bookmarking this for when pwople claim air is more popular than ground lmao
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I mean, at one point it was of course. But yeah not currently it seems.
I was kinda surprised Ground and Air AB are both less popular than the RB modes now. Naval is the reverse, although that could be changing now too.
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I played my first matches of arcade air today for like three years because squad leader accidentally selected it and its both very easy for RB players to sealclub in and insanely unorganised and spawn camping is a major issue.
the naval arcade changes while I get why they idea of changing it came around was done terribly so realistic is the only option now
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Prop SB lines up with my experience.
under 3.0, it’s kinda dead due to weird canopies, very slow and weird planes and often awful gunsights (telescopic sights).
3.0-6.0 is alive and thriving.
6.0+ dies into ju-288 spam and then early jets being awfully expensive to spawn (Horten costing around 18K SL to spawn, up front!)
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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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