Loading...Hello guys, today we discuss a common topic today. Is WG trying to save a dying game with all the changes recently? Enjoy!
Server Numbers:https://stats.wotapi.ru/stats/wows/na/total
Update Article: https://worldofwarships.com/en/news/game-updates/update-0119-submarines/
Discord: https://discord.gg/P5aR2PzVXB
Have a replay?
Music: Stranger Think- C418
Chapters:
0:00 Video Intro
0:46 Reason 1: Submarines
2:16 Reason 2: Cross Region Matchmaking
4:11 Reason 3: Hybrid Ships
5:11 The Playerbase That Has Left
6:36 Current Player Numbers
10:47 Thoughts
If I had a penny for every time the game was declared dead/dying, I would be able to fund the texas restoration single handedly
that would be 3.5 billion times, I find that hard to believe
@Mike Du Bose one penny per person? Thats just me lowballing
It’s not necessarily a sign of a dying game, but a solution to solve the time-zone problem and ensure that there can always be enough players queuing for different modes.
Cross server matchmaking – I think they claimed it is to address issues with early game matchaking.
WoWs has pretty stable player base on high tiers, but obviously older players eventually drop.
The problem is that WoWs, I suspect, has abysmal new player retention – early game is terrible. You have bad or boring ships early on with several massive roadblocks.
And because of this – early game has abysmal queue times, and is ridden with bots to fill the queues – if you are a new player… that is not something that would boost your confidence, would it?
Once you meet tier IV carriers, in many ships you will find yourself completely and utterly screwed, due to lack of AA whatsoever. So you suddenly meet a class of ship you quite literally can do nothing against.
I know – AA really doesn’t do anything anyway, but at least when you start, it gives you feeling you have some sort of countermeasure. On tier 4, there are still ships with nothing at all, or few token machine guns to boot.
And once you get through to tier V… +2 Matchmaker is unlocked. So you find yourself in a ship that can meet tier IV at the lowest, but can see tier VII at the highest – and this means you will be pulled as a bottom tier XP pinata for most of your games – so despite advancing up to the literal middle of the tech tree… You will often feel less powerful and less viable than before.
And god forbid if your ship of choice was Omaha or Konigsberg – because at this point you can add one-shot kills to the mix.
Let’s be real here – with these kind of early game experiences… plenty of players would be like “screw this”… and they would leave.
WG unfortunately is kind of notorious for neglecting early game – World of Tanks faces equivalent issues.
TLDR: Remove CVs and +2 MM, problem solved.
Yes, this is a real issue. 4 years ago you could actually kind of play and learn in T4 – T5. Heck, I remember even playing T2 or T3 premiums for actual fun. Nowadays I don’t think anything below T5 is even remotely relevant, atleast not in a single player.
However, in the current situation I think it is quite difficult for a novice player the learn to proper lessons, and way to easy (also due REEEE-community exposure) to learn the exact wrong attitude. And that is why you end up with 10K games, 43WR players failing into high tier that are just not able to realize how they ended up in that situation. And sure, one or two of such scrubs is not a real problem, just an annoyance, but if MM puts distributes them unevenly over the teams, games get tiring pretty soon.
If they want us to go back in the lower tier, they should get rid of the +2/-2 MM.
@jay Vee & the power of the cvs’ at each level is at times terrible to the extent that to play the game for some enjoyment I actually play at the lower tiers. T7+ is horrendous & I’m on the Asia server
Nah, just make the rewards better. If I could earn as much silver and xp at t5 as I can at t9, I would be there.
@jay Vee they’ve probably formed a div after the match started, you can’t div with a ship 2 tiers higher than yours in port
@Yeah That’s Me i really don’t know, but i have been dragged many times to T10 games with T7 ship because the match making decide to random pick a T7 player because the opponent’s side have a T7 ship divisioned with a T8/T9.
@jay Vee No, you were not. Because you cannot enter battle in a div with two tiers spread. I even told you the link to the news where they removed that option years ago! And even if there is a 8+9 div, that T8 of this div is treated as if it was T9, not the other way round. There is no way at all to cheat your way in a lower tier match by using a div than you could be matched into alone. Whatever you experienced is either completely made up or you dont remember it right.
Last night matches was terrific. Every matches I went into have half of both my teams and enemy teams went either AFK or AWOL. I don’t mind free kills but WG really need to make sure the servers is able to cater the huge load.
Yeah there’s been a lot of AFK in Asia recently. A lot of disconnects. Even I started getting DC’d which has never happened before. Doesn’t matter now though. Uninstalled 2 weeks ago!
Cross region play is a great feature and not necessarily a sign of a shrinking playerbase (Although it can be, of course).
I can remember players asking for the option of cross region play since the very beginning in world of tanks, let alone world of warships.
Gamers tend to have overseas gaming buddies and they would like to play together.
War thunder launched with cross region play and honestly that was a great aspect of that game!
The biggest game killer for me is the economy nerfs. I play FTP only and haven’t gotten a new ship or commander skill point in a looooong time. And I don’t expect to. Fortunately I have already accumulated a lot of premium ships that are still fun to play. But it’s getting boring.
The only boring thing for me is when I am placed in a team where everybody are noobs. It happens way too often.
