steam's achievements stats. pls discuss.
Dom, 11/04/2018 - 01:28
graveyard edit: ok, i'm done. see ya next year, folks. ^^
--disclaimer--
- ALL and ANY numbers are theoretical and unproven. they are just used to better represent/illustrate steam's achievement percentages. for all i know, a 8% achievement could translate to 3,000,000 or just 3 players if we had steam's actual database/formula
- i don't want to incite change, nor do i care for it.
- i know this might seem like a "Remove the forge!" thread, but it isn't. it's an honest question.
- yes, i'm using steam data again :/
--the post--
after pondering it over a little more, i decided to rewrite this post because i was bit too hasty to graveyard the old one / lose interest
as confirmed by a recent Steam leak, the SK steam community is estimated to be 5,226,655 players.
steam's achievements are here: https://steamcommunity.com/stats/SpiralKnights/achievements/
"Spiral Spelunker", 10.1% of all players have earned clearance to Tier 2.
5,226,655 * 0.101 = 527,892.155. so let's say ~527,000 players.
"Go Deep", 1.9% of all players have earned clearance to Tier 3.
5,226,655 * 0.019 = 99306.445. so ~99,000 players.
"Free Spirit", 1.2% of all players have beaten Vanaduke.
5,226,655 * 0.012 = 62719.86. ~62,000 players.
"Stellar Set", 0.5% of all players have earned a full set of 5* equipment (as in, 1 piece of helmet, armor, sword, gun and bomb).
5,226,655 * 0.005 = 26133.275. ~26,000 players.
ignoring the section of the forums that think the game is perfect, SK is commonly believed to be easy to exhaust / burn out. however, looking at these numbers, we can see that the majority of steam players don't even make to endgame, they just give up half way through.
my conjecture for the day is: exhausting SK and quitting is only true to a minority, and the majority of people get frustrated and leave.
do we have anything that proves otherwise? i don't care what kind of evidence/arguments you're going to use, so go crazy if you will
Dom, 11/04/2018 - 04:46
#2
important, but doesn't alter complaints for devoted players
You make an important point, that most players who *try* Spiral Knights quit long before the end.
I've witnessed it first-hand. One of my real-life friends is a fanatical gamer. Sometime in 2011 I convinced him to try Spiral Knights. He played one or two sessions before quitting. He said that the game wasn't difficult enough and seemed too much like Zelda nostalgia. He was also turned off by the daily play time budget (100 mist energy). And the free-ness wasn't a big attraction, because his time was valuable and he wanted to spend it on more sophisticated games. I pointed out that Spiral Knights gets much harder in the later levels, but he wasn't interested in waiting.
In past threads like this, we've also had players report that friends are turned off by the cute art style. They assume that it's a game for kids.
There may be other reasons for trying and quitting. But most of the reasons above are hard to change because they're deeply ingrained in the game's design. And it's inherent to a try-it-for-free business model that a bunch of players are going to try it and decide that it's not for them. That's okay. If Spiral Knights had just 1.9% of 5,000,000 players, then it would be pretty healthy --- much more than now, anyway.
When forum posters talk about the reasons for quitting, they implicitly have a sub-population in mind. They are usually talking about people like themselves. The fact that 98.1% of players never make it to Tier 3 doesn't alter the fact that Tier 3 players are frustrated by the scarcity of Radiants.
Dom, 11/04/2018 - 07:16
#3
woof
thanks for your post, bro. it's insightful
Reading your post, I just remembered that we actually had people quit over UI changes, I think? It all makes sense now.
Guess I screwed up again. Thanks for setting me straight.
> The fact that 98.1% of players never make it to Tier 3 doesn't alter the fact that Tier 3 players are frustrated by the scarcity of
Radiants.
err, my point is that 98.1% don't make it too long into the game because of this frustration. i'm saying these restriction should be relaxed (the forge system in general).
can you show me what part of the post indicate that i said what you thought? because i should probably fix that :x
edit: Oooo, ok. ignore this post guys lol
Dom, 11/04/2018 - 05:53
#4
no part
My post was not correcting you or setting you straight. And no part of your post says that Tier 3 players aren't frustrated by the scarcity of Radiants. I was just commenting on issues related to your post.
Fundamentally, we are all interested in helping Spiral Knights become better and more popular. Almost all complaints on the forums are about retaining Tier-3 players, so I tend to think about that problem. Your post correctly points out that retaining Tier-1 and Tier-2 players is another problem --- judged by the numbers, even more important to the health of the game. :)
this friend responded to my older post and they make some good points that i think will probably come up again so...
> also all of the numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, keep in mind that for example "conditioned response", arguably one of the easier achievements to do, is sitting at just over 8%
let's look at that 8.3% a little harder
5,226,655 * 0.083 = 433812.365.
so compare ~433,000 players, to ~527,000 players. so, about ~94,000 players didn't unlock it. That's not so ridiculous to me. consider that encountering a remedy capsule is RNG based, then consider the fact that capsules aren't really useful before T3 (or newbies might not use them) and there you go.
going further, there is a good reason why I chose Spelunker as the starting point, mainly to shave off all the numbers of people that might not have had any interest in the first place. as in, the ~4,000,000 players that trip over themselves and die before Spelunker are actually irrelevant to what i'm saying.
and, honestly, saying that the numbers should taken with a grain of salt doesn't actually prove or disprove anything.
> you dont even have to beat snarby for it if I recall correctly, just get to 3-2 missions in general.
https://wiki.spiralknights.com/Hall_of_Heroes#Star_Certification
> SK wiki: Tier Clearance will automatically be granted on award of the appropriate Star Certification[...]
from what i understand, it seems like they actually have to get through hall of heroes to get clearance
https://wiki.spiralknights.com/List_of_rank_missions
so, 4-1.
but let's say it's not so, and just look at the achievements again:
O Frabjous Day! @ 12.2%
Spiral Spelunker @ 10.1%
if what you're saying is true, then why is there more people that beat Snarl than those that have T2 clearance? lol
> a lot of people just try free games, then stop when they do not like them, trying to cater to these people can be useless if not downright detrimental.
i'm not saying we should crater to ~4,000,000 players who probably don't care. that's why i bring up Spelunker and Go Deep. SK's actual steam playerbase is probably less than ~600,000 but not any less than ~90,000 players. ...that's not counting all the people that have quit over the years, and not considering other sources... It's all guesswork, but that's all we can do for the time being.
additionally, you can see other games that hold large playerbases. so I don't see why SK cratering to ~600,000 or so people is ridiculous or whatever. in fact, mist energy was removed just to do exactly that.
>stellar set is far more specific than just having a full set of 5* gear though. you must have a full (slots not needed and not counting
sprite) 5* set, but with a gun and a bomb. most players do not seem to like bombs
this is true. but i'm using stellar set to illustrate those at the extreme end of "endgame".
what i'm trying to say is: those with Free Spirit or Stellar Set are the ones that exhaust the content, but they are a minority. if sk was that easy to exhaust, then why are they a minority?
> you also imply that anyone leaving or not at endgame burnt out. first, just because the game was out for a while doesnt mean that everyone started a while ago.
ok, but SK's player count is shrinking, not increasing
you can see this everywhere. between people crying that the game is DYING OMFG GH HELP (i'm joking, guys. it's a joke. Laugh, ok?), the auction house being only a fraction of what it used to be, and EU lockdown + blast network being dead at most hours.
and let's not pretend that everyone isn't just a few days of radio silence and stagnation away from quitting or becoming like a certain Disc jockey that plays controversial songs at 12 AM which upsets you all. so... no.
tl;dr -- im right until proven otherwise
edit: formatting issues :s