I am not going to say yes or no yet, will give it a week.
it had around 2k viewers, which is great for gw2. We also must keep in mind that it was happening at the same time as the GTA 5 preview streams (50k viewers twitch) and the League of Legends s3 world championships (~1mil viewers across twitch, azubu, youtube, and various other streaming services). Even I found myself switching between streams and only watching the matches I REALLY wanted to see!
That is an overly optimistic way of looking at it. Not to be a downer but you ever hear of the game called Forge? Probably not. You know how many concurrent viewers it had for its ESL Finals? About 1200-1300. And do you know when it was held? Around the same time as the GW2 tourney including LoL and GTA as you mentioned.
http://www.playforgewar.com/forums/index.php?/topic/5327-esl-forge-test-cup-recap/
And this game is extremely small and bad (imo). The company for example has 200 followers on Twitter.
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You do know they have to make money right? If people are not spending as much they almost have to change the cash shop so they spend. People don’t like to spend money so they have to do limited time offers.
Karizee I don’t see how your pictures add anything to the conversation. We all know the game funnels players to certain areas of the map. So I am not sure what posting pictures of 60-70 people proves. And even if your server is packed, it doesn’t mean everyone’s server is the same.
Also, your 7 million LFG calls is meaningless. If 150,000 players did 3 dungeons a week for 5 months it would be about 9 million groups. So I still don’t see the point you were trying to show.
Here is the point, the game is one year old and there has been a decrease in activity/population and the population especially in the lower levels (below 75) are pretty much dead. This might not be bad for players already level 80 but it sucks for new players. I know people that quit because they felt they were playing a solo game. GW2 leveling for me was 20 times more fun in a group.
If an MMO is going to survive it needs to constantly bring new players into the game. My suggesting is creating what others have suggested, a “downflow” server. It does make sense, basically if there are a few players on a certain map, put others in the same map. So they can experience an MMO with other players.
WoW saw this as a huge issue and put a lot of resources into it. Which is why they now have something called “Connected Realms” (nice word for server merges), and after that feature you will see players in every zone every level. Games like the Elder Scrolls MMO also with their servers do something similar.
I hope ANet does something to address the situation because something needs to be done.
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Thanks for the constructive feedback! You make a lot of good points, though I am curious about one thing:
In #1 you’re saying that you can’t understand enough of the combat without being latched on to one specific player. Then, in #2, you say that epic skills should have epic animations. If we did #2, would that help with #1?
I see a couple problems with following players while shoutcasting; First, it puts the focus mostly on 1 entity in the fight, when there could easily be things happening around/behind that player that the casters might miss due to not being able to see them. Second, it is more difficult to control what’s happening with the camera. There isn’t much we can do about this as we can’t tell players to sit still so the camera doesn’t jerk around.
So, it makes me wonder if these two problems, maybe even #3 as well, would be alleviated with better skill tells and maybe less skill effects. Either way, I think we have a few options to help with the problems you feel happening in the shoutcasted matches.
FYI – ESL tourney had 1.8-2k concurrent viewers during the stream (not to mention #s from non-English streams). Maybe Blu can share with us the total number of unique viewers during the stream – but if it’s anything like the other GW2 tournaments, it’s probably around 30-50k unique viewers. I’d say that’s pretty good considering the LoL championship and GvG streams were happening at the same time!
How on earth did you get this job?
30-50k unique viewers LOL THAT’S FUNNY!!!
To be fair, I think GW2 eSports has no future and I also think 30k-50k unique viewers is pretty bad regardless of competition. However, what she said can be completely true.
Concurrent viewership is not the same as total unique viewers. People join and leave streams all the time. My guess it is close to 10k-20k unique viewers, but Allie’s number is entirely possible. And not as extreme as people are making it seem.
A game called Forge, which is basically a small arena game by a no-name developers (224 followers on Twitter) with an extremely small player base had their ESL Finals the same day. They had 1200 concurrent viewers.
http://www.twitch.tv/darkvalegames/b/461968133
The fact that they got almost as much as GW2 is an extremely bad sign.
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