Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years • Hacker News Board

Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

#471

Post by goldenkey » Thu, May 06, 2021, 7:31 AM UTC

donio wrote: post #297

alpaca128 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They stopped development on HotS, which never achieved the same level of pull as League of Legends. Which to me isn't surprising as HotS' way to stand out from the rest is also why it's not fun long-term. At first it seems cool that every map in the game has a unique objective that the teams compete around. But the game is balanced in a way that you either win that objective 2-3 times or you lose the game, with rar…

> Stay in lane for 20 minutes? Sure, why not You mean you are pretty much stuck doing just that for half the game. Hope you like lasthitting all day, GLHF.

I just started playing Dota 2 less than a month ago. The game is enormously complex and a pleasure, HoTS feels like Fischer Price MOBA by comparison.

Laning involves pushing, farming, last hitting, denying, harassing, taking down towers, jungling, runeing, and ganking. It isn't stale at all. But maybe I just haven't gotten tired of the game yet. I am having more fun with Dota than any other multiplayer game (save for WoW circa 2010.)

Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

#472

Post by tdsamardzhiev » Thu, May 06, 2021, 7:43 AM UTC

A popular esports caster said the following a few days ago, and it really got stuck in my head:

> "We can't have new games like Brood War anymore, because devs would patch out everything that's fun about it in a few days."

Please get the designers away from the spreadsheets and in a game. Trade some of that polish away for a soul. Delegate more responsibility to junior people, instead of forging them into (strictly inferior) clones of the senior staff.

Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

#473

Post by rightbyte » Thu, May 06, 2021, 7:48 AM UTC

k12sosse wrote: post #283

jvzr wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right. Plus, the Diablo 2 remaster announced at the same time as Diablo 4 (IIRC) Based on past track record, I don't hold much hope, though

D2 resurrected looks like it's lining up to be fun. The company that was outsourced to rebuild has said they didn't want to fix d2. They wanted to overhaul it's graphics and give it QoL. Same bugs. Same game.

Damn I hope they fix player hostile abuse in hardcore.

Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

#474

Post by ralusek » Thu, May 06, 2021, 7:53 AM UTC

meowface wrote: post #143

lhorie wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Starcraft 2 is basically dead. WC3 remastered flopped Paradoxically, I've noticed an uptick of new creative Starcraft 2 content on Youtube (similar to those "can you beat the game by doing [insert crazy premise here]" types of videos you see in the Mario community). I think the two company direction things that were noticeable for me were that they decided to try to embrace two major cop-outs: milking cash shop (sk…

The competitive Starcraft 2 scene has definitely seen a new surge of excitement within the past two or so years. (This is just my subjective impression; no idea of the actual numbers. And I'm not sure what the non-professional scene is currently like.) I think a large part of it is that after around 10 years of dominating Starcraft 2 and 20 years of dominating Starcraft 1, there are now some European players who are…

I'm personally loving SC2 scene at the moment. Lowko is a great caster, Harstem too. Serral, Reynor, Has, Clem, Stats, Maru, Special, Scarlett...Florencio. I love it all.

Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

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Post by schlupfknoten » Thu, May 06, 2021, 7:58 AM UTC

taneq wrote: post #43

freshair wrote: post #29

"Do you guys not have phones?" -Blizzard staff in 2018, in response to booing fans upset that Blizzard wouldn't make a PC version of a game those same fans obviously wanted to play. This company has been contemptuous of their players for years. They fell into that classic trap of "If we [do something that will alienate all our customers] we can get 10x as many customers from [untapped market]" As anybody should have…

"Trust me, you think you want it, but you don't" - Blizzard, about vanilla WoW, a year before releasing WoW Classic.

Was it really a year before? I thought it was many years earlier that he said that.

Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

#476

Post by rightbyte » Thu, May 06, 2021, 8:07 AM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #88

dstaley wrote: post #37

I've been an off-and-on World of Warcraft player since the Burning Crusade days, and I honestly think that Blizzard is struggling to evolve the MMORPG genre into something suitable for the modern day. There was a great article in Kotaku[1] that illustrated this quite nicely. Essentially, what made World of Warcraft successful when it launched can't really exist today, especially with our hyper-connected world. Blizza…

Blizzard hasn't produced even one single-player-focused game since... Diablo I? Their strength has always been multiplayer, I very much doubt they could deliver a blockbuster single-player open world game.

