Player stats, sales, and reception speculation thread

[Gorbles]

And Civilization also added pieces before. The last change in Chess was en passant and was over 100 years ago, and even then it was just a small change (that had big impact, but a small change)

But when new ways to play the game came, like Freestyle/Fischer random it was adropted as a NEW GAME MODE, it didnt replace the original game. That's the difference

But this is a new argument. You said "chess doesn't add pieces". It did. A long time ago, when the game itself was still (effectively) in development.

That's what happens in video games (which is also why it's a poor analogy, as others have pointed out). Chess is a historic board game played by numerous people and cultures across the world, some of which evolved into their own offshoots. Civilisation is a video game franchise with entries popping up every several years.

Regardless, Civilisation always replaces / changes / updates the base game mode. It did with 1UPT. It did with Districts. It did with everything older games added that was new to the franchise at the time.

This argument seems to be constantly going round and round this point. The fact that you, this time, do not like the change. That the change was bigger, or unique in some unprecented way (that is different from all the other unprecedented changes). And that's fine. The fact that this time, a lot of people don't like the end result. Again, fine. I'm not arguing that. But the chief conceit in these critical arguments seems to revolve the idea that VII did something objectively bad that no previous Civ game did.

And I'm sorry, but that's such a shallow understanding of what it takes to release a game, and the factors that impact on its success, that it's why we're still going in these circles (everybody, really). Because for some people - certainly for you, and a couple of others - the problem has to be the mechanic(s) you dislike. It can't be anything else. That's why the reasoning is post-hoc. Because you've decided on what is bad, and you're working backwards from that to make everything else fit.

 

[Siptah]

Its not just chess, this is common for any sort of strategy game, turn based or real time.
At some point its clear to all the participants who is going to win, and the game is usually ended there.

Funnily enough, there are also many games in which it is really hard to predict the winner one or two turns before a game ends. And I personally think civ should try to be one of these, rather than being Chess/Monopoly/Risk where it‘s all about getting into a favorable position quickly that can hardly be contested later on. In chess, it‘s obvious that denying your opponent a favorable position is as much part of the game as is getting one yourself. In modern board games, it‘s often possible to get advantages in different areas, and it just remains unclear who will be the winner until everything is thrown together at the end. I think this is what civ should be looking for as well. Let me be the most advanced science empire if I want to be, but make this come at the cost of other areas, with no guarantee that I will win against the culture player and that crazy expansionist. Stop the I’m-the-runaway-in-all-categories play style in favor of a more interesting late game.

 

[Oberinspektor Derrick]

We must play very different strategy games then. Resigning can happen, but playing to a win or loss happens a lot, too.

Do you have any statistics to suggest which might be the dominant practise?

i doubt there are any readily available statistics, but I've watched professional chess for years to know that the second someone slips up and it's obvious that the opponent obviously has seen the blunder, the one making the mistake tends to resign within a few more moves.
Actual mates are extremely rare in high level chess, simply because both players can tell several moves in advance when its a mate on the table, or there is a game winning advantage for one side that will eventually translate into a mate (even if the actual mate is 20 moves into the future, as it takes time to convert the advantage into an actual forced mate).

As for when I watched Starcraft 2 (RTS), the same was true, a game ending engagement for one side usually caused a resignation shortly after, and pretty much noone ever played until one side was completely eradicated from the map.
Some players would try to make a comeback, but when you're down 80 supply and you just lost your only expansion and the enemy already transitioned into high tech units and denies any stealth hail marys, forfeiting is simply what you do.

 

[Siptah]

Seems like the player count on the past weekend was still way higher than during September, albeit not as high as last weekend. Playtracker is back to estimating more than 100k active players, but sales are back below 5k according to Gamalytic.

I don‘t think any of this contains any surprise.

 

[Crashdummy]

But this is a new argument. You said "chess doesn't add pieces". It did. A long time ago, when the game itself was still (effectively) in development.

That's what happens in video games (which is also why it's a poor analogy, as others have pointed out). Chess is a historic board game played by numerous people and cultures across the world, some of which evolved into their own offshoots. Civilisation is a video game franchise with entries popping up every several years.

