing to do with it . 

[Chain_shot]

11 minutes ago, Snargfargle said:

I don't think many remember when WOW was an RTS game.

So as I recall there is Battlegrounds and Arena which surely felt like RTS for me.

Alterac Valley certainly felt like real time to me. And arena mode was pretty strategic when you played as well.

 

I love how when compared to wow people run to the corners and say they are niche games to defend the ones they play lol. No dev wants to be a niche game I bet.

[Compassghost]

There's a concept of "critical mass" required to have the semblance of a fully populated game. After that, additional players either wait in queue due to too many players, or do not recognize a lack of players.

Let's say you have a game that requires 2 players, and each match takes about 10 minutes to play. Critical mass for this game is about 20 matches' worth of players (assuming a match starts roughly every 30 seconds) (20 matches x 2 players = 40 players).

For general population WOWS (approximate due to skill tier): 24 players, 15 minutes of play. Critical mass in this case is 30 matches x 24 players = ~720 players to get relatively seamless matchmaking. Above critical mass, we start seeing the queue become backlogged due to too many people entering before matchmaker is ready to launch the next group.

This is roughly aligned to tier brackets, so we would need more players to cover the spreads of T1-T10. Critical mass for WOWS as a whole would probably be about 2800 to cover ~ every 2.5 tiers worth of players.

For low-tier co-op and randoms, there is no way that you can reach critical mass of 720 players because the queue is protected and only replenished by entirely new accounts. 720 players is a lot of people, and they have to be constantly replenished. That's the unfortunate downside of protected matchmaking in that you deliberately reduce access to the new player population, but I'm not sure anyone would enjoy being clubbed by a 20K game T1 player.

[SeaCat_]

7 hours ago, shinytrashcan said:

I would be very interested in how many of these accounts are still active in January. The point of OP was not that the game fails to attract new players, but that their experience is suboptimal to the point that people are concerned whether the new players are actually staying with the game or quit after a few battles.

It is not about new accounts being made, it is about battles fought on those accounts and how long they stay active (and for WG: how much they are gonna spend on the game).

Exactly ....How many new accounts are just because it's a free download and the trailer looks good but they don't continue on.