ESO Population Declining @ SteamCharts

Eraldus

I love how the OP literally gave up on his own topic, as soon as he was confronted with logic.

LiquidPony

furiouslog wrote: »

Lord_Eomer wrote: »

Population is continuous in negative and even have further declined in September and October.

What you have is only Steam figures as ZOS will never disclose non steam statistics.


https://steamcharts.com/app/306130

Its better for ZOS to open eyes today and look into root cause.

Already done, if you took the time to read your own thread. (post 278)

https://ibb.co/rynhG2M

What will be telling is how the numbers change in Q4.

In recent history, there's been a bump with the Q4 DLC release and then another in December as (I assume) people are more available over the holidays, or perhaps new players gifted the game over the holidays.

If we continue to see a decline in active players throughout October and then on through the end of the year, I would say there's a problem.

Raudgrani

Took a break from like early June and on until a couple of weeks ago or so. And now I'm only doing PVP exclusively.

Main reason being: I'm so fed up with "balancing". Nerfing this to Oblivion, insanely buffing that - rendering sets, classes/abilities and such useless over night. Tired of suddenly being more or less unable to play characters I've had for years, and tired of seeing players shamelessly exploiting "less thought through" changes that ZOS makes, having to wait for months before they correct whatever they did to break the game.

I simply can't keep up with the demand to constantly change everything in order to "be viable", or even have a chance. I didn't start playing or play this game because I wanted to constantly rebuild/change/farm or buy gear like some sort of confused beaver who never seem to get their nest in order. I frankly hate it. And I really felt like I needed leave from all that.
I came back because of the people I play PVP with, because I missed them. I still do enjoy PVP too, but it becomes less and less likely I will keep putting up with this kind of autistic "super-nerf/super-buff" mentality of ZOS. I want to play the game, not "adapt" and constantly change everything. Of course I can take gradual or small changes of this and that, but boy o'boy - whenever did we see anything like that? It's like full *** every single time...

scorpius2k1

Tandor wrote: »

As for whether we agree or disagree, and the significance of the figures etc, the only reason we're having this exchange is because I disputed, and still dispute, your assertion that Steam players represent 25% of the total playerbase - they do not. Hopefully that has now been clarified.

A clearly stated theorization isn't an assertion. That number was pulled out of the air as a simple ideology, or conjecture if you will. Hopefully that's been clarified for the 3rd time now.

Sarousse

The insanely easy open world zones aren't worth buying because there is exactly 0 challenge to play in them.

0. Nothing. Even naked with a new char.

Ramber

We are actually in the middle of a massive dragon effort for ZoS to bring in new people to the game its not content its the fact that the last couple of patches have pushed people from the game. i have 8 characters i play and i had to change all of them to use the SAME "meta" abilities for stam and mag... its simply not as fun as it was 6 months ago to play and ZoS did say they realized their path was off and they WERE going to fix it but looking at the PTS right now its going to be worse. So Why would anyone wanna play ESO when there are better newer games out there? I have cut my play time down considerably lately and only play that much because I run a guild. Forcing masters bows in PvE (a pvp weapon), stam toons to run magicka dps abilities and not being able to parse on live due to all the lag is just a taste of all the issues going on now.

I loved this game pre summerset but haven't made a new toon since.

svartorn

Quit two years ago and just returned.

Game is more or less exactly the same state that I left it. Cyrodiil is nearly completely unplayable in the evenings when I get home from work. Population seems to be higher than I remember, though. All the cities/delves/quest areas I go it seems to be well populated.

deepseamk20b14_ESO

I’ve used the launcher that I installed day one that came with the game setup. I’ve never used steam for ESO. I’d imagine many players don’t use steam and you aren’t accounting for them.

Jaraal

Ramber wrote: »

We are actually in the middle of a massive dragon effort for ZoS to bring in new people to the game

And that's disturbing, because what happens when the lore breaking "Season of the Dragon" ends a couple of months? They've already played their ace in the hole..... how can they possibly top that?

mikemacon

Does anyone seriously still play on Steam?

Jaraal

mikemacon wrote: »

Does anyone seriously still play on Steam?

