What is this Game?

[White Lion]

AFAIK, this is a moba game with base building aspects. It has 3rd person view with moba-like mechanics, but it also allow the player to collect resources and build castles. However, it does not have the key aspects which define a survival game. It does not have a constant need of certain resources to replenish certain attributes in order to stay alive, like hunger or thirst. But ok no problem.

So the questions are:

1. Is it more fun to play PvE or PvP?
   
2. In PvP, will long-time players always dominate new comers? Like in Rust, Ark Survival Evolved, etc.
   
3. How stable is the official server? Has often do you get disconnected or how often does the server experience blackout?
   
4. In PvE, what happen if you kill all the bosses? Will it be game over or you're still free to do whatever you like until you get bored?
   
5. Do idle enemies keep idle in their current location, or will they keep on moving around the map and sometime attack your base?
   
6. Is the map randomly generated or is it 1 huge static map, like other survival games? How many map variation is currently available?
   
7. Any noticeable bugs, annoying bugs, or game-breaking bugs?
   
8. This game has 92k active players since it was launched. But now only 7k active players. What went wrong?
   
9. What is still missing in order for this game to be declared completed?

[Kalgert]

The more important question ought to be: Does the game offer custom servers?

[Suzaku]

1. I've not engaged with the PvP at all, but I've got over 270 hours in PvE only, and mostly solo, so I'd say it's rather fun.
   
2. That's a common complaint I often hear, higher-geared players bullying the weaker ones, blocking off access to critical bosses and other resources.
   
3. I've only played on private servers, so I can't offer a proper response to this one.
   
4. You're free to do whatever you want. Everything respawns, so nothing really changes after you've done all of the content.
   
5. There are many patrols in the game, but none of them pass through the areas where players are allowed to build. There are some enemies that can spawn in player territories, like wolves and golems, but you can build in a way to remove their spawn points so it's not an issue.
   Player structures are also completely immune to all PvE-based threats.
   
6. It is all one static map. The only variations are what resources might spawn in certain locations, like a rock-based resource node could respawn as a rock, a copper node, or an iron node.
   
7. Nothing of note that I've experienced.
   
8. Lack of infinite endgame loop, and those that can't handle PvP in their PvP game. When you've beaten everything, or been beaten by others, people leave.
   
   If you enter this game with realistic expectations, then it serves just fine. Easily dozens of hours of fun content for a cheap price, and that's for just the PvE. I'm not the PvP type, but I'm sure one could find many more hours if that's their thing.
   
9. I'd consider what's here is already a complete package. The devs still have plans to add more of everything, though. More spells, more weapons, more bosses, more enemies, more locations, and they've mentioned that they are aware the game is lacking in the endgame portion, so that's high on their to-do list for the next major update which is estimated to still be roughly 10 months away.

Originally posted by Kalgert:

The more important question ought to be: Does the game offer custom servers?

Yes, there are many server settings one can tweak to their liking.

[Kalgert]

Originally posted by Suzaku:

Originally posted by Kalgert:

The more important question ought to be: Does the game offer custom servers?

Yes, there are many server settings one can tweak to their liking.

Fantastic. Thank you for the answer.

[Ainess]

8. Well that´s not quite accurate; not many people realize this, but Steamcharts actually does not inform you about how many people play any given game. It rather tells you how MUCH people play said game. If 10 people play a game for 2 hours a day on average during a month, Steamcharts will say that the game had 0,83 average concurrent players during that month (2 hours per day is 1/12 of the 24 hours each day has, which is then multiplied by the 10 contributing people).

And if you then instead have 5 people playing the game for 4 hours a day on average, it will also give you 0,83 concurrent player average.

So basically, how many people play the game is reflected, but it is multiplied by how much they play it. For 1 actual person to be considered 1 player by Steamcharts, they would have to have the game running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, every day of that month. Any less than that and you are less than 1 player for Steamcharts.

And to get to the main point, this game is largely PvE and has fairly limited amount of gameplay content. PvP is effectively infinite content, as it is other people that make up that content, and no 2 PvP fights will ever be the same, but a lot of people just don´t play PvP in general, a certain type of PvP does not appeal to them specifically, or they get bored of a certain type of PvP fairly quickly.

So of course a game that is largely PvE-oriented will have vastly higher concurrent player counts right after release than months later. Not only will some people have finished everything they wanted to, but even the ones that keep on playing will start playing less per day on average, driving the Steamcharts data further down.

Data need to be analyzed with context, otherwise you get smooth brain comments like with those people who were calling Elden Ring a dead game when after about a month the player counts dropped drastically... because of course they did, because many people either got bored of the game by then, or finished it.

