Week by week effect of changes (get your metrics here)

[merovejec]

WTS sorc healer, just 20 mil, a bit used, all gear min-maxed, pm me ingame. /s

 

These numbers indicate complete loss of player population, if some classes were deemed underpowered and there was a shift of players to play different classes, wouldn't there be some increased numbers?

 

If we assume that all reports is the population and for example sentinel players make up 9% of the population, then after the nerfs and reduced all reports the sentinel players make up again 9%.

 

By this theory I can conclude (I am lazy and just assume here because I dont want to count all the portions) that we are just missing lots of data to make any statistical judgement based on starparse.

 

lol NGE coming alive here! Just need Hal and Curt to post

[merovejec]

Debatable.

 

When you do a survey of a large group the ideal is to get the right kind of information from every single one.

 

The fact remains that Bioware can see the data, well, they have it, if they look at it and use it is questionable. I personally love to play with data and view the different numbers, filters etc. therefore I love threads like this. They should know this a react on it. Sure, we are coming to the fact that its vacation season and numbers may be influenced. You can see it here in my city that instead of trafic jams the roads are half empty, which is great since I can get to and from work faster but thats only gonna last 1 or 2 more weeks.

 

Remember these are organised PVE only, Starparse users only.

 

This is the main limitation of Starparse data and its sad we dont have it like in WoW where you can see the data of others in the group. There are many things you can say here, like ppl don't have starparse on when raiding, they forget, don't use it due to lag, glitches or doesn't work and so on. They could be raiding with other guilds and not join their group or do pugs (yeah, NiM raiders don't often do it, but lets say...) so in general many things that could mean that the ppl didn't use starparse EVENTHOUGH they played swtor.

 

However, the data is pretty valid to a certain degree and cannot be simply ingored. If the players can come up with such disturbing data with the limited resources they have then Bioware must be aware of this problem too and should react to it. Or else there wont be a player base to do the new ops when its finished!

[olagatonjedi]

While the numbers are interesting, the concerns about breaking classes and breaking the game are premature considering they are still balancing classes, and possibly even changing the dps checks once balancing is complete. We are judging an unfinished project at this point.

[merovejec]

While the numbers are interesting, the concerns about breaking classes and breaking the game are premature considering they are still balancing classes

 

They already went through most of the classes. The ones that remain are melee, they should get any super buffs so there really isnt much to expect.

 

Also they surely wont be rebalancing content now! No point or manpower for it! They would break more stuff than rix.

[TUXs]

You don't need to make up a scenario, use the real ones.

 

Changes have been applied and we are looking at numbers change.

 

 

Anyway here we are on the next full week and here are some numbers comparing peak of april to the full week just gone.

 

All reports: 84731 59401 -30%

 

DPS: 50942 34901 -31%

 

Sentinel: 7695 5638 -27%

Guardian: 4709 3590 -24%

Shadow: 4698 4384 -7%

Sage: 4386 3829 -13%

Vanguard: 1982 1990 --

Commando: 17073 6938 -59%

Scoundrel: 3213 3120 -3%

Gunslinger: 8186 5412 -33%

 

Healers: 19893 14675 -26%

 

Scoundrel: 4090 4391 +7%

Commando: 5731 4890 -15%

Sage: 10072 5395 -46%

 

Tanks: 13896 9925 -29%

 

Vanguard: 2814 2216 -21%

Shadow: 6123 4120 -33%

Guardian: 4959 3589 -28%

 

Remember these are organised PVE only, Starparse users only.

 

Sadly we have no PVP data.

The numbers here do not lie. There's no doubt the nerfs hurt the game in a major way.

[VirtualMorrigan]

While the numbers are interesting, the concerns about breaking classes and breaking the game are premature considering they are still balancing classes, and possibly even changing the dps checks once balancing is complete. We are judging an unfinished project at this point.

 

What you fail to take into account is that a player, as a paying customer, usally is not going to care about work-in-progress or speculate about how it might become better. If it is not fun, and someone is neither seeing value (= enjoyment) for their money nor any propects of improvement (and BW has not communicated ANYTHING there) people will just leave and find something else to do.