I do, never had a problem with it.

srfrogg23

I think I actually saw a piece of the sky fall yesterday. I think we're in trouble... 😢

SaucyMcSauceface

Not sure if this has been mentioned, but there have been huge issues with logging in through Steam for years. It may be better at present, but a downward trend in Steam logins may have more to do with issue with Steam logins than being representative of a downward trend in logins entirely.

Eraldus

I've always played ESO through Steam and never had any issues with it, so I really have no clue of what you people are talking about.

And my PC is not even that great.

Rungar

like most things the steam login issue was blown way out of proportion. I only recall 2 very brief disruptions in 3+ years of playing that actually affected me.

it should be kept in mind that somewhere around 3 million people own the game on steam. It is not insignifigant by any means.

khajiitNPC

idk man. Campaign was pop locked until about 1am yesterday. Been playing since launch. Pretty typical for pop to decline around this time every year. Some “hardcore” players have left. This is true — but they were easily replaced. Same guilds still completing VHoF runs. Lots of games came out recently. As others said steam is not the end all of data. I could venture to say there is a SLIGHT decrease. But just because you and your friends are QQing about changes, most of the population shrugs it off and continues to continue. It’s far from dying as so many (I guess secretly wish for). Welcome to the world of MMOs.

Tandor

scorpius2k1 wrote: »

Tandor wrote: »

As for whether we agree or disagree, and the significance of the figures etc, the only reason we're having this exchange is because I disputed, and still dispute, your assertion that Steam players represent 25% of the total playerbase - they do not. Hopefully that has now been clarified.

A clearly stated theorization isn't an assertion. That number was pulled out of the air as a simple ideology, or conjecture if you will. Hopefully that's been clarified for the 3rd time now.

Not really ! You can't claim it was a clearly stated theorization that was pulled out of the air as a simply idealogy, or conjecture if you will, and omit to mention that you went on in the same sentence to say that it was a fair number. It wasn't a fair number, it was wrong, plain and simple.

todokete

Not surprised is declining, the servers are a mess

LiquidPony

My perspective purely looking at it from inside the PC/NA raid community ...

* There's only been 1 new raid in the past 18 months.
* That raid has been plagued with gamebreaking bugs for long stretches of time (broken telegraphs, mass crashes, desyncs, double beam damage on Lokke, stuck in combat, etc.)
* It was finally in a decent state mid-Scalebreaker and there were numerous mid-range raid teams pushing for scores and Godslayer. Then the first Dragonhold PTS patch notes dropped. Morale took a nosedive. People felt the time crunch. Guilds started folding.
* Dragonhold turned out to be not as bad as it originally looked, but it was still a significant DPS and sustain nerf. Teams that felt close to getting over the hump at the end of Scalebreaker took a big step back.
* Long-standing bugs persist. Hitboxes are still broken. You still get stuck in combat. There are new bugs with downstairs on Nahvii.
* Necros are still fundamentally broken. Blastbones can't be cast for some reason. Syphon is still a joke. Skull still double-casts.
* After 6 months progressing that content, people are not happy to see a big chunk of their progress rolled back for no discernible reason.

Who knows what the state of the game is as a whole, but I've personally seen 6 solid end game groups disband just in the past month or so. It has become much harder to find quality fills. DPS is down. Scores are down. Has anyone come anywhere near Godslayer on PC/NA since the patch? The top score is 70,000 lower than last patch.

I see people quitting and raid groups folding almost daily. I see low morale everywhere I look. People just don't seem to be having as much fun. And IMO it's just going to keep getting worse for the next 8 months. Maybe a new raid and new game systems in the next chapter will revitalize it.

YandereGirlfriend

mikemacon wrote: »

Does anyone seriously still play on Steam?

Judging by how the subreddit blows up whenever there's an issue, I would say, yes, many people use Steam to play the game.

...

Seeing the long-term Steam stats was informative for me though.

I started playing in April (which was apparently like the all-time high in concurrency) and took the high populations and crowded cities for granted.

I had been feeling very nervous about the state of the game over the last two months or so, as my own guilds and friends lists have become overrun with inactive players. Again anecdotal, but my main trade guild had to take in the remnants of one its "sister guilds" when that guild lost players during this patch cycle and had to fold up shop.

It had begun to feel somewhat like the later days of Starcraft II, after it became clear that the expansions were not going to claw back the player base that the had game enjoyed at its release, and it began a slow, inexorable descent into history.