[Kalgert]

Originally posted by Ainess:

And to get to the main point, this game is largely PvE and has fairly limited amount of gameplay content. PvP is effectively infinite content, as it is other people that make up that content, and no 2 PvP fights will ever be the same, but a lot of people just don´t play PvP in general, a certain type of PvP does not appeal to them specifically, or they get bored of a certain type of PvP fairly quickly.

If I understand this correctly, and taking your earlier points into consideration, this is to then say that PvP games aren't necessarily the "Best and most popular", but rather that it could very well have a playerbase established that just plays it for long preiods of time with a few casual players sprinkled in here and there? That's bound to bruise someone's ego :p

I'm asking because often times you'll see people trying to make the argument that PvP games are much more popular and that is why putting it into any game or make it as a focus is a good idea, then point at the top played games on Steam as some kind of evidence to that claim.

All in all I'd say that this is an interesting comment about how the Steam Charts are measured.

[Ainess]

Originally posted by Kalgert:

Originally posted by Ainess:

And to get to the main point, this game is largely PvE and has fairly limited amount of gameplay content. PvP is effectively infinite content, as it is other people that make up that content, and no 2 PvP fights will ever be the same, but a lot of people just don´t play PvP in general, a certain type of PvP does not appeal to them specifically, or they get bored of a certain type of PvP fairly quickly.

If I understand this correctly, and taking your earlier points into consideration, this is to then say that PvP games aren't necessarily the "Best and most popular", but rather that it could very well have a playerbase established that just plays it for long preiods of time with a few casual players sprinkled in here and there? That's bound to bruise someone's ego :p

I'm asking because often times you'll see people trying to make the argument that PvP games are much more popular and that is why putting it into any game or make it as a focus is a good idea, then point at the top played games on Steam as some kind of evidence to that claim.

All in all I'd say that this is an interesting comment about how the Steam Charts are measured.

Pretty much exactly, yeah. There are just different dynamics to PvE compared to PvP games in terms of player retention; PvE games might get more players playing more upon launch (every new minute, every new encounter is truly new and strongly engaging), and then dropping off over the next few months really rapidly, while PvP games might have slightly lower starting player counts, but they will drop off much more fluently becuase while PvP might get a bit repetitive over time, it never becomes as monotone and predictable as PvE does given enough time (generally speaking).

But of course that is a very rough and general differentiation that does not take into consideration how good a game is, how well marketed, how popular its concept/genre/setting is to begin with, how steadily or if at all new content is added, how well it is balanced (especially for PvP games of course) and much more. Not to mention this assumes that games are either PvP or PvE, with this very game being a lot of both :)

And yeah, a smaller portion of any playerbase is bound to contribute a lot to its player count because they love the game and play it often, with way more "casual" players contributing less on average, but likely more overall due to being the majority. It also depends game-to-game, for example, Hunt: Showdown is a pretty unique FPS, and as such, it appeals to some people greatly while many others hate it for a number of reasons.

This leads to a pretty crazy polarization where an unusual amount of players have 1500+ hours in the game (as much as 9000+ afaik), and also probably an unusual amount of players just dropping the game in the first 10 hours or so, leading to a playerbase of veterans (although new/casual players are still not uncommon by any means there).

And glad to hear! I find the topic pretty interesting too, as you probably can tell xP According to a comment by a <supposed> game dev in a forum thread, if you want to know the actual player count of any given game, you need to multiply its Steamcharts data by at least 20 or so, very possibly more. Which sounds about right based on some estimations and calculations that I´ve done. So that is a good rule of thumb I would say.

[Kalgert]

Originally posted by Ainess:

And yeah, a smaller portion of any playerbase is bound to contribute a lot to its player count because they love the game and play it often, with way more "casual" players contributing less on average, but likely more overall due to being the majority. It also depends game-to-game, for example, Hunt: Showdown is a pretty unique FPS, and as such, it appeals to some people greatly while many others hate it for a number of reasons.

This leads to a pretty crazy polarization where an unusual amount of players have 1500+ hours in the game (as much as 9000+ afaik), and also probably an unusual amount of players just dropping the game in the first 10 hours or so, leading to a playerbase of veterans (although new/casual players are still not uncommon by any means there).

It terrifies me to know that there are people out in the world who get so enamoured with a game that they end up playing only that for hundreds of hours and end up becoming the last soul you'd want to go up against.

Funny you'd mention Hunt as well, since it is a game I tried out during the sale and ended up contributing to the charts. Can't say it was a lot though as I really didn't get it and ended up refunding it, even though I didn't really dislike the experience. Have been rewatching the recorded play session though and have been wondering if to give it a second chance or not.

[White Lion]

Originally posted by Ainess:

8. Well that´s not quite accurate; not many people realize this, but Steamcharts actually does not inform you about how many people play any given game. It rather tells you how MUCH people play said game. If 10 people play a game for 2 hours a day on average during a month, Steamcharts will say that the game had 0,83 average concurrent players during that month (2 hours per day is 1/12 of the 24 hours each day has, which is then multiplied by the 10 contributing people).

