EPTChanges in League Distribution [Graphs and Data] - Page 2
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imrepresent
United States7 Posts
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zajeBEASTY
Poland40 Posts
On December 05 2013 04:30 Kyrao wrote: Anyone else find it interesting to see that the player base went from 367,439 to 211,965 in 6 months? That's over a 40% decline... Its nothing unusual to be true - when hots lunched many new and old players started to play - its normall for every game, every expansion. It would be better to know the numbers a 1-2 month before hots lunch to compare. | ||
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CutTheEnemy
Canada373 Posts
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seak99
Canada69 Posts
That shouldn't have anything to do with the player base. I thought they had set percentages for the league. Like Masters at 2, Diamond at 18, plat at 20.. and so on | ||
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DomiNater
United States527 Posts
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Hoon
Brazil891 Posts
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Excalibur_Z
United States12256 Posts
I want to point out a very important caveat when it comes to these charts: the data is muddied regarding who has and hasn't decayed. As we've established by now, the inactivity threshold is two weeks and decay ramps up to an average league's worth of rating at four weeks linearly, where it caps out. Are Bronze and Silver 65%+ of the player pool? Yes and no. In terms of all accounts present in the ladder, yes, the nios.kr/SC2Ranks data is accurate. However, in terms of the active playerbase it's probably not nearly that skewed. Remember that there are now two metrics which measure "activity": one is the league apportionment metric which defines the league rating boundaries through a certain number of weeks' worth of unspent bonus pool (I covered this in a TL post previously), and the other is the decay metric that I just mentioned. The former is intended to redistribute the leagues according to the ideal distribution, which it appears to do effectively when viewed through the apportionment metric lens, and the latter is designed to cater to inactive users so they're not overwhelmed when they become rusty and return to the game. I would like to see a parse which sorts players by last game played per league, as well as a parse covering the number of games played per league. That way, we might have a better idea as to how many within that 65% figure actually constitute players who are queued up playing games. Because of decay, inactive players are pushed downward a little bit. This has been going on since HotS Season 1, and we're in Season 6 now. If a Master player just played his placement match every season and that's it, like a lot of players tend to do, then by now he'd be in Bronze. Is that necessarily a problem? Again, yes and no. Yes because on a micro scale, it sucks if a true-Bronze player faces a player with Master-level mechanics. Even if that Master-level player is pretty rusty, it's going to be a stomp, flat out. However, that decayed player is only playing one game per season, meaning his impact on the entire Bronze league ends after that one game. The players in lower leagues will face a range of active true-leaguers and decayed players, we just don't know the frequency of each. It's also no secret that the lower the skill segment, the lower the activity level in general (Master players simply play more often, that's why their bonus pool accumulation rate is higher), and this complicates the matter because the number of active low-leaguers is pretty small to begin with. I also wanted to acknowledge the declining playerbase. First, the data in the image is a little misleading. Season 3 ended on June 11, 2013 and the June 1 snapshot here is only ten days before the end of the season. Season 6, which we're in now, will end on December 27, 2013 -- twenty-four days away. That's not to say the playerbase hasn't declined, though. It has, and that's happened with every season after a product launch. Are we going to get 150,000 players to join the ladder in two weeks? Probably not. At least at that time, though, we'll be comparing apples to apples. Here are a couple of data points I was able to grab from archive.org snapshots of SC2Ranks: Season 14 (Aug 19 2013 snapshot [season ends Aug 26 2013], SC2Ranks 2.0 overhaul): 471,590 players Season 15 (Nov 7 2013 snapshot [season ends Nov 11 2013]): 354,694 players Second, it's unclear why players are quitting the game. Maybe there are other games that have captured their interest, maybe it really is ladder frustration, maybe it's burnout, we can only speculate. | ||
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Psychobabas
2531 Posts
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Bulugulu
Israel250 Posts
This way it means a bit more to be in those leagues. | ||
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NiHiLuSsc2
United States50 Posts
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phodacbiet
United States1740 Posts
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rice_devOurer
United States773 Posts
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Genie1
Canada333 Posts
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Faust852
Luxembourg4004 Posts
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Drake
Germany6146 Posts
also its only half the players, so when you try fix such a bug AND half the players left the game ... its ok it needs a bit of time and ALSO there are still TO MUCH! players in master ! | ||
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Excalibur_Z
United States12256 Posts
Is the system working as intended? Yes. Players are decaying according to specification. Are there unintended consequences? Not really, no. Blizzard doesn't need to acknowledge aggregator sites like SC2Ranks/Nios.kr because they have all the data stored internally, and the way they read the populations is through an activity filter that those sites don't use. The real question is whether the decay is too aggressive and causing players to either play less often or quit outright. They could try tuning the decay rate or tuning the cap, or by introducing a rebound mechanic to catch up on decay. It could be some combination of these. | ||
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RJ231
Canada19 Posts