Seeing that ESO has more or less "been here before" makes me feel much more optimistic that things can indeed rebound.

I think it's also worth bearing in mind that Classic WoW came out during this recent downturn. The real-life friends who introduced me to ESO ALL switched back to Classic WoW (after complaining for years about how patched WoW had gone down the tubes) and haven't logged into ESO since its release. On the subreddit, there were HEAPS of "Tips for a WoW refugee" posts pre-Classic, but now that "genre" of topic has disappeared entirely as I suspect that those "refugees" returned home to mother Blizzard.

Finally, I think it probably will take something splashy like a Skyrim chapter expansion to REALLY drive interest back to April/May levels, but I also think that such a play could be immensely successful, as the Skyrim nostalgia is still very real for tons of even casual game players.

FierceSam

Kingslayer513 wrote: »

There's so much misinformation in this thread

First things first, yes obviously steam is a subset (of a subset) of the playerbase. But it is still a representative sample

No it isn’t. It is, in fact, the exact opposite. It’s a self-selecting set of people who have chosen to use Steam to purchase and play games.

As such the information it reveals is statistically irrelevant and cannot be used to extrapolate larger trends.

Jaraal

FierceSam wrote: »

Kingslayer513 wrote: »

There's so much misinformation in this thread

First things first, yes obviously steam is a subset (of a subset) of the playerbase. But it is still a representative sample

No it isn’t. It is, in fact, the exact opposite. It’s a self-selecting set of people who have chosen to use Steam to purchase and play games.

As such the information it reveals is statistically irrelevant and cannot be used to extrapolate larger trends.

With this logic, then the other side is a self-selecting set of people who have chosen to use the Zenimax launcher. Maybe they're dropping out at a larger rate than Steam users. So yes, with this reasoning, Steam users may be under representing the actual player loss.

What makes Steam users non-representative of the player base as a whole? Are they of lower IQ? Do they have attention deficit disorders that cause them to jump from game to game? Millions of people have bought the game through Steam, but some are claiming because their launcher has a little Steam logo in the corner that their experience is irrelevant.

Lol!

KoultouraS

Jaraal wrote: »

FierceSam wrote: »

Kingslayer513 wrote: »

There's so much misinformation in this thread

First things first, yes obviously steam is a subset (of a subset) of the playerbase. But it is still a representative sample

No it isn’t. It is, in fact, the exact opposite. It’s a self-selecting set of people who have chosen to use Steam to purchase and play games.

As such the information it reveals is statistically irrelevant and cannot be used to extrapolate larger trends.

With this logic, then the other side is a self-selecting set of people who have chosen to use the Zenimax launcher. Maybe they're dropping out at a larger rate than Steam users. So yes, with this reasoning, Steam users may be under representing the actual player loss.

What makes Steam users non-representative of the player base as a whole? Are they of lower IQ? Do they have attention deficit disorders that cause them to jump from game to game? Millions of people have bought the game through Steam, but some are claiming because their launcher has a little Steam logo in the corner that their experience is irrelevant.

Lol!

This guy speaks the truth.
Steam sample is statistically enough even with a confidence interval of 1 and a confidence level of 99%.

You only need a~16k+ sample on the whole 13 million which the game presumably brags about having. And steam average concurrent playerbase (let alone the true total sum of it) If I recall correctly is just as that.

Here this might come handy :
https://www.surveysystem.com/sscalc.htm

And furthermore, when I 1st joined, we have had ques for Cyrodiil up to 250 on Fridays or prime time holidays/weekends. This is no way near to what we have lately

Elsonso

Jaraal wrote: »

FierceSam wrote: »

Kingslayer513 wrote: »

There's so much misinformation in this thread

First things first, yes obviously steam is a subset (of a subset) of the playerbase. But it is still a representative sample

No it isn’t. It is, in fact, the exact opposite. It’s a self-selecting set of people who have chosen to use Steam to purchase and play games.

As such the information it reveals is statistically irrelevant and cannot be used to extrapolate larger trends.

With this logic, then the other side is a self-selecting set of people who have chosen to use the Zenimax launcher. Maybe they're dropping out at a larger rate than Steam users. So yes, with this reasoning, Steam users may be under representing the actual player loss.

