Data Analysis #3: The arrival of Statshark answers some old questions

Game Discussion General Discussion
23

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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24

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.

25

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.

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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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26

I would bet my money on the assumption that Naval was just implemented to create even higher entry barriers for potential competitors. Combing air & land seems way more easier than air, land & sea warfare.

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27

Probably at least partly true, but it only works if you can basically reuse all the same core elements and not have to make a whole new game for that mode (matchmaking, scoring, progression, real-time physics, one player-one vehicle, primarily visual spotting limiting ranges). Which is basically what they’ve done.

It is these rules now that constrain naval from effectively expanding places the players would want it to go, and even make battleship play now a little silly, with the “spawn in a traffic jam” aspects, as Napalmratte put it.

28

Another factor I think may have been overlooked is the event “multiplier”(penalizer) system that grants excessive rewards of extra score points to RB & Sim while either nothing or a negative penalty for playing AB. As a long time AB player who doesn’t go out of my way to play modes/BRs just to get these inequitable “bonuses”, I find this unfair imbalance staggering. While some may say the few extra games required to get the same score tally in AB is slight, over the entire length of events, especially for the higher score required for the better vehicles is a lot. It renders the ability to earn the tradable coupon far out of reach for most AB players.
As I think about it, this has to be a big contributing factor to the rise in RB participants as well.
Something to consider, but yet another factor stats cannot show . .

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29

That could be true as well, but in my opinion they have went overboard with it simply too much.

Naval in WT is developed more than enough to market it’s presence, so they should push the mode way back in priority and focus more on the much more played modes. In my eyes, any additional development of the mode seems like a waste of resources.

30

This move can actually make sense assuming the devs want to limit their involvement in the Naval game mode. This doesn’t mean they will just give up, I’m sure there will be more changes. But it’s possible these changes will be heavily limited in the future. I know it’s just guessing, but adding top battleships right now brings some serious questions. In particular, we already know that they have no plans to add missile ships, so where is the continuation? Locking the top BR for the next years doesn’t seem like a good plan. Especially they usually consider decompression only when they add the new top BR to the tech tree. Should we expect the top battleships staying forever at 7.3-7.7 BR?

They tried many different things recently to attract more players to Naval and, at least from what we can see, nothing worked. Adding more AI bots to Naval battles was only a confirmation that the devs see the problem with the low number of players. At some point they just have to focus on other things, because developing something takes time and money. If they don’t reach their goals, there is no sense to waste even more money. That’s why I was very surprised reading Naval Realistic players comments that they don’t care what will happen with Naval Arcade, because there is always Realistic. The fact is that losing players is bad for every Naval player, as it affects the future of the game mode.

At this point, any way I look at it, I just don’t see a bright future for Naval. I expect to see possibly even big increase in the number of players in June, because a lot of players would want to try Iowa, Bismarck or Yamato. The real test will be following months.

But maybe I got this all wrong. The devs said they will introduce submarines in 2025, so maybe they are rushing iconic battleships to add them all before submarines? Because submarines should be a huge pain especially against these huge battleships that won’t be able to avoid torpedoes. Maybe that’s the devs plan, so players can actually enjoy these battleships while they still can. Depending how submarines will be implemented, they could be a game changer. During the last submarines event, even frigates/destroyers had trouble dealing with submarines, and they knew exactly where these submarines were. They also weren’t attacked by anyone and they had planes to help them too. In my opinion submarines in this event were very, very strong, even with the limited range of the torpedoes. Much stronger than I expected them to be.

If nothing else, 2025 will be a very interesting year for Naval and probably the most important year ever, with top battleships and submarines added to the game. It could be the beginning of the end or maybe (if you are a very optimistic person) it could be the beginning of the great future with many new players joining this game mode. We will see.

