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Dota 2 is hemorrhaging players.

6

60EffPeeEss

Member
I never played DOTA2 until the Source 2 update, but I haven't really encountered anything that has ruined the game for me or given me any grief (apart from Riki but you know, I'm new...). This seems confusing to me.
 
N

Nirolak

Mrgrgr
dustin-browder4csrl.jpg


Service games tend to fluctuate very heavily based on how they handle events and updates. They can salvage this pretty easily by fixing things and putting out new content more frequently.
 
N

Nokterian

Member
UI is a huge cluster fuck getting to your stuff is just obnoxious and changing like gear on your hero's is not easier as before or weather types. They need to fix this is asap.
 
M

Metroidvania

People called Romanes they go the house?
There's a looooot of questionable UI changes, imo.

The game issues themselves are being fixed quickly, but....for w/e reason, it doesn't seem as appealing as the original client.

That being said, we're now back in school time, and the post TI craze is wearing off. It'll likely come back up.
 
C

Cleve

Member
I think it's probably hots pulling away some of the casual players and lots of the big AAA releases starting to trickle out, and just a normal lull more than it is the reborn bullshit, but valve really do need to fix this shit asap.
 
M

mephixto

Banned
Archie said:
The Reborn and Source 2 updates have been less than well received in the Dota 2 community, with the game losing 16% of its playerbase in the past month. Source 2 and Reborn have also been a comedy of errors with an abysmal UI (which has since been fixed) and many bugs.

Should Valve go back to Source 1 while making Reborn more polished? Maybe people are just bored of Dota in general and are moving to CS:GO and other games?
Click to expand...

The Source 1 version of Dota 2 took years to be that polished, go figure how long it will take the Source 2 version to get to that level, UI is fine just need more tweaks and clean the bugs.
 
G

Gipsy Danger

Member
Everytime Dota releases a new hat it starts losing players. The community is full of a bunch of shitters. Once all the issues have been worked out with reborn everything will be back to normal.
 
Interfectum

Interfectum

Member
I bet the botched Reborn Client + HOTS has a lot to do with it. I can see a lot of casual moba players jumping ship to Blizzard's game.
 
B

bennywhatever

Member
When LoL changed their UI a few months ago, everyone said the same thing, yet it's totally fine.

People will be back. It's an addictive game.
 
Z

Zareth

Member
People have to remember that school has started back up to, so that has to have affected their numbers quite a bit as well.
 
N

Nirolak

Mrgrgr
Nzyme32 said:
How is that "haemorrhaging players"?

Surely by the same token, CSGO is "haemorrhaging players" based on the same dip currently - http://steamcharts.com/app/730

Same with TF2 - http://steamcharts.com/app/440

Meaningful events are not currently ongoing and school folk are back on term time. There are probably a bunch of other reasons too.
Click to expand...
Maybe I'm reading something incorrectly, but "Past 30 Days" is listed as only -0.85% for Counter-Strike.
 
P

Pai Pai Master

Banned
Yeah I just started up again after a year and it's really awful what Valve did to the game. It's not unplayable but Dota deserves better. They clearly weren't ready for going live with Source 2, I don't understand why they didn't keep the beta going for a while longer.

Eventually they'll get their shit together and there'll be a big tournament that players will come back for. 6.85 is pretty good so far.
 
Haunted

Haunted

Member
The new UI is amazing.

It's just jarring to go back from a finished, polished product to a janky mess in beta, even if it does look much slicker now.
 
C

Com_Raven

Member
As others have said, I wouldn't base a trend on just one month, especially with The International. Basically, August is the year's apex for public and media interest in Dota 2, so it would make more sense to see August as an outlier and the months before and after as "normal".
 
D

DrArchon

Member
The 6.85 patch only came out very recently, so I'm sure it was dropping even faster before that. At lot of people were getting very tired of the meta.

But yeah, Reborn is a total mess. I can't even play a lot of my favorite game modes, like Ability Draft because they just don't work. Not to mention having to wait at the start of every match for people to reconnect because someone is guaranteed to disconnect.
 
J

JawesomeJaw

Member
Majors are coming, and surely some sort of winter or pairity based event. I thought Dota was going to peak after the TI 4 prize pool and then TI 5 showed me how ridiculous that was.
 
N

Nzyme32

Member
Nirolak said:
Maybe I'm reading something incorrectly, but "Past 30 Days" is listed as only -0.85% for Counter-Strike.
Click to expand...

The listed 16% drop is inaccurate compared to the graph. The most notable drop in peak player numbers was before the Reborn patch came out of beta. The actual numbers stay fairly consistent. The same kind of drop is seen across a lot of games, so I concluded it likely is something effecting many of the player base at this time of year - school / college / university kicks off.

It could easily be something else though
 
B

Berna

Member
ashecitism said:
That actually supposedly dropped down. It's certainly running better on my potato laptop than the Source 1 version did.
Click to expand...

