And we should keep going. WE has been ignoring our concerns and acting like nothing happened. WE has not even been able to patch trivial mistakes like diplomacy in some campaign missions (Brabarossa 5, Tamar 4) or victory conditions (Sargon 5), despite months - if not years - of these issues being reported.
Also, the playerbase is on its path to hit numbers lower than july last year - a drop of 300 players of so is very plausible.
It’s summer! People have better things to do than playing video games! Only haters rate on steam! Most people have purchased the DLC, finished the campaigns and left! Still the best selling DLC of all time!
They should’ve included the giant spring patch in this DLC: all those beautiful new castles, elite unit textures, monks, churches, and synchronized attack animations.
The past few months brought some of the best updates AoE2 has ever seen, and they were free.
Now they’re facing problems: lower sales, negative reviews, an upset community…
(Don’t take this too literally, I’m sure you get my point.)
Reminder that newer releases (both DLCs and games) aren’t on sale any time soon, and only after several months (5+ months) entre at just small sales (25% or less).
I mean, we’re still having this discussion, so I think it’s relevant to remind the rabble than I still haven’t reviewed it even though I’ve largely enjoyed it, and I continue to contend the average player just won’t review it because most people just don’t leave reviews. Average player count of ~15k vs 800 reviews means just about 5% of the active playerbase may have reviewed it, which means our sample size is tiny, which makes it a bad indicator of general feel, etc.
Further, I continue to contend that the most likely reason to leave a review tends to be to voice dissatisfaction in order to effect change or signal disgust, not to give someone an electronic pat on the back. With that being said, I don’t plan to get banned again, so aside from this short post I’m not touching this thread again with a ten-foot pole.
I’m sorry, but your denial is getting more desperate day by day.
If you haven’t posted your review yet, that’s on you. Likewise, a lot of people not satisfied with the DLC either just skipped it or did not post a review either, so your argument is pretty invalid. Additionally, there was a 6.3% turnout in US Presidential elections in 1792 (arguably a much more important factor than a DLC review)…and guess what? The election and its results stood.
There is no minimal limit for a turnout for elections or reviews to be valid. You don’t vote? Your problem. What counts are the votes cast. Compile the facts that this DLC has more negative reviews than positive, and that a lof of people just skipped it, and you’ve got a bad DLC. Splitting your community is always detrimental for business.
Oh, you’re heavily underestimating the number of active players by a lot.
Those 15k are just the average number of concurrent players online at any given moment, 24/7.
I’m not judging, it’s really hard to approximate with only official data.
From my data (via their API), around 500,000 unique accounts played online during the last month alone.
So if you include everyone who only plays singleplayer, and consider a longer time frame (like over the summer), we’re probably talking millions.
That means only about 0.1% of us rated that DLC.
I’ll second this. I don’t even use steam any more. It’s for people in their twenties. They will tell everyone that Steam is the best platform, but GamePass is pretty good too, it’s just that these kids insist on having a high-end PC because “muh graphics and performance” and they have a one track mind for everything. Muh game sales. Muh graphics. Muh Steam sales. They are like a broken record, repeating their bad opinions over and over again, and mimicking other user’s false concerns about non-existent problems.
I find this claim very dubious and problematic, for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, it’s a false dichotomy. There are many more reasons to review a game than “to voice dissatisfaction in order to effect change or signal disgust” or “give someone an electronic pat on the back”.
But secondly, even if I’m generous and interpret this statement simply as “people are more likely to give negative reviews than positive ones”, the evidence I can see goes very much against this. Looking at my Steam library, literally every game in it has either “Very Positive” or “Overwhelmingly Positive” reviews. So in general, it seems people are much more likely to leave positive reviews.
(I realise that looking just at my own Steam library gives some bias here. Personally I’m not convinced that bias is relevant, but I’m not inclined to go into detail about this at the moment.)
I do think the idea that user reviews are biased towards being negative can seem quite intuitive, especially to someone who doesn’t review things themselves. But think it’s actually just incorrect, and I would definitely need to see some evidence or an argument to convince me otherwise. Sometimes people’s intuition is just wrong.
If you said, “only haters leave negative reviews” then in fact there must be many players who bought it but did not like it, but chose not to leave a review, because they are not “haters”. That’s also kind of apparent because a decent amount of positive reviews are fairly negative.
Alright, I’ll give you a straight response since you seem earnest.
I think you are hard pressed to find negative reviews in a field meant to provide entertainment as long as the goal of said entertainment was to entertain. The rare occasions where things in the field of entertainment get utterly raked over the coals review-wise is when they do something abhorrent to the senses or self-sabotage their own product by doing something to taint the product in the eyes of the average viewer. The worst do both.