What makes Steam users non-representative of the player base as a whole? Are they of lower IQ? Do they have attention deficit disorders that cause them to jump from game to game? Millions of people have bought the game through Steam, but some are claiming because their launcher has a little Steam logo in the corner that their experience is irrelevant.

Steam users are representative of the game, where game features are concerned. For example, a Steam user's opinion on combat balance should be on par with anyone else who is playing the game.

Where you start running into inaccuracies is when you realize that platform specific variables differ from another populations. Steam is a different environment than non-Steam, and it has different variables, and not all of them are even related to ESO. When a Steam player decides not to play ESO, is it due to ESO, or some condition that is not related to ESO?

Steam Charts do not say why people are choosing to play, or not play, ESO. Just as a decrease in play could be unrelated to ESO, the reason that the numbers increase could also be unrelated to ESO. It could just be a collective move based on something else that is happening.

I don't pay attention enough to the Steam eco-system to even begin to account for all the variables, so Steam numbers are just meaningless numbers. They have no meaning unless someone can do the investigation to determine why the numbers are the way they are.

Wayshuba

I have to laugh everytime I see people dismiss the Steam users.

While I play through the Zenimax Launcher, I still know there are quite a few people that play through Steam and I am willing to bet is is a much larger portion of the player base than people realize.

I have been playing ESO since February 2017 and I can remember at lease three instances of Steam users having issues after a patch. What I find interesting, is how fast ZoS addresses these Steam issues when they come up. Do you really think ZoS would put that kind of rapid effort into something that only represents 1%-2% of the player base?

Alinhbo_Tyaka

This is strictly anecdotal but I have had conversations with several former ESO Steam players who are still active in ESO. They bought the native version of the game after having issues with logging in via Steam or higher having more lag. Based on this I can't consider the Steam numbers a reliable source for how well the game is holding up with the player base.

Tandor

Wayshuba wrote: »

I have to laugh everytime I see people dismiss the Steam users.

While I play through the Zenimax Launcher, I still know there are quite a few people that play through Steam and I am willing to bet is is a much larger portion of the player base than people realize.

I have been playing ESO since February 2017 and I can remember at lease three instances of Steam users having issues after a patch. What I find interesting, is how fast ZoS addresses these Steam issues when they come up. Do you really think ZoS would put that kind of rapid effort into something that only represents 1%-2% of the player base?

Do you know for a fact that fixing those Steam-specific issues was down to ZOS? Maybe Valve fixed them quickly at their end because they were responsible for them, just as a lot of the time when console players have connection issues it's down to a wider service issue that Microsoft or Sony deal with.

Speculation about the reduced number of Steam logins is pointless without knowing how many of the Steam players no longer logging in through Steam have switched to logging in through ZOS and how many have actually stopped playing completely.

I'm not arguing either way as to how representative Steam players are of the game's overall playerbase, I just think there are potentially other factors at play with Steam users such that we don't have clear enough information on which to make any reliable correlation between Steam trends and overall population trends.

idk

ParaNostram wrote: »

Every patch there is a "doom gloom the nerfs will kill the game!" every patch following 1.6 it's been the same song and dance.

ESO is still here. It's a broken buggy mess but it's still here.

More so since the game launched.

Granted, I do agree that the decline in players the last two months is concerning and would be something that Zos, and more importantly Zenimax media, would note as troubling, the process of implementing these changes would still continue. It would not make sense to stop half way nor to revert them to what Zos has been challenged in figuring out how to manage the game.

llande

NotaDaedraWorshipper wrote: »

Wait, there are people who actually use Steam to play ESO?

This.

steam charts have no meaning for ESO, really

idk

llande wrote: »

NotaDaedraWorshipper wrote: »

Wait, there are people who actually use Steam to play ESO?

This.

steam charts have no meaning for ESO, really

Not entirely accurate.

Steam charts is the only source of actual information concerning the active player base. Granted, the sampling is not actually random and there may be a specific type of gamer that tends to use Steam. However, the bias from that would be slight as many of the Steam players are also normal MMORPG players.

The information has also be surprisingly consistent over time showing it has a reliability that is important. Considering we do know there is a significant amount of change fatigue in the player base with the recent updates the recent reverse in growth merely support the solidness of the information it provides.

So the steam charts do have meaning and likely correspond to the actual player base on at least PC/Mac servers.