On December 07 2013 12:45 Excalibur_Z wrote: Second, it's unclear why players are quitting the game. Maybe there are other games that have captured their interest, maybe it really is ladder frustration, maybe it's burnout, we can only speculate. I thought I would give my opinion on this as I am one of the players who basically dropped the game after investing quite a lot of time/energy into it and I know a number of other high level players who did the same for similar reasons. The biggest issue is mainly that the game just isn't properly balanced, this along with the fact that blizzard takes far too long to admit their balance/design mistakes makes for some very frustrating and exhausting games. The thing I always hear people say is "well x just won this tournament so clearly x race isn't under powered" and they fail to realize that for the majority of the player base that unbalanced situation usually plays out much more clearly in the lower levels. If widow mines are tearing the very best zergs on the planet apart and costing them games how do you think I feel when I'm playing in master league and instantly lose the game to a unit that automatically fired a missile from underground and just wiped out a huge chunk of my army. When you see top players playing they are completely aware of the imbalances of the game and will do whatever they can to abuse/mitigate their effectiveness. For the average SC2 enthusiast they aren't quite as adept at recognizing these things and dealing with them so they end up losing to these forces in catastrophic ways that feels very bad to be quite honest, it doesn't help that it tends to happen again and again. I think that if Blizzard did a better job of acknowledging the imbalance in their games and were more proactive it would feel better as a player, it's exciting to me when I hear they've nerfed that or buffed this because it means now the game is likely more fair and there's this feeling that it's sort of "new" again since the match ups won't revolve around certain imbalances quite as much. I think another big issue is the game just isn't friendly to newer players, how do you actually play a race like zerg casually? For the race to even function you need to be on 80+ drones, have 4 hatcheries and then spend hours mastering weird keyboard sequences so your macro isn't complete crap. When I watch a game like league of legends on stream I can get excited and can go enter into a game and have a pretty decent time, maybe I'm not great but I don't necessarily feel like I'm being punished actively by the game for being new to it. There's this sort of progression to other games that I don't feel like SC2 has; either you're decent at it or you're complete garbage at it - and when you spend time trying to become decent at it you'll be constantly reminded of how slow it takes blizzard to actually fix things and how badly it feels to push yourself to your limit and then die to a giant attack-move protoss death ball. | ||
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Swift118
United Kingdom335 Posts
On December 07 2013 16:03 RJ231 wrote: I thought I would give my opinion on this as I am one of the players who basically dropped the game after investing quite a lot of time/energy into it and I know a number of other high level players who did the same for similar reasons. The biggest issue is mainly that the game just isn't properly balanced, this along with the fact that blizzard takes far too long to admit their balance/design mistakes makes for some very frustrating and exhausting games. The thing I always hear people say is "well x just won this tournament so clearly x race isn't under powered" and they fail to realize that for the majority of the player base that unbalanced situation usually plays out much more clearly in the lower levels. If widow mines are tearing the very best zergs on the planet apart and costing them games how do you think I feel when I'm playing in master league and instantly lose the game to a unit that automatically fired a missile from underground and just wiped out a huge chunk of my army. When you see top players playing they are completely aware of the imbalances of the game and will do whatever they can to abuse/mitigate their effectiveness. For the average SC2 enthusiast they aren't quite as adept at recognizing these things and dealing with them so they end up losing to these forces in catastrophic ways that feels very bad to be quite honest, it doesn't help that it tends to happen again and again. I think that if Blizzard did a better job of acknowledging the imbalance in their games and were more proactive it would feel better as a player, it's exciting to me when I hear they've nerfed that or buffed this because it means now the game is likely more fair and there's this feeling that it's sort of "new" again since the match ups won't revolve around certain imbalances quite as much. I think another big issue is the game just isn't friendly to newer players, how do you actually play a race like zerg casually? For the race to even function you need to be on 80+ drones, have 4 hatcheries and then spend hours mastering weird keyboard sequences so your macro isn't complete crap. When I watch a game like league of legends on stream I can get excited and can go enter into a game and have a pretty decent time, maybe I'm not great but I don't necessarily feel like I'm being punished actively by the game for being new to it. There's this sort of progression to other games that I don't feel like SC2 has; either you're decent at it or you're complete garbage at it - and when you spend time trying to become decent at it you'll be constantly reminded of how slow it takes blizzard to actually fix things and how badly it feels to push yourself to your limit and then die to a giant attack-move protoss death ball. Also LoL has the advantage of being able to blame team mates + imbalance for loses. Quite the plus for those who don't like to admit when they are sucking. Anyways sc2 is fairly good RTS for casuals, admittedly the speed the game moves at is maybe not casual friendly (seeing your whole army die in 3 seconds flat after being slightly out of position can be brutal). If you want to be reminded how an RTS can be incredibly not causal friendly I suggest you install sc1 bw. The design argument is fair enough and something everyone is entitled to an opinion on, regardless the level you play at. For me sc2 Protoss is like a good RTS race.......... for another RTS. Always needed a redesign imo. | ||
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Mahavishnu
Canada396 Posts
On December 05 2013 04:15 tar wrote: So what, if I end in Gold/Silver/Bronze one day yet my oppoentns still play decently, I have no objections. Why isn't this the only reaction ever? | ||
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NicksonReyes
Philippines4431 Posts
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