 

None of us is obligated in any way to reserve judgement on the state of the game until some vague point in the future. This is what it is now, and barring the anouncemnts about incoming changes to melee classes, there is no communication what else they want to do and in what timeframe. We judge what we see. Some of us may take into account what they hope or wish for, but don't try to imply people are at fault for not being patient enough.

[TUXs]

While the numbers are interesting, the concerns about breaking classes and breaking the game are premature considering they are still balancing classes, and possibly even changing the dps checks once balancing is complete. We are judging an unfinished project at this point.

A 20-30% drop off in players parsing is pretty significant. Those people who have quit, don't give a flip about what changes are made next month, they have acted on what happened THIS month...this is why balance needs to happen a helluva lot faster than Bioware has been moving. Bioware made a tremendous mistake in 5.3 and their metrics man needs to be fired. Their goals and target numbers are so far off base it's not funny.

Edited July 28, 2017 by TUXs

[Quraswren]

A 20-30% drop off in players parsing is pretty significant. Those people who have quit, don't give a flip about what changes are made next month, they have acted on what happened THIS month...this is why balance needs to happen a helluva lot faster than Bioware has been moving. Bioware made a tremendous mistake in 5.3 and their metrics man needs to be fired. Their goals and target numbers are so far off base it's not funny.

 

Agreed.

Players invested a fair amount of time in the past 8-9 months getting their toons to CXP 300. Just to see bw's massively late and heavy handed nerfs. It's not like bw can claim they don't know the numbers. It's not like bw can claim they didn't design the 4 tiers of gear and the class skills. bw cannot hide under some veil of "we didn't know how the data would turn out and numbers would be "X".

 

bw screwed up here with metrics an now they want us to believe what we are getting is the so called "right" way or better way the game should be. I don't buy that all.

 

All this might not have went over so bad had bw done this with 5.0. Major change to the game plus adjustments to the classes. Better chance of going over a lot better.

 

Do these kinds of heavy handed nerfs 8-9 months after players put in so much effort to CXP and the negativity you see is what happens and negativity that lands on bw is deserved at this point.

[DWho]

You don't need to make up a scenario, use the real ones.

 

Changes have been applied and we are looking at numbers change.

 

 

Anyway here we are on the next full week and here are some numbers comparing peak of april to the full week just gone.

 

All reports: 84731 59401 -30%

 

DPS: 50942 34901 -31%

 

Sentinel: 7695 5638 -27%

Guardian: 4709 3590 -24%

Shadow: 4698 4384 -7%

Sage: 4386 3829 -13%

Vanguard: 1982 1990 --

Commando: 17073 6938 -59%

Scoundrel: 3213 3120 -3%

Gunslinger: 8186 5412 -33%

 

Healers: 19893 14675 -26%

 

Scoundrel: 4090 4391 +7%

Commando: 5731 4890 -15%

Sage: 10072 5395 -46%

 

Tanks: 13896 9925 -29%

 

Vanguard: 2814 2216 -21%

Shadow: 6123 4120 -33%

Guardian: 4959 3589 -28%

 

Remember these are organised PVE only, Starparse users only.

 

Sadly we have no PVP data.

 

The thing that bothers me about these numbers is the 30% drop off in Sentinel DPS. There have been no significant changes to that class since 5.0. How can they be showing that kind of drop if they were not nerfed. It makes me question the data as a whole. I main a Combat Sentinel and don't feel there has been any significant drop off in the DPS I do in PVP or Operations. If someone has a good explanation why that drop in DPS occurred I'd like to understand it.

Edited July 28, 2017 by DWho

[Lionflash]

The thing that bothers me about these numbers is the 30% drop off in Sentinel DPS. There have been no significant changes to that class since before 5.0. How can they be showing that kind of drop if they were not nerfed. It makes me question the data as a whole. I main a Combat Sentinel and don't feel there has been any significant drop off in the DPS I do in PVP or Operations. If someone has a good explanation why that drop in DPS occurred I'd like to understand it.

