That is preatty interesting considering old time argument that air modes are more popular.
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I’m a bit surprised that isn’t the case, but I guess stuff has changed in the past few years. WT isn’t known as the plane game, it’s known as the tank game.
It’s also that it’s about the only game that does tank combat in a more realistic way, while there are other flight sims that could replace parts of WT.
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If there’s any truth to the LtChambers scrape from 2021, and remembering the playerbase has roughly doubled since then, Air RB has still grown, but nowhere near as much as Ground RB which took most of the new players. The Ground AB playerbase stayed basically the same in absolute numbers while the others grew, and Air AB’s numbers have dropped in absolute as well as relative terms.
Also, these are “players in matches” while that previous scrape-from-replay site approach was counting actual games themselves. Obviously if a mode or BR has more players in an average match than another, that will also have some effect in trying to figure out how many actual games we’re talking about here.
The data isn’t protected and it’s available to everyone. It all depends on how they’re gathering the data, so long as it doesn’t negatively impact the game then there’s no drama.
P.S. your Air/Ground Battles by BR graph is pretty hard to follow what with the colours, line and no units on the Y axis.
P.P.S. it would be interesting to see number of vehicles per BR, per nation, I suspect that the popularity of certain battle ratings in ground BR could be linked to the number of vehicles available for lineups.
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As we learned, ground is popular in top tier because it’s basically ARB without the threat of other aircrafts taking you out.
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its only ARB if you know how to keep out of the way of pantsir
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These charts fly over my head but I can tell you’ve put a decent amount into this analysis and I appreciate it
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I would attribute the changes to the content creators/streamers and Gaijin themselves as they have been “promoting” “Realistic” mode above ALL others for several years now . . . just a matter of time that things change. And that is ofc accepting that all this is 100% accurate as well.
I am not sure that AB has lost any players to speak of, but I would say that newer players have been led (by the ring in their collective noses) to RB thru promotion.
So, seeing the influx of many more newer players since 2020 and the “lockdown” effect, coupled with the almost nothing but high tier/modern content to bait them in, it really make sense. Not sure AB has “lost” popularity as much as RB has been gifted a huge influx of new players.
Again, all speculation and also . . not a damn thing “Statshark” or any other “information” source could say about any of that … . . not even Gaijin.
Because knowing what motivates players/customers to do what they do is indeed . . . the “Holy Grail” of informatics, isn’t it?
At any rate, I appreciate your hard work putting all this together for us.
(even tho I do not see it as settling any “arguments” . . . lol)
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I think the reason why arcade modes get less players is because at top tier they’re poorly done.
For tank ab, thermal sights make name tags redundant as they are too slow to pop up compared to what you can see.
For air ab, well, balance is atrocious and most people use the biplane trick to get .3 lower BR (so same one death leaving), and missiles act similarly in both modes (okay, clutter isn’t simulated in ab but that’s about all).
So essentially you’re getting less rewards for the same gameplay.
Interestingly, in naval top tier, AB may improve the gameplay because of long range spawns and lots of battleships have slow ranegfinders, which AB has removed. It’s sort of inverse compared to other AB modes.
Certainly raises the question of why so many developer resources are being used on Naval when it makes up such a small portion of the player base. Do Naval Players disproportionately spend more money on the game or are Gaijin still hoping that Naval will somehow make a comeback if they just add X vehicle?
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Of course the mudmover gamemode is more popular. you can play it as you jerk. Waste of storage space. Could’ve gotten proper spacing for planes and EC and other DCS-ish gamemode that is more PvE oriented if the game is not catering to an audience of w-ers that warrant HD ground unit detail and it’s own wing of development team.
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Who says that.
It really is remarkable that they spend that much on a mode that only amounts to a little over 1% of actual player matches. It’s a shame because I’d say RB, at least, is as good as it’s ever been right now (other than the absolute death zone of 6.0-6.3, for reasons this article makes obvious).
Anyway, here’s a bonus stat: % of player matches played at the top BR of that mode, using April-May Statshark data. Shows how much game play today is at the highest (longest-to-reach, most-expensive-to-get-to-in-terms-of-time-and-money) top tier. If you think about it it shows a real problem with naval AB in particular… before the major update in March the same stat for naval AB was ~10%. This was probably already too high: where ground and air still have “entry modes” as you can see where you don’t need to get to top tier as much, naval AB wasn’t really performing that role. (Unfortunately now after the AB aiming changes, at least in the immediate aftermath it’s even worse… low-and-mid tier AB players are playing less, which has driven the top tier percentage up to where it’s now a hair higher even than RB).
