After reading all of DNA posts and carefully watching and analysing data so far. I'm still not so sure if we would hit the 1 Billion mark.
I think to be on the safe side, we could do with another Stark Foundation donation, I don't think we need much, maybe just another...let just round it up and say 500mil just to be sure. 😉🤫
I think the statement that we will hit the 1 billion without Kabam’s adjustments is proving to be an optimistic interpretation of the trending or participation has nose dived in the last week when compared to previous season because of this meta’s unique ability to spotlight just how unenjoyable the current AI has become.
It’s no surprise we are limping to the finish when playing the game simply isn’t fun because of jacked up AI. I miss simpler times of basic AI and jacked up nodes
Unfortunately they created a scenario where we will never know if we could've gotten to the Titan on our own or not. For the last week or more we've been doing like 50m a day, and we only needed to average 33m and change to make it. There may have been more motivation to continuing pushing like that if we could see the Titan just barely within our reach. Now we will get it tonight, then slow down like crazy outside of those going for Bastion or those that still need 5k or to hit GC for the She Hulk piece.
We are ignoring the multiplicative impact of Stark Foundation donation. The 170M points made the 1B target achievable, which likely pushed a lot more people to make an effort to get to the individual 5K point mark. Without the donations, I doubt we would have even made 800M. The slowdown we saw in week 2 would have only worsened. Now it looks like we will get to 900M+ without the donations, which shows that there was potential to get to the 1B milestone on our own.
The team had to make 2 changes to the original design. First one was 50 points for 1 BG win every 2 days. That's 700 points per player. That is 15-20% additional boost to individual player points or 150-200M additional points, if we get to 1B points without the donations. If we consider the original event targets, even with all the increased incentives we would have fallen well short of the milestones under the initial design. Kudos to the team for recognizing this in time and intervening at multiple points.
We are ignoring the multiplicative impact of Stark Foundation donation. The 170M points made the 1B target achievable, which likely pushed a lot more people to make an effort to get to the individual 5K point mark. Without the donations, I doubt we would have even made 800M. The slowdown we saw in week 2 would have only worsened. Now it looks like we will get to 900M+ without the donations, which shows that there was potential to get to the 1B milestone on our own.
The problem with this theory is there was no week two slowdown. There was a drop on day 6, but then there was a significant jump in scoring during days 7 through 11. The first Stark donation occurred at the start of day 9, after the scoring jump had already begun. Players were accelerating scoring *before* the Stark donation.
While there’s no way to fully account for sentiment boosts due to the Stark donations encouraging players to continue to play, there’s no evidence the first Stark donation directly led to more scoring. It is more likely, given the timing of the scoring bump, that it was driven by the inflow of marks from milestones. It *is* possible the second donation encouraged more scoring towards the end, but that’s difficult to separate from the fact that participation *always* ramps up at the end of every BG season, and such a scoring increase was both expected and predicted.
It is almost mathematically impossible for week two scoring to have declined relative to week one scoring, given the normal pattern of BG participation and the huge influx of marks being unlocked. The question was how much higher it would go, not if it might actually decline overall. That would have required a substantial amount of BG players to decide to quit scoring for no reason, relative to past seasons. The people thinking scoring might continue to decline after a single day drop are exhibiting irrational pessimism.
I should point out that the week one linear projection, which includes the day six drop off and does not include the first Stark donation, was for 800 million. That was the most pessimistic projection possible: that scoring would remain at that low level indefinitely, and prior to the knowledge that Stark donations were incoming. That was the absolute floor, presuming everything that could possibly go wrong did, and that in spite of both a deathless piece and a realm event going on and with twice the marks available players would actually participate less this season than in past boosted seasons.
In week one I estimated a 75% chance of reaching one billion, and an essentially certain chance that we would score well above the initial linear projection of 800 million. There was just no way we would barely make 800, and zero chance we would have dropped below 800 million. I would have bet anyone anything at any odds on going over 800 million, and I would have taken that bet on any day after week one.
I'm genuinely curious how many players actively playing even know of the stark donation in the first place. I imagine quite a few players have just been doing business as usual and see that we had 100mil extra points and just thought "wow, people sure were playing a ton recently"
I'm genuinely curious how many players actively playing even know of the stark donation in the first place. I imagine quite a few players have just been doing business as usual and see that we had 100mil extra points and just thought "wow, people sure were playing a ton recently"
The vast majority of players probably have no direct idea the Stark donations are happening. Many might have some vague idea of sentiment though, getting their information from a friend of a friend of a friend.
There are still lots of people who think Kabam wants us to open crystals because large crystal hoards slow down the game, even though that’s been debunked on the forums, YouTube videos, the Discord, and live streams. Most players get their info from the rumor mill. Many probably don’t even know there’s a realm event going on, which is one of those things I’m going to probably address after this event is over.
I should point out that the week one linear projection, which includes the day six drop off and does not include the first Stark donation, was for 800 million. That was the most pessimistic projection possible: that scoring would remain at that low level indefinitely, and prior to the knowledge that Stark donations were incoming. That was the absolute floor, presuming everything that could possibly go wrong did, and that in spite of both a deathless piece and a realm event going on and with twice the marks available players would actually participate less this season than in past boosted seasons.
The first week projection already includes the first change implemented which is 50 free points every 2 days. Anyone putting up 5K points almost certainly got the full 700 points, that's a 16% bump in points (700/4300). Your absolute floor already factors in 15-20% higher points vs. a normal season. Personally, I got to GC when my points were in the mid 3000s. If I thought we would end up in the 800M range, there would have been no incentive for me to add another 2K points.
~30K people reach GC every season, you are overestimating how much value is attached to the deathless piece. It is important for endgame players but the realm event demands more participation from the broader community. The removal of solo and (initially) alliance events would have had more detrimental effect than the addition of the deathless piece.
I would love to believe that we could have got to 1B on our own. But I'm really happy that the game team intervened early and then again when they figured out they got their calculations wrong. I hope the next set of realm events are appropriately tuned, because I do like them and they foster a level of engagement which is unlikely with solo or alliance level events.
I should point out that the week one linear projection, which includes the day six drop off and does not include the first Stark donation, was for 800 million. That was the most pessimistic projection possible: that scoring would remain at that low level indefinitely, and prior to the knowledge that Stark donations were incoming. That was the absolute floor, presuming everything that could possibly go wrong did, and that in spite of both a deathless piece and a realm event going on and with twice the marks available players would actually participate less this season than in past boosted seasons.
The first week projection already includes the first change implemented which is 50 free points every 2 days. Anyone putting up 5K points almost certainly got the full 700 points, that's a 16% bump in points (700/4300). Your absolute floor already factors in 15-20% higher points vs. a normal season. Personally, I got to GC when my points were in the mid 3000s. If I thought we would end up in the 800M range, there would have been no incentive for me to add another 2K points.
~30K people reach GC every season, you are overestimating how much value is attached to the deathless piece. It is important for endgame players but the realm event demands more participation from the broader community. The removal of solo and (initially) alliance events would have had more detrimental effect than the addition of the deathless piece.
I would love to believe that we could have got to 1B on our own. But I'm really happy that the game team intervened early and then again when they figured out they got their calculations wrong. I hope the next set of realm events are appropriately tuned, because I do like them and they foster a level of engagement which is unlikely with solo or alliance level events.
You said “We are ignoring the multiplicative impact of Stark Foundation donation. The 170M points made the 1B target achievable, which likely pushed a lot more people to make an effort to get to the individual 5K point mark. Without the donations, I doubt we would have even made 800M.” I am specifically replying to that statement about the effects of the donations, which is why I specifically quoted it.
If you meant to say “without the Stark donations and the 50 point objective bonus we wouldn’t have made it to 800 million” then my week one projections include four days of such bonus points. If we assume about half of all players got them, and we assume 300,000 players participating, both of which are likely very high estimates (300k players probably participate eventually, but its unlikely to be that high in the first week alone) we end up with 30 million points due to those bonuses in week one and an adjusted linear estimate of about 700 million points. Even that initial projected estimate would have implied a final score at or above 800 million given the fact that the average points per day was increasing.
As to your observation that 30k people reach GC every season: that’s true: sometimes more sometimes less. It is always consistently higher during seasons with either Deathless pieces or boosted milestones. *This* season 57k were in GC at the end of week three, with that number climbing faster than I’ve ever seen. I have never seen 57k in GC at the end of any season. Want to take a guess how many are in GC now, about 30 hours later?
As I write this, there are 57873 players in Uru3, implying about 66,373 players in GC total. Almost ten thousand players entered GC in a little over a day, and this is normally just the start of the end of season rush.
It is highly unlikely that these tens of thousands of players are doing way more points this season, and everyone else is doing nothing more. This many players in GC with this much time to go implies a general increase in activity across the board. Boosted milestones typically increase participation and numbers in GC by noticeable amounts. The deathless pieces also do so, I explicitly measure these things during those seasons. This season seems to be blowing all of the earlier seasons out of the water, and it cannot be just a few end game players doing it.
I'm genuinely curious how many players actively playing even know of the stark donation in the first place. I imagine quite a few players have just been doing business as usual and see that we had 100mil extra points and just thought "wow, people sure were playing a ton recently"
exactly, i didnt even knew until i saw something in global chat couple of days ago and then visited forums..
also, now the billion mark is reached.. what is your expected score outta this event? where will the milestone event finish... ofc with another donation we can do till 1.5 bil but thats highly unlikely to get
now depending on the player base, end days multiple players are parking/grinding.. which somewhat leads me to 1.25 bil scored milestone to be achieved.
If you meant to say “without the Stark donations and the 50 point objective bonus we wouldn’t have made it to 800 million” then my week one projections include four days of such bonus points. If we assume about half of all players got them, and we assume 300,000 players participating, both of which are likely very high estimates (300k players probably participate eventually, but its unlikely to be that high in the first week alone) we end up with 30 million points due to those bonuses in week one and an adjusted linear estimate of about 700 million points. Even that initial projected estimate would have implied a final score at or above 800 million given the fact that the average points per day was increasing.
I should have been clearer. I meant in the normal scoring (without the boosts), which is more representative of a typical season (with boosted incentives or otherwise), we wouldn't have hit 800M
As I write this, there are 57873 players in Uru3, implying about 66,373 players in GC total. Almost ten thousand players entered GC in a little over a day, and this is normally just the start of the end of season rush.
It is highly unlikely that these tens of thousands of players are doing way more points this season, and everyone else is doing nothing more. This many players in GC with this much time to go implies a general increase in activity across the board. Boosted milestones typically increase participation and numbers in GC by noticeable amounts. The deathless pieces also do so, I explicitly measure these things during those seasons. This season seems to be blowing all of the earlier seasons out of the water, and it cannot be just a few end game players doing it.
This highlights the same issue as that everyone brought up when the event was initially launched. That the milestones were set too high. We have almost double the amount of people in GC and will probably end with 75-90K people in GC. That's an incredible amount of effort that's gone in and despite that, without the bonus points and donations we wouldn't have got to the 1B milestones. Most of those who get into GC this time will not have done it for the deathless piece, since they did not do so in earlier seasons.
We are now trying to position this as we would have got there except for some doom mongering initially. While the truth is without the interventions we would have had an extremely crappy month weeks before the CW weekend. The game team did the right thing intervening and I hope this informs how the next set of events are designed.
I should have been clearer. I meant in the normal scoring (without the boosts), which is more representative of a typical season (with boosted incentives or otherwise), we wouldn't have hit 800M
My prediction before the event officially started was in the realm of 800-850 million, based on earlier estimates that our highest prior seasons would have scored around 800 million. I now believe that estimate was too low, before accounting for all the scoring changes, and that if we reproduced our highest activity season, without any special knowledge of the realm event happening, so players just did what they would normally do during a season with a deathless piece, we would have scored at least 900 million.