My internet provider has 2.7 stars, I signed with them because my location had few reasonable and effective options aside from them. I’ve had no trouble with them whatsoever, but they have that review average because many individual people have had serious, but uncommon issues with the service that thousands use without a single concern. It’s ~300 or so serious problems versus… Who could even guess how many thousands have used the service since the reviews became accessible? And yet, those 300 1-star reviews have not been offset by the thousands of positive reviews from people who have had my experience because I don’t write reviews at all and the vast majority of people do not write reviews of their service providers. Also, I’ll grant that the 300 or so serious problems could actually be a tiny amount of the serious problems deserving of one star, and the negative reviews could be understated. Just as well as my service, which has been solid for my entire tenure could be an exceptional case. I grant both these possibilities. I would suggest this company would be dead by now if that were the case, but granted.
Now. This is not an apples to apples comparison, obviously. So let’s just walk back to the topic at hand and tie in this tangent. That way, that whole paragraph makes just a tiny bit of sense so you don’t wonder “so why the hell is he ranting about his internet, exactly?”
This is obviously a product in the field of entertainment, so why do the negative reviews pile up? Refer to my point about why entertainment reviews tank on the whole and it’s glaringly obvious to anyone with even the most light understanding of the DLC. Preemptive spin. They did PR things that made people unhappy, they took a direction with the DLC that made people unhappy prior to the release of the DLC, and as such, the DLC has a high negative review count. This is to be expected. If you aren’t projecting a higher negative review curve from that pretext, you were lying to yourself or you haven’t really paid attention to culture over the last few years… and especially the last year
Snow White.
Terribad movie. Could it have done less terribly if the viewing populace wasn’t disgusted by it before it came out? Maybe, but when it became more entertaining to mock it than actually watch the thing, it’s hard to imagine they could have been any worse off by keeping their PR incredibly minimal and mostly tame. Instead, more people decided to never go see it off it’s messaging failure in PR which took the legs off the movie before it ever got going…
Oh damn, how many of us haters here are never buying the DLC out of spite for how they made it and marketed it? I remember counting at least half a dozen who’d state that proudly in prior threads. So that’s evidence that a similar effect from pre-DLC public reception has impacted not only sales, but also reviews. How bad is it? Well, bad enough that a 5-Civ DLC for 20 bucks (the absolute best rate per civ the game has ever seen per civ in a DLC) is 50/50. So I think there’s an excess of negative reviews as a result of bad PR in the pre-DLC months. Then, a lack of interest from people who are using a service they have purchased (That’s AOE2’s servers and the game pieces, I.E. the game and it’s DLC’s) to write positive reviews about something that isn’t giving them particular trouble.
The continual users of the service are the people I am indicating a low propensity to write a positive review, not a new customer. The review they are providing you is as clear as any 5-star review can be, they keep coming back and keep playing. That’s different from entertainment, broadly, because entertainment is made to be consumed, assessed on a scale of how entertained you were by the medium, and then generally left by the wayside. The DLC you are pointing at has two competing aspects, Entertainment for a medium that has largely provided a long-term service for it’s users over many years. In that, you’ve got two types of reviews, reviews from entertainment-seekers and reviews from those who are being provided a updated, but continual service. See how entertainment reviews are harmed by negative spin, and see how unlikely satisfied users of a service are to contradict the anecdotal negative experience of individuals using that service and being disappointed.
Broadly, you reject my point of reviews because you look at this as purely an entertainment medium, and I concur, as an entertainment medium it’s reviews are unimpressive. The rest of the users of the service don’t care to explain why they have visited this establishment for 3,000 hours, so long as it’s still open and provides what they like.
I’m back to never responding to this thread again, though if you’d like to continue debate on this topic my DM’s are open. I appreciate your level-headedness.
saying it’s ok because barely more than half of the entire customerbase likes it is one of the dumbest arguments I’ve ever heard and just shows that they don’t see the core of the issue here. This aint a vote.
The vact that half the people who bought it deslikes it is REALLY BAD!
They just need to fix their mess and say something about the matter once and for all.
This silence makes it look like these guys don’t know anything about responsibility and owning mistakes.
It’s simple. Just move 3K out of the base game and, in their place, add Tibetans, Tanguts, Dali + Khitanguts rework.
You started all of this type of discussion in the first place, to own the haters of course:
So these numbers matter and don’t matter at the same time?
Same with another argument that 53% was majority upvote. You can’t have it both ways and only matters when it fits your narrative.
Most of the ~15k do not own the DLC. Get the number of those players that own the DLC then we can talk about representativeness.