Regardless, Civilisation always replaces / changes / updates the base game mode. It did with 1UPT. It did with Districts. It did with everything older games added that was new to the franchise at the time.

This argument seems to be constantly going round and round this point. The fact that you, this time, do not like the change. That the change was bigger, or unique in some unprecented way (that is different from all the other unprecedented changes). And that's fine. The fact that this time, a lot of people don't like the end result. Again, fine. I'm not arguing that. But the chief conceit in these critical arguments seems to revolve the idea that VII did something objectively bad that no previous Civ game did.

And I'm sorry, but that's such a shallow understanding of what it takes to release a game, and the factors that impact on its success, that it's why we're still going in these circles (everybody, really). Because for some people - certainly for you, and a couple of others - the problem has to be the mechanic(s) you dislike. It can't be anything else. That's why the reasoning is post-hoc. Because you've decided on what is bad, and you're working backwards from that to make everything else fit.

You are twisting the words

The context in the "Chess doesnt add pieces" was within a single match. You dont get more pieces as you advance in the game, which in Civilization you do. That was the discussion we were having with Kwami

You should read what you quote

 

[Crashdummy]

Funnily enough, there are also many games in which it is really hard to predict the winner one or two turns before a game ends. And I personally think civ should try to be one of these, rather than being Chess/Monopoly/Risk where it‘s all about getting into a favorable position quickly that can hardly be contested later on. In chess, it‘s obvious that denying your opponent a favorable position is as much part of the game as is getting one yourself. In modern board games, it‘s often possible to get advantages in different areas, and it just remains unclear who will be the winner until everything is thrown together at the end. I think this is what civ should be looking for as well. Let me be the most advanced science empire if I want to be, but make this come at the cost of other areas, with no guarantee that I will win against the culture player and that crazy expansionist. Stop the I’m-the-runaway-in-all-categories play style in favor of a more interesting late game.

I disagree. I think if they want to attempt that, they should do it with a new IP or a new game mode. Civilization success was with this model, what you are talking and what they attempted in Civ VII was to create a whole new game, and that is not right. Thats why Civ VII doesnt feel like a Civilization game, because its not

 

[itix]

3. Win-quit itself is not a problem, it's an indicator of a potential problem. If players leave the game in the first third, because they win the game in the first third, that's the problem with snowballing being too huge. If players leave the game while working on victory project it's an indicator that victory screen is not satisfactory.

If you win the game in the first third, but the victory screen is out of reach, there is a problem in game design.

I also believe there is a third quit type, boredom-quit. It seems that many quit at turn 100 or so because everything is explored and nothing interesting to do. I have no evidence, but I believe Firaxis was trying to tackle this with the exploration age.

So, the problem with previous civ titles is the amount of snowballing, which makes late game so uninteresting (on top of other reasons for the late game to not be interesting) that players end the game very early. And yes, extreme snowballing is the problem which needs fixing in my book, because the game is supposed to be played from caves to space, not from caves to castles.

No, not really. Even when I am not snowballing, the late game in Civ 6 is boring. The ever increasing district cost is adding boredom. Even if you found new cities, getting them up and running takes too long. It probably just didnt receive enough playtesting and was neglected.

In Civ 7 the last age is snappy because devs could easily jump to the last age and play it through, ensuring that it ends quickly enough.

 

[Gorbles]

i doubt there are any readily available statistics, but I've watched professional chess for years to know that the second someone slips up and it's obvious that the opponent obviously has seen the blunder, the one making the mistake tends to resign within a few more moves.
Actual mates are extremely rare in high level chess, simply because both players can tell several moves in advance when its a mate on the table, or there is a game winning advantage for one side that will eventually translate into a mate (even if the actual mate is 20 moves into the future, as it takes time to convert the advantage into an actual forced mate).

As for when I watched Starcraft 2 (RTS), the same was true, a game ending engagement for one side usually caused a resignation shortly after, and pretty much noone ever played until one side was completely eradicated from the map.
Some players would try to make a comeback, but when you're down 80 supply and you just lost your only expansion and the enemy already transitioned into high tech units and denies any stealth hail marys, forfeiting is simply what you do.