That’s based on two main corrections. The first is, and this is something I mentioned when I first posted about this, I could not estimate the impact of higher GC scoring, so I didn’t account for it at all - I presumed neutral contribution from GC players relative to typical scoring. That now seems to have been much too conservative. The other is that my estimates for participation were all systematically low by more than I originally thought. I measure participation by recording my own placement across multiple alts that score differing points - sometimes a little as a couple hundred to place near the bottom - and presume the total must be around there. However, I cannot always measure right at the end of the season, and I cannot specifically try to place at the exact bottom of leaderboard, so sometimes my numbers for certain things are lower than the final stats - such as GC totals.
My original estimate of “around 800m” should have been closer to “around 900m” as a result. And this does not factor in the additional enthusiasm for the event itself, which was an unknowable before the event started. The data suggests that before Kabam started putting their thumb on the scales with Stark donations, enthusiasm was pushing scores upward significantly relative to what would ordinarily be expected. So if I start with an estimate of about 900, and then factor in enhanced enthusiasm above normal, 1billion points becomes within the margin of error for a final score.
We are now trying to position this as we would have got there except for some doom mongering initially. While the truth is without the interventions we would have had an extremely crappy month weeks before the CW weekend. The game team did the right thing intervening and I hope this informs how the next set of events are designed.
I would argue the reverse, or rather I would argue the Stark donations may have done as much damage as good, precisely because it creates the very sentiment you’re articulating.
I should say, I *am* arguing and *will continue* to argue that to the devs. There are a lot of ways in which the realm events can be improved: I’m working on fleshing those ideas out as I write this. But while the Stark donations are appreciated in general, clearly they create a sense the goals were unachievable without them, and arbitrarily lowering the milestones to the point where it becomes obviously achievable by even the most pessimistic players would be equally damaging, because then they could never escape the noose of “if it isn’t obvious, it is impossible.” That is an albatross that is inescapable except generationally. Meaning, all the players today would have to leave and be replaced with other people who did not live through the current realm events. Which is a thing that has happened to other games in the past.
I should have been clearer. I meant in the normal scoring (without the boosts), which is more representative of a typical season (with boosted incentives or otherwise), we wouldn't have hit 800M
My prediction before the event officially started was in the realm of 800-850 million, based on earlier estimates that our highest prior seasons would have scored around 800 million. I now believe that estimate was too low, before accounting for all the scoring changes, and that if we reproduced our highest activity season, without any special knowledge of the realm event happening, so players just did what they would normally do during a season with a deathless piece, we would have scored at least 900 million.
How? We are going to get to 1.1-1.2B now. This includes 170M of Stark donations and 150-200M from bonus objectives. Even if we hit 1.2B, we would have only hit 900M in normal scoring terms. You agree that participation this season has been beyond what we have seen in any previous seasons. Why do you think we would have hit 900M by reproducing previous highs, when we are only going to hit that number with 2x people reaching GC this time around?
We are now trying to position this as we would have got there except for some doom mongering initially. While the truth is without the interventions we would have had an extremely crappy month weeks before the CW weekend. The game team did the right thing intervening and I hope this informs how the next set of events are designed.
I would argue the reverse, or rather I would argue the Stark donations may have done as much damage as good, precisely because it creates the very sentiment you’re articulating.
I should say, I *am* arguing and *will continue* to argue that to the devs. There are a lot of ways in which the realm events can be improved: I’m working on fleshing those ideas out as I write this. But while the Stark donations are appreciated in general, clearly they create a sense the goals were unachievable without them, and arbitrarily lowering the milestones to the point where it becomes obviously achievable by even the most pessimistic players would be equally damaging, because then they could never escape the noose of “if it isn’t obvious, it is impossible.” That is an albatross that is inescapable except generationally. Meaning, all the players today would have to leave and be replaced with other people who did not live through the current realm events. Which is a thing that has happened to other games in the past.