 

These numbers don't represent DPS; the entire premise of this thread is that there is somehow a correlation between players submitting parses and class balance. The 30% drop off for sentinels simply means 30% less players submitted stuff to this particular website from last week to this week.

[DWho]

These numbers don't represent DPS; the entire premise of this thread is that there is somehow a correlation between players submitting parses and class balance. The 30% drop off for sentinels simply means 30% less players submitted stuff to this particular website from last week to this week.

 

 

In that case I don't even really understand the point. other than it says a lot of people who submitted parses are no longer doing so for whatever reason. It seems a bit of a stretch to say that is all because of class balance. Looking at the numbers it looks like the only change was away from commandos (and I assume bounty hunters as well) to other classes. The Commando/Bounty Hunter were so OP that a lot of people were playing them for that reason, now they are playing other classes.

[Lionflash]

Yeah, it could mean something, or it could mean nothing. Maybe these stats could be used as a data point along with other information to gain some perspective about class balance or population or something. Maybe people are playing more and parsing less... maybe everyone quit the game. I don't know.

[LordTurin]

In that case I don't even really understand the point. other than it says a lot of people who submitted parses are no longer doing so for whatever reason. It seems a bit of a stretch to say that is all because of class balance. Looking at the numbers it looks like the only change was away from commandos (and I assume bounty hunters as well) to other classes. The Commando/Bounty Hunter were so OP that a lot of people were playing them for that reason, now they are playing other classes.

 

There is no "submitting" data to starparse; just using it this data gets uploaded. So the 30% drop literally means that 30% fewer people used starparse last week then they did a couple months ago (I believe you do have to click the "raid" button for it to upload, so I guess 30% fewer people were in starparse "raid groups").

 

Honestly, while the nerfs certainly didn't help at all, there has actually been a fairly steady decline of 2-4k starparse users each week since that peak. There was a huge drop the week after the nerfs came out (down to 50k from 60k) but that bounced right back up to 59k the next week, so that was probably a momentary "I'm annoyed" outlier, or people running easy stuff to gear up a new toon and so didn't run starparse (who knows, speculating here).

 

The bigger concern from my perspective is that we did not see a jump with A&E. I think the problem there is that since they were releasing the bosses 1 at a time, they really should have allowed people to jump right to A&E, instead of having to go past Tyth. If they are going to treat them as single bosses, they should just go all the way. Otherwise, a lot of people are gated at Tyth, which is not a good thing for getting people excited about the next boss (who cares if A&E is out if you can't get past Tyth).

Edited July 28, 2017 by LordTurin

[Seelvir]

At a guess, I'd say that most raid teams with rDPS in the form of Mando/Merc and Slinger/Sniper have mDPS in the Sent/Mara category. When the Mando/Mercs and Slinger/Snipers don't log in to raid, what are the Sents gonna do that week? Answer: also not raid. Total healers and tanks went down ~30% also. Basically, the teams whose rDPS didn't log in to raid, no one on those teams raided.

 

Also, consider that we're talking about Starparse submissions here. When people are bummed that their specs are Fd, their DPS is Fd, and they decide to raid on alts and begin the depressing CXP grind on a new character, they may not be bothering with running Starparse - even though they ARE playing. I know my team's utilization of Starparse drops by 75% when we're not raiding with the full compliment of people playing their mains. When we have alts, rerolls, subs, and we know we won't clear our progression content, we just smash storymodes for the CXP. There's always those guys who will run Starparse when they're in EV/KP storymode for the lulz, but a lot won't.

[FerkWork]

Perhaps but most likely the staleness of content and state of raiding. Once a few months a log in bosses are easily put on farm once mechanics are figured out. It's still one boss and then back to the rehashed content. Truth is I see this as people just not having else new. Teams that have cleared everything are bored and the teams still working on it are fed up with carrying people or accepting not being given good ekough that with nerfs make it now impossible to ignore so teams are collapsing left and right. And the prospects are grim for any returning veteran raider. There is both a scarcity of players and teams to the point where people with high level of skill looking for teams only options are things like hm or sm. It's like having a Medical Degree but the only jobs available are for the Janitor spot. Unless you have a team you are fudged six ways to Sunday. That is the harsh truth. Edited July 29, 2017 by FerkWork

[Gyronamics]

These numbers don't represent DPS; the entire premise of this thread is that there is somehow a correlation between players submitting parses and class balance.