And if you then instead have 5 people playing the game for 4 hours a day on average, it will also give you 0,83 concurrent player average.

So basically, how many people play the game is reflected, but it is multiplied by how much they play it. For 1 actual person to be considered 1 player by Steamcharts, they would have to have the game running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, every day of that month. Any less than that and you are less than 1 player for Steamcharts.

And to get to the main point, this game is largely PvE and has fairly limited amount of gameplay content. PvP is effectively infinite content, as it is other people that make up that content, and no 2 PvP fights will ever be the same, but a lot of people just don´t play PvP in general, a certain type of PvP does not appeal to them specifically, or they get bored of a certain type of PvP fairly quickly.

So of course a game that is largely PvE-oriented will have vastly higher concurrent player counts right after release than months later. Not only will some people have finished everything they wanted to, but even the ones that keep on playing will start playing less per day on average, driving the Steamcharts data further down.

Data need to be analyzed with context, otherwise you get smooth brain comments like with those people who were calling Elden Ring a dead game when after about a month the player counts dropped drastically... because of course they did, because many people either got bored of the game by then, or finished it.

The website states this:

The collector queries the number of concurrent players on an hourly interval for every single game in the Steam catalog, and has been collecting data since July of 2012.

Every hour, SteamCharts queries data to find out how many people are actually playing (currently active). It does not track the duration of people playing. It will be just too much data to collect, especially when Steam has 120 million users and thousands of games. That's roughly 120 billion records to extract and process every second, just to yield the value that you've explained above. Knowing that it uses PostgreSQL, then extracting and processing 1 billion records will require more than 10 minutes. Hence it does not make sense to process in a way you've explained above.

So SteamCharts does track total people playing and not total player-hour, like you explained above.

[White Lion]

Originally posted by Kalgert:

Originally posted by Ainess:

And yeah, a smaller portion of any playerbase is bound to contribute a lot to its player count because they love the game and play it often, with way more "casual" players contributing less on average, but likely more overall due to being the majority. It also depends game-to-game, for example, Hunt: Showdown is a pretty unique FPS, and as such, it appeals to some people greatly while many others hate it for a number of reasons.

This leads to a pretty crazy polarization where an unusual amount of players have 1500+ hours in the game (as much as 9000+ afaik), and also probably an unusual amount of players just dropping the game in the first 10 hours or so, leading to a playerbase of veterans (although new/casual players are still not uncommon by any means there).

It terrifies me to know that there are people out in the world who get so enamoured with a game that they end up playing only that for hundreds of hours and end up becoming the last soul you'd want to go up against.

Funny you'd mention Hunt as well, since it is a game I tried out during the sale and ended up contributing to the charts. Can't say it was a lot though as I really didn't get it and ended up refunding it, even though I didn't really dislike the experience. Have been rewatching the recorded play session though and have been wondering if to give it a second chance or not.

You can refund any game for any reason as long as you've played it less than 2 hours. The time limit to request a full refund is 14 days after purchase.

[Ainess]

Originally posted by Kalgert:

Originally posted by Ainess:

And yeah, a smaller portion of any playerbase is bound to contribute a lot to its player count because they love the game and play it often, with way more "casual" players contributing less on average, but likely more overall due to being the majority. It also depends game-to-game, for example, Hunt: Showdown is a pretty unique FPS, and as such, it appeals to some people greatly while many others hate it for a number of reasons.

This leads to a pretty crazy polarization where an unusual amount of players have 1500+ hours in the game (as much as 9000+ afaik), and also probably an unusual amount of players just dropping the game in the first 10 hours or so, leading to a playerbase of veterans (although new/casual players are still not uncommon by any means there).

It terrifies me to know that there are people out in the world who get so enamoured with a game that they end up playing only that for hundreds of hours and end up becoming the last soul you'd want to go up against.

Funny you'd mention Hunt as well, since it is a game I tried out during the sale and ended up contributing to the charts. Can't say it was a lot though as I really didn't get it and ended up refunding it, even though I didn't really dislike the experience. Have been rewatching the recorded play session though and have been wondering if to give it a second chance or not.

Interesting, but as a 5600 hours-in-Hunt-player, I have to tell you that playtime is far from everything xP I do have a pretty decent KDA even though I started out with something like 0,6, but even after all this time, I commonly get blasted by people with 10 hours or so in the game. Even died like 10 times to someone who had literally never killed anyone before killing me xP

And I have also run into similar kills/hours players who played stupidly or missed every shot, as well as into brand new players who headshot me the moment they saw me. It also largely comes down to bugs/glitches, server issues, latency, and RNG guns like dual wielding which are more rewarding for low skill players.