D2 was a single player game, right? The multiplayer success always felt accidental to me.

Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

#477

Post by joycian » Thu, May 06, 2021, 8:16 AM UTC

dragontamer wrote: post #157

TulliusCicero wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love BW but it's still far from perfect. Even if things like single build select and max 12 unit select were okay at the time and worked decently within the game's design, they're still incredibly clunky choices. Honestly, even playing it in its heydey, I already disliked the 12 unit select. > It's basically the perfect RTS so everything that came after it seems inferior. Even Starcraft 2. SC2 had a bunch of design…

> Like, how incredibly tightly units clumped together should've been picked out as an obvious flaw immediately Pretty much everyone who used air-units in SC1 abused the "tight" formations of Muta-stacks (or other SC:BW air units). In most fights: tight formations are incredibly superior to loose formations. (Obviously Corsairs / Valkyries changed that, but typical hit-and-run tactics are better when stacked) Automati…

Are there no widely used flak/AoE weapons that heavily punish tight formations?

Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

#478

Post by Aerroon » Thu, May 06, 2021, 8:20 AM UTC

_carbyau_ wrote: post #421

blibble wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

people don't want "fair" though, they want to win about 2/3rds of the time of course the numbers don't work when you're exclusively playing against other people this is why smurfing is so popular

"people don't want "fair" though, they want to win about 2/3rds of the time" This is why I think PvE is more sustainable for a player base and more conservatively solid as a business plan. WoW for instance. But then by definition it isn't PvP and isn't going to get the same player base.

Designing a game around PvE is hard though. It's difficult to create an AI challenge that's interesting and can simultaneously challenge extremely good and mediocre players without feeling impossible.

I think the future of PvE games is going to be in AI. If game developers could put a DeepMind-playing-StarCraft level of AI into games without immense cost, then it's going to change games quite a lot. It wouldn't be perfect, but you could have AI offer a challenge to players for longer without feeling unfair. (It's still AI that doesn't learn based on the player though, which means that the players would eventually figure out the puzzle of the AI.)

Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

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Post by Aerroon » Thu, May 06, 2021, 8:35 AM UTC

ALittleLight wrote: post #390

darth_avocado wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think I have a warped view of SR. Yes the idea that you win more than 50%, you’ll eventually get there is flawed. Especially in lower ranks where there’s an overcrowding of salty folks who leave, throw, smurf, pick heroes not based on need and just straight up don’t play the objective. I agree that the logic works at higher ranks, but it simply doesn’t at lower ranks. Performance based SR is important for low…

Even in lower ELOs each team should have, on average, the same amount of trolls, leavers, etc. Actually, if you can guarantee that you aren't one of those people, then there are X slots on the enemy team that might be a joker and X-1 slots on your team, so the odds should favor you.

I'm unsure of the intricacies of Overwatch's rating system, but the problem I've noticed in most rating systems is that players don't play enough games for the rankings to stabilize. You end up with a situation where a very large amount of players end up close in ratings, where only a few wins or losses can propel them way higher or way lower.

This might not be a big deal, but the game isn't static. It changes, which means that the skills someone picks up might not be as useful in the next patch anymore. This keeps the rankings somewhat unstable.

Team games inherently require more games to stabilize a rating too. You can get lucky or unlucky with your teammates. On top of that, a game where you can end up with a character you're not strong with probably increases the number of games to stabilize a rating even further.

On average it might work out, but are enough games played to actually reach that? My guess is that for most players the answer is 'no'.

Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

#480

Post by 8fingerlouie » Thu, May 06, 2021, 9:28 AM UTC

Perhaps if they started making new, innovative games like they used to (prior to Activision merger), instead of just rereleasing their old stuff.

There's nothing new, with the exception of expansions to WoW, which is essentially also just "more of the same". They tried to make the entry bar to WoW smaller by squishing max level from 120 to 60, but somehow completely failed to accomodate casual players by timegating everything worth doing behind a massive time investment.