At the grandmaster level, perhaps. But this again maps poorly onto Civilisation, which is why statistics are important when it comes to deciding how a game is designed upfront. Checkmate as a part of the design was the win / loss condition.

This is the other wrinkle in evaluation resignation vs. a game ending at a victory (and there's a tangent in AI behaviour vs. human behaviour) - it will vary substantially on player skill, and things like victory conditions enabled (and AI level faced). A lot of the sandbox-y type players like pushing the game experience as far and as wide as possible (and have talked about, in this and other threads, how they do that).

There are no "correct" answers, in a way, which is why I asked for statistics. If we have none, we can't decide what the popular solution would look like. All we have is a solution that has drawn criticism because that's what the game shipped with.

To say this is a problem that didn't need fixing, if we're going to stick with the chess analogy (that I don't agree with, but hey), would be to rewrite chess to never having had checkmate. Or rewriting it so that checkmate was historically difficult to reach for any player, and then claiming that solutions that incentivise mate actually happening are unnecessary. Despite the fact that early changes to chess were a) contentious and b) made regardless to try and make the game more of well, a game. Changing things is always contentious. Well, nearly always.

A lot of the competitive chess meta is what, less than 200 years old? For a board game that goes back many more centuries than that? That is emergent gameplay that has arisen from the constraints of the actual game.

You are twisting the words

The context in the "Chess doesnt add pieces" was within a single match. You dont get more pieces as you advance in the game, which in Civilization you do. That was the discussion we were having with Kwami

You should read what you quote

Which makes it even more of a weirder analogy to reach for imo, but fair enough.

(also, technically, it does, if you advance a pawn enough)

Please don't accuse folks of things with malicious intent - not understanding your analogy is not twisting your words.

 

[nakzox]

I've said it before elsewhere, but I don't think it's really a problem if people aren't playing games to completion if they are still, in the end, playing the game.

If you play up to 80% of the game, realize you don't need to play it out, and then immediately start a new game at turn zero, that's a good thing. It shows the game has good replayability.

Instead, they tried to "fix" this problem and no one is playing it. That's not good.

VI's late game was tedious by design with how many cities the player was encouraged to have, and thus how many they would have to take to win a domination victory. Then, the science victory which took ages for no particular reason, and the culture victory with the SAME ANNOYING ROCK BAND SOUNDS EVERY SINGLE TIME YOU USED ONE, and also that it took forever, along with the religious victory. I would nope out too if I wasn't obsessed with getting achievements for winning with each civ.

I only played V and VI, but I think V did it best with ideologies making things interesting and just less overall tedium and moving parts necessary for the other non-domination victory types.

 

[Oberinspektor Derrick]

I've said it before elsewhere, but I don't think it's really a problem if people aren't playing games to completion if they are still, in the end, playing the game.

If you play up to 80% of the game, realize you don't need to play it out, and then immediately start a new game at turn zero, that's a good thing. It shows the game has good replayability.

Instead, they tried to "fix" this problem and no one is playing it. That's not good.

My thoughts exactly. People not finishing games is perfectly fine. And most people play single payer anyway, and can freely choose whether to finish the game or not.

 

[Gorbles]

I've said it before elsewhere, but I don't think it's really a problem if people aren't playing games to completion if they are still, in the end, playing the game.

If you play up to 80% of the game, realize you don't need to play it out, and then immediately start a new game at turn zero, that's a good thing. It shows the game has good replayability.

How do you know people are playing up to 80% of the game?

Like, I have to emphasise the sheer number of assumptions people are making when their core opinion is just "I don't like Age Transitions". That's reason enough. You don't need to retrofit some kind of counterargument that applies to anything the developers ever use to justify their own decisions. The developers rationale could have made sense to them according to the data they had, and you can still not like the result.

A lot of games design comes down to multiple answers for a single problem. Choosing any one answer comes with advantages and disadvantages (there are very few "perfect" answers, and the reality of implementing these compounds that most, if not all, of the time).

Though it is funny that you then talk about how the lategame in VI is tedious. Do you think the developers aren't aware of this?