So if you feel like trying it again, I wouldn´t worry too much about the relatively high average veterancy of the playerbase, there is skill-based matchmaking after all (although it tends to be kinda abused lately by deranking on purpose in order to smurf). It much more depends on whether you play with a more skilled player than you or a less skilled one, than how good you yourself are, actually playing with a worse teammate will inflate your KDA (or your personal performance), because the matchmaking is based on the combined team MMR, not your individual one. Also you get a bonus to matchmaking as a solo, so that should yield the best KDA if that is what you are going for (also the playstyle is generally pretty different, so it can appeal to you more or less than teamplay).

[Ainess]

Originally posted by Xtreme:

Originally posted by Ainess:

8. Well that´s not quite accurate; not many people realize this, but Steamcharts actually does not inform you about how many people play any given game. It rather tells you how MUCH people play said game. If 10 people play a game for 2 hours a day on average during a month, Steamcharts will say that the game had 0,83 average concurrent players during that month (2 hours per day is 1/12 of the 24 hours each day has, which is then multiplied by the 10 contributing people).

And if you then instead have 5 people playing the game for 4 hours a day on average, it will also give you 0,83 concurrent player average.

So basically, how many people play the game is reflected, but it is multiplied by how much they play it. For 1 actual person to be considered 1 player by Steamcharts, they would have to have the game running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, every day of that month. Any less than that and you are less than 1 player for Steamcharts.

And to get to the main point, this game is largely PvE and has fairly limited amount of gameplay content. PvP is effectively infinite content, as it is other people that make up that content, and no 2 PvP fights will ever be the same, but a lot of people just don´t play PvP in general, a certain type of PvP does not appeal to them specifically, or they get bored of a certain type of PvP fairly quickly.

So of course a game that is largely PvE-oriented will have vastly higher concurrent player counts right after release than months later. Not only will some people have finished everything they wanted to, but even the ones that keep on playing will start playing less per day on average, driving the Steamcharts data further down.

Data need to be analyzed with context, otherwise you get smooth brain comments like with those people who were calling Elden Ring a dead game when after about a month the player counts dropped drastically... because of course they did, because many people either got bored of the game by then, or finished it.

The website states this:

The collector queries the number of concurrent players on an hourly interval for every single game in the Steam catalog, and has been collecting data since July of 2012.

Every hour, SteamCharts queries data to find out how many people are actually playing (currently active). It does not track the duration of people playing. It will be just too much data to collect, especially when Steam has 120 million users and thousands of games. That's roughly 120 billion records to extract and process every second, just to yield the value that you've explained above. Knowing that it uses PostgreSQL, then extracting and processing 1 billion records will require more than 10 minutes. Hence it does not make sense to process in a way you've explained above.

So SteamCharts does track total people playing and not total player-hour, like you explained above.

Well yeah, it has to check in intervals, but whenever you are not playing, you are not counting as a player, so your count of 1 player goes down for the month. If you play 1/10 of the amount of hours of a month, you will be 0,1 player for Steamcharts. It is *average concurrent* players, not *total unique* players over the period of a month.

EDIT: To clarify, when you go on the site or into community tab to see how many players are online, then yes, it does show how many people are *currently* online, but the monthly, weekly etc. data are averaged and since no one plays for weeks or months uninterrupted, any actual individual player will be represented as a value of <1 over such a prolonged period.

[Ainess]

Originally posted by Xtreme:

Originally posted by Kalgert:

It terrifies me to know that there are people out in the world who get so enamoured with a game that they end up playing only that for hundreds of hours and end up becoming the last soul you'd want to go up against.

Funny you'd mention Hunt as well, since it is a game I tried out during the sale and ended up contributing to the charts. Can't say it was a lot though as I really didn't get it and ended up refunding it, even though I didn't really dislike the experience. Have been rewatching the recorded play session though and have been wondering if to give it a second chance or not.

You can refund any game for any reason as long as you've played it less than 2 hours. The time limit to request a full refund is 14 days after purchase.

You can also refund after longer periods, it is just not a guaranteed refund then. If you give a good enough reason and don´t have too many hours, you have a decent chance of gettting it from what I´ve read.

[@xaker89]

Vampires don't need to eat and drink, all they need is blood.

[Sir Víve]

stop talking out your Ainess... I had to

[Bomoo]

First of all, let me dispel the notion that this is a multiplayer only, pvp game like what you refer to as "moba" and by which I presume you mean dota-like. It's not that. I mean, I imagine some players enjoy it as a pvp clan vs. clan experience or whatever, but I personally play it as a single player game with optional multiplayer if anyone feels like joining me for some boss fights or something. And that's one of the neat things about the game, and why it's so underpriced at $20 or whatever they're charging for it.

But your mileage may vary based on what you want out of it. That it even is able to provide entertainment for so many different kinds of players I think is one of the big points in its favour.