 

You misunderstand how the Starparse system works but basically you do not get to directly upload anything. You cannot spam a ton of logs to starparse or edit it easily and upload.

 

You use the program live and unless you turn off the program sending data back to ixale who made it he has his site set up to display figures from the live combat it sees.

 

It is used live to look at performance either personal or raidwide and better see mechanics going on. Highly useful for PVE content and heavily used by dedicated PVE players

 

What can be seen in the data is open for debate but I'll be continuing this thread for a while at least and unless I'm very much mistaken these 60-85,000 fight reports per week will react with changes to classes.

 

That is not the ONLY factor, many others have already been named starting with mentions in my original post which may or may not be generating changes completely independently. Or not.

 

As for the core reason for mentioning changes vs data I would sum it up as wanting questions answered:

 

- Do players agree or disagree

- Are we any better off afterwards

 

I believe there is a large enough sample to represent PVE data and if we watch for long enough we will see, very slowly how the data changes over the coming weeks.

 

I'm allowed to be wrong but I also would like the answers and this is the data we have to look at since I believe there's a snowballs chance in hell that bioware would allow public access to a mega database which they could have but might not. If not then in great irony the starparse database is the best anyone has.

Edited July 28, 2017 by Gyronamics

[DanNV]

At a guess, I'd say that most raid teams with rDPS in the form of Mando/Merc and Slinger/Sniper have mDPS in the Sent/Mara category. When the Mando/Mercs and Slinger/Snipers don't log in to raid, what are the Sents gonna do that week? Answer: also not raid. Total healers and tanks went down ~30% also. Basically, the teams whose rDPS didn't log in to raid, no one on those teams raided.

 

From the looks of http://mirror.torstatus.net/shards/us/trends I'd say the class changes have had a negative effect on the game in general. I'd love to see what the actual population numbers are but BW won't ever let those out. However, I expect the servers with light populations are mostly ghost towns. Even Harbinger is running about 150 people on fleet in prime time, down from 250+ before 5.0.

 

I don't see how continuing to piss off players is going to help the game, but BW seems to think it will.

[ivanhedgehog]

The thing that bothers me about these numbers is the 30% drop off in Sentinel DPS. There have been no significant changes to that class since 5.0. How can they be showing that kind of drop if they were not nerfed. It makes me question the data as a whole. I main a Combat Sentinel and don't feel there has been any significant drop off in the DPS I do in PVP or Operations. If someone has a good explanation why that drop in DPS occurred I'd like to understand it.

 

because you team with people. you cant solo ops. the rest of the team saw the nerfs first hand

[ivanhedgehog]

In that case I don't even really understand the point. other than it says a lot of people who submitted parses are no longer doing so for whatever reason. It seems a bit of a stretch to say that is all because of class balance. Looking at the numbers it looks like the only change was away from commandos (and I assume bounty hunters as well) to other classes. The Commando/Bounty Hunter were so OP that a lot of people were playing them for that reason, now they are playing other classes.

 

they arent playing other classes. that is the point. These numbers show significantly less raid activity after a massive dps nerf. I wont call it balance, it has nothing to do with class balance. People are either leaving the game or not raiding. we can all decide for ourselves which it is.

[DanNV]

To add a little data, the top 2.5 mil parse for gunnery commandos is now 9182.26 DPS, the top Telekinetics sage is 9863.8 DPS, the top Scoundrel Scrapper is 10,250.56 DPS. This is what BW calls balance and why numbers are going down, yet again.

 

I am still here because my wife is guild master and I like to play with her. However, I am playing TESO 5-7 nights a week and raiding in SWTOR 5 to 7.5 hours a week over 2 or 3 nights. BW has taken all of the fun out of the game, given us no good story in years, trashed gearing and only sort of fixed it, "balanced" classes into unviability, and the list goes on. I'm tired of being sick and tired of BW.