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31

You might remember this quote:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Warthunder/comments/8fyc1m/we_have_decided_not_to_pursue_supersonic_jet/

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32

This is going down a bit of a rabbit hole, but the quote from BVVD in Dec was “Yes, we have plans for playable submarines, but no further details on this yet.” That’s what he says whenever the change is (1-n) years in the future. I haven’t seen anything clarifying since that would trump that from Gaijin. I agree they’re a natural counter to BBs and are still likely to show up eventually. The real limiting factor on that was always the effort required to retool the subsurface areas of existing random battles maps, which are often simply not deep enough at present. But yeah, we’ll still likely see subs before carriers or post-war missile boats (both of which face much bigger obstacles). I just don’t think it’ll be 2025.

Getting back to the subject, I think it’s also important to note how balanced Naval is now at 5.7 and below. I think it’s one of its strongest features as a mode. One way to express this mathematically is the chance of being in the top BR of a match (yay!) minus the chance of being in the bottom BR (boo!). In a perfectly balanced game with 4 BR steps this would always be zero. As you can see from the graph below, naval isn’t doing too badly, up to 5.7, it’s keeping pretty close to the “fair and balanced” line. 2.0 is fun, 2.3 kinda sucks, from there it’s a pretty smooth progression up to 5.7 as the sweet spot, from there you want to skip right to 6.7-7.0. This will of course all change at the top end with BR decompression as I mentioned but the principle then will be the same.

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EDIT: The other two modes for comparison:

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33

The only thing not freely available that statshark can track is your lineups, everything else is able to be found ingame

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I thought this whole Community Update article was about 2025, but maybe I’m reading too much into it.

Maybe this was just a random answer for the far future, based on the fact they are getting so many questions about submarines. But you are correct and there is no date specified in this answer. It was just my interpretation that all these questions are related to the 2025 development.

I don’t think they ever said that. They just admit they have goals with how quickly you can complete the tech tree (and therefore the game). This doesn’t mean that all game modes should take the same amount of time to complete the tech tree. But this is again something that is not fully transparent. Their explanation brings more questions than answers. You can check this fragment here (from 15:44):

I saw community calculations on the forum, where it was clear that it’s getting harder and harder to reach the top tier with every major update. This is something I would actually love to hear more from the devs. Where are these RP reductions?

35

So that’s not quite right: obviously it’s publicly available data today, that doesn’t mean anyone knew it was there before this year. Otherwise there wouldn’t have been so many efforts over the years by dataminers and content creators to reverse-engineer stats to answer questions like, “what mode or nation is actually the most popular?” I can’t count the number of arguments I’ve seen on Reddit or this forum that could have been definitively answered if any of this was “freely” available. It seems we now have those answers out in the open, which is awesome. But there was no way until now for a regular person to tell that from looking in the game itself. (Also opt-in sites like Thunderskill would never have been created.)

(They were showing current lineups for a while too, but they’ve stopped doing that due to privacy concerns. So that info is apparently freely available as well, they’re just choosing not to show it anymore because it seems invasive. Which is fine by me.)

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I would sugest that one reason for the rising popularity of the realistic modes may simply be linked to the kind of premiums sold.

For ground, light nimble vehicles make up a fair share of the expensive premiums. In arcade, they are far less useful than in realistic. Which means, it is usually not feasible to form premium lineups in higher tiers in arcade.

With planes it is even more obvious: In arcade, only attackers have bomb reload, fighters take way too long. You can’t really bomb well with premium fighters in arcade. Need I say more?

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37

Realistically, they’re just taking the statistics for the amounts of matches played of each mode at each BR, which isn’t freely available on its own but can be found through simple algorithms looking at each match played in a certain time frame

Thunderskill was opt-in because it was a lot older of a site, they weren’t planning to take stats from everyone, Statshark is connected to WT and tracks all accounts

Nevertheless, it couldve been determined prior completely ingame if someone had that much time and looked at every account ever made, the only thing statshark has added is the tine periods

38

You keep saying this was all findable “in game.” There’s currently no way outside of looking at the other players vehicles (with the exception for ground RB and SP, I know) of a regular player even knowing what the BR was of the match they’re in, or the one they played the night before. If the match BR for every single game you played (as one example) was a recorded and findable stream of data that players could have seen before this month, no one who knew ever said anything about it. I just think we should give Statshark a little more credit here for lifting up the hood and letting players see the engine.

