Savej Posted May 28, 2015 Share Posted May 28, 2015 http://www.swtornetwork.com/news/interview-with-bioware-stats-and-game-design-decisions/ I haven't seen this elsewhere... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lunafox Posted May 28, 2015 Share Posted May 28, 2015 Thanks for sharing that. Interesting read, I enjoyed it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lewintelamon Posted May 28, 2015 Share Posted May 28, 2015 Interesting, the last part....a jibe at players who claim "devs don't play their own game", perhaps? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DarthDymond Posted May 28, 2015 Share Posted May 28, 2015 Just saw that on MassivelyOP and popped over to see if anyone had posted it here. Definitely an interesting read with some neat little tidbits (like the % of players who seem to be using 12x XP to make max-level alts vs those who are using it to see the stories, or the amount of off-the-clock playtime BW employees have put in). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZionHalcyon Posted May 28, 2015 Share Posted May 28, 2015 Very fascinating article. The interesting part is that they observed that players aren't rushing to the end, but taking their time. Would make me think that they should look at refocusing on the 1-50 experience and maybe overhaul it - perhaps a tweak to those side quests? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jerba Posted May 28, 2015 Share Posted May 28, 2015 (edited) I already saw it earlier but I'll give my thoughts on it anyway. In general, I am wary of the analytics managers. They have the biggest influence on content development and whch bugs are getting fixed. No matter what we write on the forums, no matter how we play in game, in the end it only matters what reports they create, because any new design decisions are based on that. And since currently my favorite game area (endgame PvE) is being neglected, I have all the more reason to be concerned why they moved away from that and focused on different content. I was hoping that the interview would alleviate my worries and show that the analytics managers really make good decisions that increase the lifetime of the game and its population but it did not. Instead, we got a lot of behind-the-scenes information which was certainly nice but not what I expected. Not sure if the goal of the interview was just different but it did not meet my expectations. Content-wise, I was disappointed that the author did not mention Georg Zoeller's GDC talk which gave a very in-depth look at SWTOR's analytics system and I've been wondering for a long time if they are still using that or have abandoned that approach. Also, I felt that he asked too few PvE questions, specifically around the popularity of flashpoints/operations and if they saw the change to operations (making it more difficult) be helpful or damaging to the game. Oh well, this is just a very big topic and I certainly appreciated reading that interview. Maybe my expectations were too high but I hope we'll get more interviews in the future. Edited May 28, 2015 by Jerba Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MSchuyler Posted May 28, 2015 Share Posted May 28, 2015 The analytics managers are bringing facts to the table rather than opinion. That is a good thing. There's no need to be afraid of them. They simply show your gross generalizations and claims about the game to be true or false. When you pull your own personal "analytics" out of your butt, you deserve to be taken down for it. One stat that popped out at me: Revan took them 62,000 hours of work. That's about 30 Man Years of effort. Add up the salaries for 30 years to get an idea of what the personnel costs were, and double it to get an idea of support costs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jerba Posted May 28, 2015 Share Posted May 28, 2015 (edited) Some more thoughts I forgot to mention in my previous post... He answered the questions much more open than what we hear from Musco etc. at the cantina tours and livestreams, which was nice to read. While it was interesting to see some numbers, they are missing details, taken out of context and not very useful for a meaningful discussion. I suppose the only way to really get an overview about player interaction is by seeing the data oneself, which would go completely beyond the scope of a single interview. As it stands, individual numbers lead players to draw the wrong conclusions and is certainly not something he intended. For example, in other comments about this article, I've seen the sentence: Less than 10% of our player base seems to be primarily motivated to “get to the end” interpreted as "Only 10% of all players are interested in endgame". When in fact, he meant something like: "Of all the people using 12XP, 10% are using it to quickly level another alt to 60 while 90% are experiencing the story and watching cutscenes". I'm still waiting for an explanation on how the new story-based/singleplayer approach started with Forged Alliances/Shadow of Revan is beneficial to the game in a long-term. Yes, I'm sure their metrics show that there are tons of players who played through KotOR and want to experience the story but I'm not convinced that those are the kind of players that will stay subscribed to the game for years to come, while the repeatable, grindy content for traditional MMO players gets pushed to second place and player interaction is reduced, weakening the server communities. Sadly, the interview did not touch upon that question but I still hope that the devs in Austin are on top of it and have given plenty of thought to it. I want this game to have a long life and hope they don't just think of short-term income sources. Edited May 28, 2015 by Jerba Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
annabethchase Posted May 28, 2015 Share Posted May 28, 2015 The analytics managers are bringing facts to the table rather than opinion. That is a good thing. There's no need to be afraid of them. They simply show your gross generalizations and claims about the game to be true or false. When you pull your own personal "analytics" out of your butt, you deserve to be taken down for it. One stat that popped out at me: Revan took them 62,000 hours of work. That's about 30 Man Years of effort. Add up the salaries for 30 years to get an idea of what the personnel costs were, and double it to get an idea of support costs. Good stats to have, it is more hours than I expected. That calculates out to about 1.5 to 2 million of personnel cost. So if only 100,000 people bought the expansion they made that money back. Then the rest of the people buying the expansion is profit. Everything else is covered by subscription cost. So in other words, expansions are wildly profitable. Hence why 4.0 should be at least 3 times as large as Revan, aka over 150k hours of work. That would still be wildly profitable even if only 400k people bought it. But with a release near episode 7, I can only imagine the shockingly high number of buys it would get at that scale of an expansion. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
annabethchase Posted May 28, 2015 Share Posted May 28, 2015 The most popular single lightsaber crystal is a purple outline. Proving once again, Samuel L. Jackson made a good choice asking for that special purple saber. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts