Welcome Crusaders, to the second Monthly Arkhona Report! This time I have less data due to a briefer survey, but some interesting things nonetheless: Factional Performance for the month, including the Campaign. Chaos dominates via consistency, Eldar overrun the Campaign, and Loyalists make a valiant but ultimately doomed effort Player demographics show little shift in population Player enjoyment is likewise little changes, but now we know that guilded players enjoy the game more. A change in preferred class away from Heavies to Support and Ground Assault The following is a summarised version of the full report, since the complete report would be too lengthy to be shown here, and would be missing all of the nice embedded charts. The full report can be found at https://arkhonareports.wordpress.com/january-2017/- just follow the links from each heading, or use the top menu to navigate directly. Faction Performance January saw the Eldar, Chaos, and Orks fighting it out for dominance of Arkhona, while the Loyalists highest peak never reached a quarter of the map. The campaign followed a similar pattern, with the Eldar dominating for the duration, Chaos holding steady and then rising towards the end, the Orks gaining slightly and then dropping off suddenly, and the Loyalists having a brief rise at the end of a low but steady week. Compared with December, Orks, Chaos and Eldar were much more even in their performance, and noticeably higher. Chaos in particular was very consistent, and held more than a quarter of the map for the whole month. Demographics Just under half the respondents were in a Guild. Loyalists and Orks were roughly evenly split, but noticeably more Eldar were guilded, and Chaos were the reverse the trend with just over 60% of them not guilded. When it came to class, the following were more likely to be in a guild: Support, Fire Dragon, Striking Scorpion, Swooping Hawk. Notably, 75% of both Fire Dragons and Swooping hawks were in a guild. More likely to be unguilded were: Ground Assault, Jump Pack Classes, and Tacticals by a small margin. Heavies were equally likely to be guilded or not. Once again, the Tactical classes are the most played, but the proportion has increased by nearly 10 percentage points – it is now close to half the player population. The proportion of Support Classes has remained the same, but they are now the second most played, up from third. Ground Assault has likewise moved up a rank, but with a drop in proportion compared with December. Most of shift towards Tactical seems to have come at the cost of the Heavies (-9.1 percentage points), but there has also been a drop in the Jump Assault classes (-4.3 percentage points. All factions favour their Tactical equivalent classes, Loyalists more so than the others. Support and Ground Assaults are the next most popular, though the Orks reverse the order of preference and Eldar have the smallest proportion of Support. Heavies and Jump Pack classes are the least favoured amongst the Loyalists, Orks and Chaos. The Eldar have a fairly even split amongst their non-tactical classes, but Banshees are least favoured and Striking Scorpions the most. Player Morale The enjoyment of the game for the unguilded portion of the respondents is not that different to what was seen in the December survey: most people enjoy the game, rating their enjoyment as a 4 out of 6 or higher, but there was a noticeable amount who rated their enjoyment poorly. The ability to split enjoyment by guild thought, illuminates the difference between guilded and unguilded play. The guilded players not only rated their enjoyment higher, but the “rage inducing” tail almost disappears. General Comments It was good to see some new players having their say in this survey. The themes of this month’s general comments were: Latency remains a problem for many The Pugging experience is disliked, especially: playing as LSM playing against pre-mades Perceived Balance issues – a number of comments regarding LSM being weak in particular.
It'd be interesting to see what age groups players are in. I know this is a question you've not asked. Though I wonder whether the bulk of players trend older or younger. Sales for the tabletop game are in decline which means some of us are here for a nostalgia hit, like myself, having played 40k games since their introduction in '87. It's not really surprising to see guilded players say they enjoy the game more. A higher proportion of those voting on the forums think clan stacks stomping randoms is ok, with far fewer guided players thinking that sort of behaviour is not ok. Anyone who can make the unacceptable leap of mental gymnastics required to justify clan stacks to themselves is likely to win more at the cost of unguided players. Unfortunately such behaviour does not bode well for the long term growth of the player base and sustainability in the long run. In the short term these players are cheating other players out of a fair game, in the long term they'll ultimately be cheating themselves out of any game at all. Obviously not all guilded players clan stack and not all enjoyment of being guilded in the game comes from that. The social aspect and the ability to at least have one or two friends with a clue no doubt improve the game experience for many people. For my own part in this survey, an eternal random and army of one, I put my enjoyment of the game fairly high. Something around 70 to 80% in the survey. That enjoyment has grown since I fought through all the bullshit a new player has to deal with before to become, if not the top player in a match (which I very rarely am), at least among the top 5 players in a match much of the time. I also wonder if there is a correlation with total time played and satisfaction. Ignoring the rather self evident conclusion that players with a long played time are more likely to enjoy the game, otherwise why would they still be playing (masochism?), I wonder how much enjoyment increases or decreases over time. More than any game I have ever played, Eternal Crusade has an upside down Bell Curve of satisfaction over time. It starts with high hopes "Wow, a 40K shooter!", dips sharply "Man this sucks, I can't last 5 seconds!" before rising again with experience "This point is mine and I don't care how many you send, you're all gonna die!". At the bottom of this curve is where many players quit never to return. For the long term prospects of the game I hope the developers can make a positive upward dent in that curve. For players own part, I would implore you to stop clan stacking matches heavily. More than any action by a player, that behaviour is the single largest factor in turning new players away from the game. The player base is small enough to be a community, I would urge you to start acting responsibly towards it particularly if you are a guild leader.
I rated the game poorly. I haven't played 1 hour in total in over 1 month: I am a casual player and I have very little time to enjoy videogames. When I finally find 1 hour to sit at my desk I don't want to deal with crashes, lag, eternal queues, poor performance, imbalanced population, imbalanced weapons, shit talking kids. Not even WH40K can justify such a pain. I'm out waiting for next updates. Let's see what happens.
Surprise surprise, guilds have more fun stomping randoms with their friends than the randoms have getting stomped. The fact that Chaos has the lowest ratio of guilded players and yet still remains one of the better performing factions overall is interesting, and i'm curious too see if that trend will continue, especially with a major balance overhaul supposedly in store.
True I suppose, but I don't think you'll run into many large groups of non-guild players all in a war party.
Chaos is just a lot easier to play. There's not a lot an opposing team can do if their players are constantly sent to respawn because you have Chaos players wiping them off the map very quickly with Abaddon's Grace, along with a Melee heavy setup which favours Chaos at confined point capture locations e.g. the most important locations to win a match. I play both LSM & CSM and the difference is night and day. Assuming two teams of identical skill, LSM vs CSM, Chaos would win every match. My ability is fairly consistent, yet playing on CSM my kill count more than doubles compared to playing as LSM. I don't play any better because I'm on a Chaos team, I just have the tools to eliminate the opposing players more easily. We shall see what happens after the next patch and whether it does anything to close that gap.
I recently joined chaos after spending a little more than a year with LSM. The autocannon does need to be reigned in somewhat, but it's effect is only pronounced when Chaos is on defense, and having played both sides I would say autocannon spam is only slightly more effective than heavy bolter spam due to higher damage output, and the HB isn't as vulnerable to return fire due to suppression. Melee I haven't noticed significantly more melee players with Chaos compared to LSM in most matches, unless you count Sorcerers. LSM do tend to use way more JPAs than CSM use raptors though. The major difference I've noticed between CSM and LSM is the fact that unguilded CSM are much more likely to listen to orders, call out enemy transport movements, and stay with their squads than unguilded LSM. That lack of cohesion is really the only thing holding LSM back.