I just keep grinding for coal, keeps something there to be attained and grind for to get a new coal ship
C raptor has done several nice breakdowns of this. The last one I saw was before the Russian invasion and it looked like the Russian server was losing people but the others were fairly stable. I expect that traffic continue
seems amazing to me that there are games that haven`t changed for centuries yet they have a healthy player base , so why do our modern games need to keep changing . the concept of this game got me hooked , not premium ships , or quirky game modes . the point being i guess is that most of the changes made to the game are only really noticeable to existing players not to the new sailors to the game nor to the potential players either as they don`t have previous experience to compare with . i just hope the game doesn`t change so much that it starts to lose sight of the original idea
When games don’t change, the playerbase ends up finding the gameplay stale and they just leave. It’s why games need to constantly update or they fall.
I left the game 2 years ago. Many, who started with me in CBT, vanished already at that point. Those were experienced gamers, you could have good non steam rolled matches. I left after they start pushing loot boxes, buyable T9/10 ships, absolut unbalanced premiums, events you cannot do anymore without a credit card. Even with a 54% solo WR, there were days of frustrating matches. And if you wanted to keep up with events, the game turned into a second job. And we talk about a account with all the brocken premiums and all tech trees fully researched. The game wasn’t any joy anymore. I think latest at the time of the CC walkout, I would have quit the game. And subs were already a no go for me at the start of the game.
It would be easy to test, offer CV or sub/CV excluded randoms vs what they’re doing now… very sure the most populated would be sub and CV free modes.
Aye,
CV’s are the most hated class and subs are just annoying and add nothing to the gameplay apart from nonsense and irritation.
@Cammo1962
Aye fair enough.
I have seen (and it’s happended to me) subs getting depth-charged and hit repetedly but they seem to be made out of extra-special bomb-proof material and stay alive somehow.
And let’s not get sarted on the homing missiles oh sorry… ‘torpedoes’. 😉
If you really don’t think it is dying then try playing tier 1 or 2 for a while. This is where the new players come in. Totally common for teams to be only 1 or 2 humans per team and the rest are bots. Since subs I have been playing tier 4 and below, all 4 tier routinely have 6-9 bots per side. If you are not attracting new players then you are dying.
That doesn’t mean the game is dying, it means you have a poor understanding of the game. Players want to reach high tier as fast as they can and low tier takes very little experience to get out of. No matter how many new players join the game, they will always exit from low tier extremely fast which will inevitably leave it empty. In fact, low tier games were filled with bots within the first year or so; low tier only had players at the beginning of World of Warships.
As a veteran player, I may be a co-op/competitive main, I just simply want to enjoy the game for what it is as history is a big factor in it. Sure, the game has issues and I acknowledge that. The “game is dying” trolls are in every game that has existed.
If WoW really wants to get players to “go back down Tier” they should stop pushing Tiers 9 to 10*.
Personally, I hate submarines (specifically) and torpedoes (in general). I wish this was just a battleship & cruiser game. Oh well . . .
If only the submarine gameplay was only like how Silent Hunter does it.
I disagree that connecting the servers is them just giving players what they want. Other than them never giving us what we want its pretty obvious it’s to bump the player numbers up. It’s not necessarily a bad thing but to pretend that they have some alternative motive behind this particular move is disingenuous.
My two cents: I went from 2 ~ 10 hrs gameplay a week to a 2 hrs a month (at most), and I don’t miss playing at all. To many games are meh at best (even the wins, the wins can even be the worst!), and I cannot help there are more fun activities, or games, to play instead of playing against my own mental state in WoWs.
+10
the problem for wargaming is its a semi niche business, even if you can retain numbers the cash spent is in decline, for a number of reasons. Generally people have spent in for what they wanted and their spending rate slows over time, they may keep playing but they spend less, covid will have seen an anomaly in the trend as hobbies generally saw an increase in spending in this period, but that’s at an end now. Without significant or steady increases in recruitment at a constant rate there comes a stall point in the business and it goes from growth to decline
I’d be curious if bringing subs has brought more players than they lost. Of course, we’ll never know the truth about this. I do know one guy from our clan quit in frustration with subs.
Submarines…
The class nearly everyone didn’t want and nearly all the CC’s said “don’t put these in the game” after years of testing.
….and here we are.
😉
Yo Mountbatten! I sincerely enjoy your videos, especially the in-depth research and obvious time you put into them to keep the quality high. Having said that, I also believe you are a bit of a War-Gaming apologist, and tend to put the best face on any new developments coming to the game. And, IN MY OPINION, the folks running the game don’t deserve it.
I would cite the many, many times WG has introduced (or tried to introduce) concepts that no one really asked for and the majority of the player base staunchly opposed. The CV rework, Hybrid ships, submarines, the economic rework, the Alabama and Puerto Rico debacles; WG has shown time and time again that customer satisfaction was not job 1, or any job number with a single digit.
So while I admire and respect your work and your video creations, I must disagree with your stand on the current health of the game. You say the Chinese and Russian servers lag behind the US and Euro servers in released updates; is it possible that this is because the folks running these servers have seen the negative receptions the most recent updates have engendered? And FYI, losing the Russian server was HUGE! It was one of 3 main servers the game relied on and losing 33% of your player base simply has to be a devastating blow. So, IN MY OPINION, this latest move on the part of WG is more serious than some think, and I believe the player numbers bear watching closely in the future.
I occasionally check other player stats and I’ve noticed a trend. Most new players are quickly advancing through the ranks and only really start playing the game at Tier 8 and up.