Actually there are graphics cards supported by Source 1 that are not supported by Reborn.
Your graphics card falls below our official minimum specs, which have not been changed in the transition to Dota 2 Reborn.

When running under the Source 1 engine, that did not prevent the game from working because the engine was not designed around the full capabilities of the minimum spec for graphic cards. However, Dota 2 Reborn relies on graphics features such as vertex textures and shader model 3.0 and so adherence to the minimum spec is a stronger requirement than it was in Source 1 Dota 2.

Unfortunately this means that Dota 2 Reborn will not be able to run on some graphics cards from 2006 or before.
Click to expand...
Though I do not believe it's the reason for that big drop.
 
N

Nirolak

Mrgrgr
Nzyme32 said:
The listed 16% drop is inaccurate compared to the graph. The most notable drop in peak player numbers was before the Reborn patch came out of beta. The actual numbers stay fairly consistent. The same kind of drop is seen across a lot of games, so I concluded it likely is something effecting many of the player base at this time of year - school / college / university kicks off.

It could easily be something else though
Click to expand...

Maybe I'm missing something, but this is the average player count graph for Dota 2:

dota2bjkus.png


Turin Turambar said:
Kids and teenagers going to school, after a summer playing Dota2?
Click to expand...

But it didn't go up when we hit the Summer. The peak for this year was in February-March when they hosted the last event and the post-February-March numbers were pretty static until recently.
 
R

randomengine

Banned
Good. Let's keep that trend going. MOBAs should have a place at the table, but should not be one of the most popular games out there. I think it would lead to trends which would change the gaming industry into making more games I no longer enjoy.
 
A

ashecitism

Member
TI was in August, that was a peak, then Reborn had its rocky launch, people got bored of the meta, lot of things coming together. It is noticable.

This is a graph that tracks how it's Monthly Active Users changed since September 2013. A former r/csgo mod made it to compare how GO advanced.

https://infogr.am/unique-players-dota2csgo

It peaked once with the second New Bloom (it was when the game went over 1m CCU) at 11m MAU, then dropped down and slowly went up again. Then it quickly peaked again during TI with 12m MAU and now when you got to the Dota site it lists 11.3m MAU. Almost dropped down a million in MAU in a month.
 
Interfectum

Interfectum

Member
Nirolak said:
But it didn't go up when we hit the Summer. The peak for this year was in February-March when they hosted the last event and the post-February-March numbers were pretty static until recently.
Click to expand...

Also, 2013 and 2014 didn't see a massive drop during "back to school time" either.
 
N

Nirolak

Mrgrgr
randomengine said:
Good. Let's keep that trend going. MOBAs should have a place at the table, but should not be one of the most popular games out there. I think it would lead to trends which would change the gaming industry into making more games I no longer enjoy.
Click to expand...

Given how the game held despite a new, notably popular MOBA entering the industry, I wouldn't hold my breath.
 
Ü

Übermatik

Member
Er, it's not that bad. Some bugs have been frustrating (can't tab out on OSX, weird typing error, and king of all rage is the infamous 'targeting' bug), but there's no more than were in Source 1. It just needs to get up to speed.

It's all worth it for the custom games in my opinion.
 
G

Gipsy Danger

Member
Interfectum said:
I bet the botched Reborn Client + HOTS has a lot to do with it. I can see a lot of casual moba players jumping ship to Blizzard's game.
Click to expand...

Why would casual moba players be playing Dota in the first place? League is already a more relaxed moba. I don't really believe HOTS has anything to do with this.
 
K

Klossen

Banned
randomengine said:
Good. Let's keep that trend going. MOBAs should have a place at the table, but should not be one of the most popular games out there. I think it would lead to trends which would change the gaming industry into making more games I no longer enjoy.
Click to expand...

You don't know true pain until all your friends who you used to play games with daily, jump on DOTA 2 never to look back again.
 
I

Imp the Dimp

Member
randomengine said:
Good. Let's keep that trend going. MOBAs should have a place at the table, but should not be one of the most popular games out there. I think it would lead to trends which would change the gaming industry into making more games I no longer enjoy.
Click to expand...

A hilariously tough and complex game being of the most successful games in history is rather reassuring and poses a balance to press A for awesome AAA games, don't you think?
 
N

Nzyme32

Member
Nirolak said:
Maybe I'm missing something, but this is the average player count graph for Dota 2:

dota2bjkus.png
Click to expand...

I used the sliders to select that area and looked at the more detailed graph above. Between late August to September 1st it drops from around 920,000 to 860,000 - 800,000 peak, and that continues consistently. So it isn't the Reborn release, which occurred around Sep 10th. The same thing happened with other games to a lesser extent, but then again no other game has those kind of numbers
 
G

Gipsy Danger

Member
randomengine said:
Good. Let's keep that trend going. MOBAs should have a place at the table, but should not be one of the most popular games out there. I think it would lead to trends which would change the gaming industry into making more games I no longer enjoy.
Click to expand...

Most selfish post of 2015?
 
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