After a long and gruelling saga of epic proportions (a quick search and a few clicks), I believe I have found the survey you were enquiring about!
Unless you meant Darxide’s potato quiz, in which case you’ll need to do your own research (Maris Piper ftw!)
Edit: I was a bit slow putting this together, apparently.
Cool story. Still useless.
Excuse me? Estimation of what exactly do you think it shows? “Avg. players” is not “all people who play”, you know this, right?
This is also a good point. If I used the Steam client (I don’t) then my play would skew that. I play once per week right now. Raid night. I quit logging in daily for two reasons. One was RSI that is exacerbated by gaming and two was because I didn’t want to get burnt out and quit outright. I am still here if new content were dropped. but I am online for an hour or less each week. Most of my raid is actually on a similar play schedule, if not exactly the same. Most of them are not online except for that one hour period each week. And for the record, my raid group consists of three groups. We clear three times. There’s some overlap, but that’s roughly 25 people right there, probably I would guess between 15 and 20 of them are on the “once a week” play schedule just from random Discord conversation.
I don’t think that we are any kind of special group of people. I know a ton of veterans who log in even less than once a week, but they still hover around. Waiting for the unobtainable dream of new content. There are a lot of cabalmates in my Discord who haven’t logged in in weeks. But they’re still there and they do still talk about what they wish the game was because they enjoy it so much.
Yet more reasons why @hylonomus is completely inaccurately representing things beyond ignoring the fact that non-Steam users exist and using some anecdotal poll as if it were actually evidence to some argument.
I think there was another poll one year later, showing a slow shift towards non-Steam users as global population decreased.
Altogether, it is true that it should be read with a pinch of salt anyhow as there would be some significant variance as due to the small overall population.
As for whether @darxide personal experience is more representative than a poll (even an internet one), i mean you can make your own opinion on that, but altogether confirmation bias might play a bit of a role in how he is forming his opinions.
If we go with anecdotal experiences, I know “tons of veteran” who moved entirely to ESO, FFXIV or GW2 and only check around once a while to check if anything at all is hinting towards a new version of the game that would be playable and like you know… properly designed. Do they have any appetite to spend time or money on SWL unless some massive changes are done to combat system, monetization, content updates and several other aspects of the game…? Not at all. But that is my own confirmation bias, so is neither representative nor link to the point you raised which was the allocation between steam and non-steam players.
I’ll come back to check in a couple of months if any new features makes it relevant to log to this game for 15 minutes.
If you (talking about the people not you you) question so many aspects of the game I would argue that the game just isn’t for you. I think it is fair to move on. I moved on from GW2 and while I had my issues with it I don’t really hate it, I just had my reasons to not enjoy it.
As for:
Since I did one myself at one point: One thing that influences it the most is where you hold it. Depending on the community outlet you get wildly different results and the only reasonable accurate intel you get out of it is that both a steam community and a none steam one exist and which one uses which outlet.
My experience was that we lost a lot of grumpy people, healers at heart and pvp centric people but gained a lot more casual players that aren’t that endgame focused. How those two balance out I don’T know. Like that is a book with 7 seals to me. The game loses people yeah but in honesty every MMO does at some point with age. SWL is while in reality only a few years old kinda build on a 2012 game on a much older engine with lots of tweaks and newer versions. It can look dated to some and is not ahead of the curve but at least it still is running. Not fast but forward.
I’ve never understood the obsession with denying that Steam usage numbers are representative of its popularity. Is there some reason the real game population being ~400 concurrent users can’t be correct? The 50-50 poll is far more likely to be true than any individual’s feelings about “everyone I know plays on the steam client”.
I hesitate to bring up steam charts anymore because of people that can’t see the value in its data. Steam Charts can be used to identify trends and make general observations about the games population. Whether its a 50/50 split (the perfect scenario) or some variation like 40/60 it still enough to generate trends. The only case in which steam charts would be absolutely useless is if it represented a very small % of the population like 5-10%. People like to play the you cant prove with 100% certainty so you must be wrong game, and sadly that’s not a game any reasonable person can win.
If there’d been anything really at all to imbalance it, like one of the versions running more or less smoothly, and an ability of users to move to that one, perhaps. But it’s probably pretty stable with no difference in steam/non-steam users playstyle, only reason to choose one over the other is payment processor being one you already use. Personally I’d recommend steam cause I played TSW standalone and did not have a good time with funcom’s paypal transactions (somehow much slower than the normal ‘instant’ you get from paypal+mmo).
I started playing Funcom games a month after Anarchy Online was released (it was too unstable at first, but we were on dial-up back then). (If curious what old school is like, I highly recommend it. Even though it’s been made substantially easier since it was released. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXjurbQnc6A, which you probably won’t hear much now unless you hang out in Borealis (at night). Or have a 4 kHz connection,)
As well as TSW at release.
SWL was released on July 31, 2017, which I also played at release.
Steam was not involved in any of the above.
I started playing Ark Survival Evolved in Nov 2017 (i.e., I didn’t take to SWL as well as I did TSW), using Steam. And have over 5000 hours playing it (which doesn’t reflect actual play time, since Ark doesn’t kick you out when afk. On a player run server, which is all I have played it on.)
Ark and Conan are similar in that both are sandboxes, like Minecraft, and can’t be compared to TSW/SWL. I never considered Conan because dinosaur slaves were more palatable to me than human ones, despite being a Funcom fan from the beginning.
TSW is remarkable because of the amount of developer time it must have taken to have so finely crafted such a magnificent theme park.
While the initial development cost of a sandbox might be high, adding embellishments to it probably not so much.
BTW, the only reason I left Ark and came back here is the developers attempts to cater to the console crowd, by trying to add theme park elements (very badly).
Is that some irony or what?
Er, Conan Exiles is sandbox, but Age of Conan: Unchained (AoC) is a themepark isn’t it? I think you’re getting confused between the two Conan titles. AoC has just had an update, which is what people are talking about.
nope, open world gankbox
Open world pvp does not make it a sandbox. If you’ve got NPCs handing out quests and rewards, that’s themepark elements at least.
Yes, you’re right. I keep confusing the two Conans, and haven’t a clue what AoC is like.
Nevermind.