My thoughts exactly. People not finishing games is perfectly fine.

At no point did Firaxis demand that everyone must finish every game, 100% of the time.

So sure, not finishing games is fine.

But the developers wanting more people to complete more games, is also fine. I don't understand why this distinction keeps being ignored in favour a truism ("not finishing games is perfectly fine") that the developers have never worked against.

 

[nakzox]

How do you know people are playing up to 80% of the game?

Like, I have to emphasise the sheer number of assumptions people are making when their core opinion is just "I don't like Age Transitions". That's reason enough. You don't need to retrofit some kind of counterargument that applies to anything the developers ever use to justify their own decisions. The developers rationale could have made sense to them according to the data they had, and you can still not like the result.

A lot of games design comes down to multiple answers for a single problem. Choosing any one answer comes with advantages and disadvantages (there are very few "perfect" answers, and the reality of implementing these compounds that most, if not all, of the time).

Though it is funny that you then talk about how the lategame in VI is tedious. Do you think the developers aren't aware of this?

Even if you're playing 50-60% of the game, but are still putting in a seriously high hour count, again, that is a good thing. People playing the game is a good thing.

Regarding the bold: They made it that way though and then cited players not finishing games as reason for the drastic differences in VII.

 

[IntelligentDisk]

I disagree, its not worth tackling because its not a problem

And yes, i know Freestyle chess, the fact that Fischer random exists is proof that Classical Chess is amazingly snowballing. But here is the difference, Freestyle chess IS A DIFFERENT GAME MODE. It does not replace Chess and it would receive a really bit commotion and genative response if they would have push to be a replacement. Funny isnt?

The end in Chess is checkmate, stalemate and such, not resigning, which is how most of the games finish

Fischer didn't create his own variation to eliminate snowballing, he created it because he thought opening prep and relying on memorisation was becoming too detrimental, as well as becoming bored of traditional Chess. It's the same reasons Magnus Carlsen has been trying to make it more popular in recent years.

Civ VII is a different game. It does not replace Civ I to VI.

Resigning is a natural conclusion to the end of a Chess game. The end of a Chess game can naturally happen as quickly as 2/3/4 moves in.

You could argue that players wanting to start a new Civ game instead of finishing their current one is also a natural conclusion to a Civ game, which I would agree. But the reasoning being they're bored or have won early is bad for the game. People aren't resigning in Chess because they're bored, it's because they've been defeated. If you play a multiplayer Civ game and people are quitting/resigning because they've been defeated, then that's a fair natural conclusion. If you're playing a single player game against AI and stop playing half way through the game because you've decided you've already won, then that's an issue.

• if players are only getting a third of the way through a game before quitting because they're bored, then that needs addressing as it's a major issue
• if players deem themselves to be winning too quickly (snowballing) and quitting the game early, then that needs addressing as it's a major issue
• if players are getting to the last 10-20 turns of a game and would prefer to start a new game than finishing, then that needs addressing but it isn't a major issue

 

[IntelligentDisk]

Regarding player counts, the average player count is around 7-8% higher so far in October than the June-August period.

 

[Gori the Grey]

The end of a Chess game can naturally happen as quickly as 2/3/4 moves in.

I once did Fool's Mate in a sixth-grade chess tournament. I was reading chess books; no one else was. I came across it as a curiosity, but decided to give it a try.

The adult moderators couldn't believe I was calling them over to confirm a win as early as I was. I don't think they knew Fool's Mate, but they looked at the position on the board and had to confirm, "yep, that's a win."

 

[Kev1916]

There is indeed a design problem in Civ VI - it is boring. In addition, it seems to be badly optimized. Enemy turns are taking too much time, even on performant machines.

On the other hand, I have shifted my playstyle. I dont care if I am winning or losing, I play Civ6 as an empire/city builder game and I quit when I am done. I have disabled all victory conditions except domination victory.

Totally,
thou Civ VI is still getting 30K+ players daily and double the rating of "Civ" Vii , I don't think players not "finishing" the game is anything other than an excuse to split the game into 3/4 mini games.