[rylanadionysis]

All your data really tells me OP, and yes I did click link and pore over it a bit, as well as read a good deal of the responses...

 

Is pretty much everyone in this GAME is a FOTM chaser, seriously.

 

nearly a 60 percent drop in playing a commando as a DPS from high peak to the latest complete week?

 

Its ridiculous how twitchy this playerbase is about max statting in what is probably the easiest (and most practiced for its age due to the lack of new stuff to do for two years) end game content in most MMOs. Seriously, other than a few fights with some serious mechanics, most are just standard tank n spank fare and our gear levels have outclassed their difficulties for over a year.

 

Completely drop your mando you worked on for a few percent of a DPS loss.... just to apparently roll the new FOTM classes? In this case it seems the reroll is split fairly evenly among slingers and sentinels. Imagine that.

 

The bars dont lie man, youre all a bunch of rerollers, all the damn time.

Edited July 29, 2017 by rylanadionysis

[masterceil]

The bars dont lie man, youre all a bunch of rerollers, all the damn time.

 

I've mained a Ruffian since 4.x. I'll be maining one on August 23rd, too

[WayOfTheWarriorx]

Debatable.

 

When you do a survey of a large group the ideal is to get the right kind of information from every single one.

 

You can't usually do that so a sample is done, large enough to get a meaningful picture of the whole and you have a think about how biased the method of collecting data was.

 

There's bias here alright, obviously everyone had to have starparse which itself suggests the sample is of a more informed group than average.

 

Can't really say what way that swings things or how large a sample vs the whole population we are seeing.

 

But what we definitely have is about 60,000-85,000 fight reports per week over 16 weeks and its not a mess of random results, we can see strong patterns, almost entirely downwards but clear all the same.

 

It's too much data to be dismissed.

 

I would also say it's the only data we can look at so there's not a better standard to compare to.

 

In addition to the fact that it doesn't take PVP into account it also doesn't take all the pug groups doing Operations most of which have no use of Star Parse or any parsing program. While it can certainly give some insight, it is missing a large portion of players and their play habits.

 

Still a noteworthy study and insightful.

Edited July 29, 2017 by WayOfTheWarriorx

[WayOfTheWarriorx]

Agreed.

Players invested a fair amount of time in the past 8-9 months getting their toons to CXP 300. Just to see bw's massively late and heavy handed nerfs. It's not like bw can claim they don't know the numbers. It's not like bw can claim they didn't design the 4 tiers of gear and the class skills. bw cannot hide under some veil of "we didn't know how the data would turn out and numbers would be "X".

 

bw screwed up here with metrics an now they want us to believe what we are getting is the so called "right" way or better way the game should be. I don't buy that all.

 

All this might not have went over so bad had bw done this with 5.0. Major change to the game plus adjustments to the classes. Better chance of going over a lot better.

 

Do these kinds of heavy handed nerfs 8-9 months after players put in so much effort to CXP and the negativity you see is what happens and negativity that lands on bw is deserved at this point.

 

Thats a big part of this and should be taken into consideration. People have spent the last 8-9 months grinding their asses off, and if they than find themselves actually worse than when they were in 224 gear, it makes everything they did and worked for null and void. That is in and of itself something that will cause players to leave, it's really a terrible thing to do to people.

 

The irony here is that no one was complaining for the most part about DPS with regard to class balance. Everyone knows that. Now, you can nerf defenses and it may be annoying to some but people will deal with that alot better than losing DPS. Let's face it, DPS is essentially the most important factor to most players, right or wrong.

 

There was no need to go at DPS factors for class balance. This is where, once again, BW has made a huge decision and change by not listening to the players base, and going in an opposite direction.

 

Even after they nerfed ranged DPS, it had some effect in PVE, but in PVP Mercs and Snipers are still top dog.

 

There is one sure fire way to piss off players and lose customers and that is to start messing with classes that no one was complaining about and whom even by BW standards were "on target" with DPS.

