Quote:
Originally Posted by Remy
So, Interestingly enough, the planet numbers was RISING up to R44 (something everyone was praying for, wasn't it?). R45 we saw a serious drop in numbers. Why? First thing i did was look at the 'Changes this round'. What i saw was this:
|
I have no less than
five objections:
1) Round 44 was free, so the data from that round should be discarded.
2) We've seen this kind of 'stability' before: player numbers were roughly constant from round 34 to 36 (1307, 1247, 1299). The same is true of round 28-33 (1432, 1420,
1628,
1696, 1551, 1447), the numbers in italic are round 30 (supposedly the last round) and 31 (bought by zPeti with much fanfare), which are anomalous and should be ignored. Of course, we can use the exact same rounds to show that PA's player number shrunk significantly: in round 29, there were 1420 players. Round 35 had 1247 players. Round 41 had 1103. Round 47 had 854.
3) All this establishes is correlation, not causality.
4) One data point is not enough to derive conclusions from. It's simply bad science to pretend that it is.
5) Even if the current player base does not like something, that does not mean it's a bad feature, nor is losing those players necessarily bad for PA. I've long been amazed and annoyed at how incredibly stuck people are in their ways. This is snown particularly well when someone does something unorthodox. XP whoring, fortress gals, covert operations, donating your galfund to someone at tick 24; all of these strategies and tactics caused a mass uproar when they were first used (and some still make people red hot with anger), with the usual cries of 'abuse' and 'unfairness' and demands for nerfs. PA 3.0 would probably be better off without the current player base.
Unfortunately, while some of my objections could be overcome with more data, I don't think this round will give us any. As I've said several times now, I don't believe a limit of prelaunching to +4 meaningfully changes anything at all, so even if we lose another 100 players this round, then that just shows people are
morons. But then I'm already convinced of that, so many I'm biased.
P.S. It is interesting to see that "free" rounds
still attract so many more people than "paid" rounds. To me it shows a failure to communicate that hey, PA is perfectly playavle even if you don't buy a credit!