The mini games opened the door for a deluge of overpriced "Civ" lets and ofc the console market

 

[Leucarum]

I've said it before elsewhere, but I don't think it's really a problem if people aren't playing games to completion if they are still, in the end, playing the game.

If you play up to 80% of the game, realize you don't need to play it out, and then immediately start a new game at turn zero, that's a good thing. It shows the game has good replayability.

Instead, they tried to "fix" this problem and no one is playing it. That's not good.

VI's late game was tedious by design with how many cities the player was encouraged to have, and thus how many they would have to take to win a domination victory. Then, the science victory which took ages for no particular reason, and the culture victory with the SAME ANNOYING ROCK BAND SOUNDS EVERY SINGLE TIME YOU USED ONE, and also that it took forever, along with the religious victory. I would nope out too if I wasn't obsessed with getting achievements for winning with each civ.

I only played V and VI, but I think V did it best with ideologies making things interesting and just less overall tedium and moving parts necessary for the other non-domination victory types.

It's not a problem for a player.

For the devs I completely understand why it's a problem. They are putting time, money and effort into making late game content because without it the game feels incomplete. But players don't play it anyway 90% of the time.

So maybe the devs tried to fix their own problem, with the elephant in the room being that it isn't the players' problem...

 

[itix]

• if players are only getting a third of the way through a game before quitting because they're bored, then that needs addressing as it's a major issue
• if players deem themselves to be winning too quickly (snowballing) and quitting the game early, then that needs addressing as it's a major issue
• if players are getting to the last 10-20 turns of a game and would prefer to start a new game than finishing, then that needs addressing but it isn't a major issue

Uhm, sorry but this makes no sense.

With snowballing, you can win at turn 75. Without snowballing, you can win at turn 175. Why would it be any better to win late than early? Is it important to play long games by winning very late?

The goal should not be to prolong games. The goal should be to make victories easier and quicker to achieve.

 

[Kev1916]

It's not a problem for a player.

For the devs I completely understand why it's a problem. They are putting time, money and effort into making late game content because without it the game feels incomplete. But players don't play it anyway 90% of the time.

So maybe the devs tried to fix their own problem, with the elephant in the room being that it isn't the players' problem...

Sort off, I think everyone can agree late game in Civ Vi was a chore.

Devs should have made the late game much more interesting and a challenge , sadly "Civ" Vii doesn't even have a proper late game as they have still to flog an expensive expansion next year.

Making 3 4 mini games was IMHO an incredulously unwise game design, again it may have been to sell more packs but at what cost ! 88% Negative is a shocking review score

 

[Leucarum]

Sort off, I think everyone can agree late game in Civ Vi was a chore.

Devs should have made the late game much more interesting and a challenge , sadly "Civ" Vii doesn't even have a proper late game as they have still to flog an expensive expansion next year.

I will say that commanders, removing builders and the town/city split are a big deal for making the late game better. Civ7's general push towards making micromanagement less hefty is a big plus.

But if you let players carry stuff over, later ages are just going to be less impactful and we do invariably hit a point where it just doesn't matter.

This is why I point my finger at civ switching more than the age system as being Civ7's fatal flaw. If 1/3 of the civs are only playable in the least relevant part of the game... That's not great.

Making 3 4 mini games was IMHO an incredulously unwise game design, again it may have been to sell more packs but at what cost ! 88% Negative is a shocking review score

For me the expansion pack issue is a value for money question. I rarely like more than 1/3 of the new civs or leaders in any civ expansion (regardless of which Civ) - so now that I can only play the 1/3 which I like for 1/3 of the game... It feels like I'm really not getting my money's worth despite the fact that the costs are almost certainly higher for the devs to produce it. I think with Civ switching they've put themselves between a rock and a hard place when it comes to creating expansions which feel like good value.

I'll be voting with my wallet on this version of Civ. We need to be able to play civs out of era or I'm not paying what Firaxis is asking for (doesn't neccessarily mean civ switching has to go, the two can coexist)... But more generally, Civ7 needs to shift to a philosophy of letting the player play in the way they want to. Otherwise it just won't have longevity.