 

So they did the range, now they are going to do the melee. So what we are seeing here is not balancing, merely a different set of numbers. Some will be lower some will be higher.

 

It's unrealistic for BW to think that people whom by their own stupid standards based on their flawed "road map" that nerfing some classes than are "on target DPS", but not others, makes very little sense and is going to upset people greatly. If they were off target DPS, that would be one thing, but my nuking on target DPS specs, it tells everyone that no one is safe, even if you were considered balanced you can still get nuked.

 

What they don't seem to understand is that there is a limit to which people will tolerate getting thier characters messed with. You can declare anything you want, but if it doesn't match the realities of play on a mechanical level, no one cares what BW declares them to be, they care about how their play style operates.

 

Mercs and snipers and corruption sorcs were overtuned, okay, not the players fault, that was BW's doing. Chopping down their DPS was wrong and even if thier was to be some adjustment to it, you cannot nuke a specs DPS so badly that the difference is night and day. It solved nothing, it improved nothing, and the statistics show that. So what does BW do? Starts taking the axe to a whole new slew of classes.

 

Right or wrong, people do not want to lose all the work they have done to improve their characters and to have them effected in such ways wherein there wasn't a balance problem as an issue [DPS] all that accomplishes is to make people even more afraid about what might lie in store for their characters of somewhere down the line and make people who were able to fufill their roles no longer able to do in a reasonably effecient manner.

 

You can't cut people DPS by 400, 500, 600 or more and expect people to be okay with that, they wont be, especially when their DPS was never a point of contention to even begin with.

 

After this, people will remember the class balance purge of 5.3-5.4 and will be always thereafter be afraid when class adjustments are called for and are coming.

 

It is an absolutely terrible thing to do to players who have worked so hard and so long on their characters to find them changed so dramatically.

 

 

And when all is said and done, next will come utilities/defenses, so as much suck as those axed specs have already endured, that was only part of it. There is more suck in store and a new side of things that will make players already effected negatively by class changes even worse.

 

Some things are justified, but most of what is being done is not.

 

Mercs lost a sht ton of DPS, and they are almost certainly going to get their defenses axed to hell. The defenses were valid points of contention, what was done to their DPS was disgusting and totally unreasonable, and I hate mercs.

 

5.4 will cause a whole slew of other players of different specs to leave the game and you know what? I don't blame them at all. The basis on which they are instituting class 'balance' is inherently flawed, unrealistic, and stands no chance of bring class balance. We will look back at pre 5.3 as a better time of things.

 

Spec types and dummies have absolutely nothing to do with the realities of game play and effect. Each spec is unique, brings different things to the table all of which effect performance overall. By not taking the things a spec brings to the table and defining DPS for the specs with no consideration to the many aspects that make the specs what they are and what they can do and what they are suppose to be doing by design you ensure that balance is impossible and whole segments of the player base are looked upon as less desirable and less capable, because that's exactly what they will be.

 

They asked for our opinions. They said what we say matters and they want our input. Not one thing they have done so far can be seen to have come from that, and 5.4 will erase any doubt about that that may still linger at the expense of a whole new slew of specs getting ripped apart and people leaving the game.

 

I have never seen a worser methodology for basis of 'class balance' than what BW is doing now. They go from one bad idea to the next ignoring the player base at every turn. That 8-9% difference noted now, will turn into 20% post 5.4.

 

But keep up the great work with CM. Because that's what matters.

[Icykill_]

It all comes down to the balance process being wrong. Too most people the DPS was never the issue with Mercs or Snipers.

If they had just fixed the DCDs, survivability and plasma spam, then the OPness would have dissolved. Then they just needed to boost the bottom tier under performing specs like PTs and Sorcs and balance would be pretty close.. at least for most people and PVE wouldn't have been affected at all...

Its definitely not the pvpers fault for the dps nerfs because Biowares approach to balance is flawed. We gave them very specific feed back on what the problems were and even offered real fixes and some people were able to back that up with numbers...

Edited July 29, 2017 by Icykill_