Author Topic: Measureent of what game options people actually use?  (Read 6459 times)

Offline Tridus

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Re: Measureent of what game options people actually use?
« Reply #15 on: September 06, 2016, 08:33:50 am »
or buy it and then just never touch the game after that.

You'd be surprised how often that actually happens. One of the reason sales don't have the impact they used to is that backlogs are huge these days. People own tons of games they haven't played at all.

Offline kasnavada

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Re: Measureent of what game options people actually use?
« Reply #16 on: September 06, 2016, 08:38:45 am »

Rainy Day Savings: 50,000 Energy => that's basically the number of people that started a game : 28%.


Okay, that number surprised me.  I mean, really, 28% is all that bothered to go that far?

Looked at the other achievements, the percentages really are just amazingly low, aren't they....  It's like people either go through the tutorial and then just give up, or buy it and then just never touch the game after that.

Just... ugh.

I'm barely surprised, actually.
AI war also has the "downside" that it's available outside of steam and some activate it here "just because" but don't play on steam.
There is also the (possibly very small) percentage of people that play steam offline for some reason.

Last, AI war is... not very much newb-friendly. With all the "bashing" on "we need a better tutorial" (that I'm a part of), Chris & Keith & the others have actually made a pretty good job of having most units & mechanics explained via alerts (wave alerts), tooltips (unit description is very good) and a few other things (options screen, and so on). However, there is still a ton of mechanics needed to grasp to start a game and have fun. A few people I tried to explain the game to had that issue, too much needed to know at start.


Remark:
If you want a point of "comparison", I suggest looking at Civ 5 stats. I think a lot of achievements there "match" stuff from AI war in principle (like winning with a nation is more or less comparable to winning with a personality type).

Offline Tridus

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Re: Measureent of what game options people actually use?
« Reply #17 on: September 06, 2016, 08:47:30 am »
For example, if you look at the (imperfect, but still best we have) Steam Spy data, 30% of AI War owners have *never played it*. This is not abnormal for Steam games. The number is 20% for Battleborn, for example, and that was a much more expensive game that hasn't been in nearly as many bundles.

All time median play time is 1.2 hours (while the average is 10), so you've got half the people who have played it putting in less than 2 hours, while the other half can rack up absolutely huge numbers. That's telling me that a lot of the bundle sales are people who either bought the bundle for something else, and/or tried AI War out and decided they weren't interested.

This would make some in game metrics even more useful, because then we'd know what the people who are playing are doing. Achievements don't really convey the same thing, because they don't tell us if someone used that option once, got the achievement, and never did it again, or if they have it on every single game because it's their favourite thing ever.

Offline Elestan

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Re: Measureent of what game options people actually use?
« Reply #18 on: September 06, 2016, 09:26:28 am »
Last, AI war is... not very much newb-friendly.

As one of the newer players (I've had the game less than a year), I'll echo this.  I played through the tutorial, then played a full game, decided that this Champion thing looked interesting, and got blindsided by the first Nemesis wave.  After investing some time reading forum posts and wiki pages, I now feel I know what I need to play competently, but I had to do research to get there.  The learning curve of AIW is quite steep, and I think the data people are quoting show that a lot of players aren't managing to climb it; over half of them give up during the tutorial.

My opinion on the cause:  Too much complexity, too quickly.  Too many hull multipliers, too many unit types, too many controls, too many in-game options.

My opinion on what will help:  Eliminating ad-hoc hull multipliers will help.  New unit types should be introduced one at a time, with a brief tutorial blurb on the utility of each one.  The player's ship database should probably only contain units already encountered/buildable by default.  Each game setup option should probably also have a tutorial triggered on first use.  Most of the unit information on the wiki should probably be embedded in the game.  The UI needs a fair bit of work, including better use of iconography over text, and probably deserves a thread here for each major component.  Finally, many of the control options can probably be relocated behind an "Advanced" section to indicate that new players shouldn't worry about them. 

Offline Misery

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Re: Measureent of what game options people actually use?
« Reply #19 on: September 06, 2016, 09:53:56 am »
Ugh, backlogs.  That's right.

Indeed, then, those achievements aint worth much for data purposes.

That's too bad, I'd be kinda interested in seeing what sorts of things in the current game are frequently or rarely used.




Last, AI war is... not very much newb-friendly.

As one of the newer players (I've had the game less than a year), I'll echo this.  I played through the tutorial, then played a full game, decided that this Champion thing looked interesting, and got blindsided by the first Nemesis wave.  After investing some time reading forum posts and wiki pages, I now feel I know what I need to play competently, but I had to do research to get there.  The learning curve of AIW is quite steep, and I think the data people are quoting show that a lot of players aren't managing to climb it; over half of them give up during the tutorial.

My opinion on the cause:  Too much complexity, too quickly.  Too many hull multipliers, too many unit types, too many controls, too many in-game options.

My opinion on what will help:  Eliminating ad-hoc hull multipliers will help.  New unit types should be introduced one at a time, with a brief tutorial blurb on the utility of each one.  The player's ship database should probably only contain units already encountered/buildable by default.  Each game setup option should probably also have a tutorial triggered on first use.  Most of the unit information on the wiki should probably be embedded in the game.  The UI needs a fair bit of work, including better use of iconography over text, and probably deserves a thread here for each major component.  Finally, many of the control options can probably be relocated behind an "Advanced" section to indicate that new players shouldn't worry about them.


One feature I'm really hoping for, for this new game:  A database of EVERYTHING that can be looked up in the game itself.  I've gone to the blasted wiki for the game so many times, but pretty much always come away from it with nothing.  Either info there is very bare-bones, or there's no page for a specific thing at all. 

Heck, I had that blasted Nemesis thing happen to me too, when I started out with the game (I think I mentioned this in another thread as well), where the game is giving me that "Champ Nemesis" warning, and I hadn't seen it before, and I'm like "Okay, so it's giving me a warning, but it may as well be spraying random letters at me, because that warning means nothing to me, I don't know what to do, since I don't know what that is!".   And yep, died real freaking fast once the attack came.  NOW I know how to deal with it, but having a loss or something like that simply because of an unexplained cryptic thing is super frustrating.


Offline Draco18s

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Re: Measureent of what game options people actually use?
« Reply #20 on: September 06, 2016, 12:32:32 pm »
The way to do this kind of data collection really needs to be along the lines of:

"A game was started with [list of options] and it lasted [x minutes]" tagged with a UUID.  "Lasted" in this context would be a session. As soon as the user exits the game (saved or not) this packet would fire off.  If it was saved and is later reloaded, the UUID will make sure that the two chunks of data get recombined later.[/list]

 

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