I don't think anyone is arguing milestones to be lowered to the point where it becomes obviously achievable by even the most pessimistic players. The original milestones were set so high that it required 3 interventions, first one before the event started then two subsequent donations. The last 70M donation was probably not needed, there was enough momentum to get us to 1B after the first one.
I agree that the Stark donations create an expectation of the devs stepping in, if the player base creates enough noise around the rewards structure. This could have been avoided by setting a realistic target. 800M would have been a tough but achievable target, if we beat our previous highs (which the current GC leaderboard suggests we have already done). We have not seen 60K+ people in GC in any of the previous seasons. 1B was unrealistic to the extent it created negativity even before the event began. It would have been demoralising to everyone involved if we had got to 850-900M with 75K+ people in GC.
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The team had to make 2 changes to the original design. First one was 50 points for 1 BG win every 2 days. That's 700 points per player. That is 15-20% additional boost to individual player points or 150-200M additional points, if we get to 1B points without the donations. If we consider the original event targets, even with all the increased incentives we would have fallen well short of the milestones under the initial design. Kudos to the team for recognizing this in time and intervening at multiple points.
While there’s no way to fully account for sentiment boosts due to the Stark donations encouraging players to continue to play, there’s no evidence the first Stark donation directly led to more scoring. It is more likely, given the timing of the scoring bump, that it was driven by the inflow of marks from milestones. It *is* possible the second donation encouraged more scoring towards the end, but that’s difficult to separate from the fact that participation *always* ramps up at the end of every BG season, and such a scoring increase was both expected and predicted.
It is almost mathematically impossible for week two scoring to have declined relative to week one scoring, given the normal pattern of BG participation and the huge influx of marks being unlocked. The question was how much higher it would go, not if it might actually decline overall. That would have required a substantial amount of BG players to decide to quit scoring for no reason, relative to past seasons. The people thinking scoring might continue to decline after a single day drop are exhibiting irrational pessimism.
I should point out that the week one linear projection, which includes the day six drop off and does not include the first Stark donation, was for 800 million. That was the most pessimistic projection possible: that scoring would remain at that low level indefinitely, and prior to the knowledge that Stark donations were incoming. That was the absolute floor, presuming everything that could possibly go wrong did, and that in spite of both a deathless piece and a realm event going on and with twice the marks available players would actually participate less this season than in past boosted seasons.
In week one I estimated a 75% chance of reaching one billion, and an essentially certain chance that we would score well above the initial linear projection of 800 million. There was just no way we would barely make 800, and zero chance we would have dropped below 800 million. I would have bet anyone anything at any odds on going over 800 million, and I would have taken that bet on any day after week one.
There are still lots of people who think Kabam wants us to open crystals because large crystal hoards slow down the game, even though that’s been debunked on the forums, YouTube videos, the Discord, and live streams. Most players get their info from the rumor mill. Many probably don’t even know there’s a realm event going on, which is one of those things I’m going to probably address after this event is over.
~30K people reach GC every season, you are overestimating how much value is attached to the deathless piece. It is important for endgame players but the realm event demands more participation from the broader community. The removal of solo and (initially) alliance events would have had more detrimental effect than the addition of the deathless piece.
I would love to believe that we could have got to 1B on our own. But I'm really happy that the game team intervened early and then again when they figured out they got their calculations wrong. I hope the next set of realm events are appropriately tuned, because I do like them and they foster a level of engagement which is unlikely with solo or alliance level events.
If you meant to say “without the Stark donations and the 50 point objective bonus we wouldn’t have made it to 800 million” then my week one projections include four days of such bonus points. If we assume about half of all players got them, and we assume 300,000 players participating, both of which are likely very high estimates (300k players probably participate eventually, but its unlikely to be that high in the first week alone) we end up with 30 million points due to those bonuses in week one and an adjusted linear estimate of about 700 million points. Even that initial projected estimate would have implied a final score at or above 800 million given the fact that the average points per day was increasing.