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I’ve kinda just assumed its less about the mode succeeding and more about making sure the other naval game loses by providing an alternative to it as naval enthusiasts are often very dedicated and its a niche market with few options so any players they suck away will have a noticble effect on other games
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The matchmaking graph really shows which BRs you should play if you don’t want constant +0.7 or + 1.0.
Nice
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You are just mocking Naval players. ;)
I remember the devs stating that Arcade mode is more popular than Realistic mode. I tried to find this statement in their Q&As, but I failed. The truth is, I don’t even remember where they wrote this.
I also remember that TEC mentioned this statement in one of his videos, but he has so many videos that it’s pretty much impossible to find this specific one (he probably also talked about many other things in this video). But I’m sure the devs confirmed this a few years ago.
You surely remember the 2021 “Ground Breaking” update activity changes. These changes made RP rewards heavily dependent on time alive in the vehicle. The problem is, to get very good activity and RP reward after these changes, you need battles lasting ideally at least 12 minutes. Most Ground and Air Arcade battles are just not long enough (with 6-8 minutes battles at average). This made RP difference between AB and RB game modes even bigger than before. Only Naval Arcade RP is still close to Naval Realistic RP after these changes, because battles there are longer.
If you want to reach top tiers, it would take ages in Air/Ground Arcade nowadays. A year ago I made a small comparison between Air Arcade and Air Realistic. I wanted to check how quickly I can spade the same vehicle in two different game modes:
- to spade Russian Yak-9P in Air Arcade I needed 48 battles with 32 deaths, 104 air kills and 20 ground kills.
- to spade Hungarian Yak-9P in Air Realistic I needed 9 battles with 4 deaths, 17 air kills and 8 ground kills.
Nowadays it only makes sense to play Air Arcade for fun. You won’t achieve anything if you want to actually grind in this game mode. I can also complete score-based events much faster in Air Realistic.
With such unfair rules, I would be surprised if more players still played Air Arcade. The difference in Ground is not that huge, but still significant. Even for new players, it just makes sense to play Realistic nowadays. Especially we have more and more vehicles in the tech trees, so RP is becoming more and more important.
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It could still be partly true, depending on the metric. Casual players play fewer games each. So comparing the number of games played between modes could privilege a smaller number of hardcore players playing a lot of games over a broader base playing relatively fewer games each.
For me, “players” is a less interesting stat than games played. I care more about queue times and whether games are full or not.
For naval, I think CC Napalmratte’s comments this week that the June update is the “beginning of the end” are likely accurate. It’s not that they couldn’t try to alter core gameplay, it’s just that all the iconic “come try naval again” ships will be on the board, so there’s no cards left to play left for future audience lures. The other naval leak rumor this week, that they’re giving Gneisenau 15" guns, means they could try to buy themselves one more cycle by introducing the “paper” ships but, yeah.
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I do believe it’s more of an ego/cope thing.
They certainly hope that Naval might get popular all of the sudden for some reason, but it’s also hard for them to pull the plug on a mode they spent a lot of time and money on.
Naval is pretty much dead and closing in fast on the EOL status. Ground Simulator should follow soon.
Oh, by the way -
It’s said RP gain is normalized across all game modes, yes?
Like, correct - stat card says you get the same RP% across all game modes
However -
Give this a read.
Notice the “Play time” entry.
This does require a caveat for EC at least.
You can join/leave the same game multiple times, and the same game can last 90 minutes easily, if not drag out to the full 3 hours (rare, but 2 hours is not unheard of).
It’s not enough to make even an order of magnitude difference, but something worth considering if your perspective is how difficult it is to find a match.
Main challenge at prop tiers for me is less finding a lobby, and more finding a fun lobby (reasonable weather for visual spotting, reasonable map for dogfighting (not denmark), active fighter players who don’t run and afk at airfield due to useful actions system).
Due to this, “players” is a more relevant stat than games played. Having 8 lobbies of 4v4 denmark is less “healthy” than having 3 lobbies of 12v12 tunisia/sicily/stalingrad.
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