(Also Thunderskill/WTDP were just bought out and relaunched by a whole new team last year. And they still didn’t have any naval vehicles. If this was so easy, they could have done it, but they didn’t.)

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My argument here was more towards this, btw

I was arguing that all of this has been available ingame and that Statshark hasn’t breached any privacy or anything, and Gaijin would have no reason to shut them down

I was never discrediting statshark, I was just saying that all this has been findable, you simply just needed to work

You can go through replays and see what vehicle each person was playing, at what time, what spawn they chose, everything, you just simply had to spend time looking

Ingame, there is a menu on your profile that shows matches, time played in vehicle types, total hours, etc. If you went through and looked at this for every player, you could piece together a total for all gamemodes and from there determine the popularity of each.

Sure, you might need the external site to view replays, but you can view your vehicle stats and lifetime stats ingame, Statshark has added a rating system and will scrape data from each of your play periods, which is what makes it much more than whats ingame and it does so through computer algorithms

40

On paper, it makes sense in that the time-to-earn in air for the same amount of score assuming equivalent challenge and gameplay favours AB (Respawning planes so don’t need to compete for kills as much compared to RB, small maps + markers + mouse aim for increased and longer range lethality) is compensated for using score multipliers.

Ergo - getting 2-3 kills/match in RB over 12 minutes is fairly plausible even for a mid-skilled player. Not every match, but the effect is apparent.

As a Prop-tier dogfight-oriented ASB player, my progress looks like this looking at some games I saved:
75 minute game, 7276, worth 15K progress (high average)
80 minute game, 5475, worth 11K progress (low average)
63 minute game, total is 7226, worth 14k progress (my best game ever to date)
93 minute game, total is 3,633, worth 7K progress (a fairly pitiful game of low pop on off-peak hours)

Progress is score x 2.3 x 0.9 (rank 3/4).
(For comparison, someone suicide bombing airfields and respawning constantly can hit 15K score within an hour for zero effort provided they’re in a lobby that doesn’t have people intercepting them)

The problem manifests in more abusive approaches to score earning that inflate the score needed each time and also skew game modes. Sim is more or less ruined whenever a popular grind event appears because people start rigging lobbies and refuse to fly in competitive/dangerous ones.

At least on my part, this has an inverse relationship on sim pop - I start playing less and less as I get more and more frustrated with lobbies that feel unplayable due to PvE rigging/unbalanced due to people leaving because they want a high average game rather than low average or even pitiful game) to the point I finally end up taking a break waiting for it to end.

This is to say I wish there were ways to penalize PvE rigging better than spamming Schindlbee with reports and to somehow shut down lobby shopping for pushover opponents.

Until then, I’d honestly be glad if we had RB-level event multiplier in sim to discourage ingenuine tourism.

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41

Incredible work, this was the stuff I was expecting to see once StatShark launched.

Being able to access incredibly reliable data records for this game will open such a large amount of possibilities.

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42

So the thing is, when K2 Krabiwe tried that last year, just for ground RB, Gaijin took steps to block bulk downloading of replays to prevent anyone else trying exactly what you’re describing. And when Gszabi tried a bulk replay scrape last year to try to figure out average game length, the data came out so messy he had to admit it was beyond his ability.

So yes, in a theoretical universe of infinite monkeys what you’re saying could be true, but the best dataminers in the game community worldwide found in practice it was impossible until Statshark came along. Maybe they were all just really stupid, hard to say. But these aggregate stats you’re looking at in this post weren’t available to anyone in any practical sense outside of the Gaijin inner circle before this month.

I do think it’s interesting to see how Gaijin will react as Statshark continues to get attention. Whenever someone tried to base an argument for a game change on Thunderskill stats, they could always dismiss it as “those aren’t the real stats, and we won’t tell you the real stats.” Not seemingly an option anymore.

“If you went through [service records] and looked at this for every player, you could piece together a total for all gamemodes”… Yes, check my previous pieces, I would do stuff like that with sample sets, I know the level of compute involved pretty well. What I and no one else ever knew we had access to though, and that you can’t get reliably through either scraping any amount of either service records or replays (except for air RB) is the BR of the match played. Absolutely crucial piece of data.