As to your observation that 30k people reach GC every season: that’s true: sometimes more sometimes less. It is always consistently higher during seasons with either Deathless pieces or boosted milestones. *This* season 57k were in GC at the end of week three, with that number climbing faster than I’ve ever seen. I have never seen 57k in GC at the end of any season. Want to take a guess how many are in GC now, about 30 hours later?
As I write this, there are 57873 players in Uru3, implying about 66,373 players in GC total. Almost ten thousand players entered GC in a little over a day, and this is normally just the start of the end of season rush.
It is highly unlikely that these tens of thousands of players are doing way more points this season, and everyone else is doing nothing more. This many players in GC with this much time to go implies a general increase in activity across the board. Boosted milestones typically increase participation and numbers in GC by noticeable amounts. The deathless pieces also do so, I explicitly measure these things during those seasons. This season seems to be blowing all of the earlier seasons out of the water, and it cannot be just a few end game players doing it.
where will the milestone event finish... ofc with another donation we can do till 1.5 bil but thats highly unlikely to get
now depending on the player base, end days multiple players are parking/grinding.. which somewhat leads me to 1.25 bil scored milestone to be achieved.
This highlights the same issue as that everyone brought up when the event was initially launched. That the milestones were set too high. We have almost double the amount of people in GC and will probably end with 75-90K people in GC. That's an incredible amount of effort that's gone in and despite that, without the bonus points and donations we wouldn't have got to the 1B milestones. Most of those who get into GC this time will not have done it for the deathless piece, since they did not do so in earlier seasons.
We are now trying to position this as we would have got there except for some doom mongering initially. While the truth is without the interventions we would have had an extremely crappy month weeks before the CW weekend. The game team did the right thing intervening and I hope this informs how the next set of events are designed.
That’s based on two main corrections. The first is, and this is something I mentioned when I first posted about this, I could not estimate the impact of higher GC scoring, so I didn’t account for it at all - I presumed neutral contribution from GC players relative to typical scoring. That now seems to have been much too conservative. The other is that my estimates for participation were all systematically low by more than I originally thought. I measure participation by recording my own placement across multiple alts that score differing points - sometimes a little as a couple hundred to place near the bottom - and presume the total must be around there. However, I cannot always measure right at the end of the season, and I cannot specifically try to place at the exact bottom of leaderboard, so sometimes my numbers for certain things are lower than the final stats - such as GC totals.
My original estimate of “around 800m” should have been closer to “around 900m” as a result. And this does not factor in the additional enthusiasm for the event itself, which was an unknowable before the event started. The data suggests that before Kabam started putting their thumb on the scales with Stark donations, enthusiasm was pushing scores upward significantly relative to what would ordinarily be expected. So if I start with an estimate of about 900, and then factor in enhanced enthusiasm above normal, 1billion points becomes within the margin of error for a final score.
I should say, I *am* arguing and *will continue* to argue that to the devs. There are a lot of ways in which the realm events can be improved: I’m working on fleshing those ideas out as I write this. But while the Stark donations are appreciated in general, clearly they create a sense the goals were unachievable without them, and arbitrarily lowering the milestones to the point where it becomes obviously achievable by even the most pessimistic players would be equally damaging, because then they could never escape the noose of “if it isn’t obvious, it is impossible.” That is an albatross that is inescapable except generationally. Meaning, all the players today would have to leave and be replaced with other people who did not live through the current realm events. Which is a thing that has happened to other games in the past.
I don't think anyone is arguing milestones to be lowered to the point where it becomes obviously achievable by even the most pessimistic players. The original milestones were set so high that it required 3 interventions, first one before the event started then two subsequent donations. The last 70M donation was probably not needed, there was enough momentum to get us to 1B after the first one.
I agree that the Stark donations create an expectation of the devs stepping in, if the player base creates enough noise around the rewards structure. This could have been avoided by setting a realistic target. 800M would have been a tough but achievable target, if we beat our previous highs (which the current GC leaderboard suggests we have already done). We have not seen 60K+ people in GC in any of the previous seasons. 1B was unrealistic to the extent it created negativity even before the event began. It would have been demoralising to everyone involved if we had got to 850-900M with 75K+ people in GC.