While a game mode is early and just taking off, analyzing it can be difficult. A new metric to help improve this analysis would be the average player count in sessions. Different games have different optimal player counts, and when analyzing discover tests in particular when you get them, it’s helpful to know what the average player count in a session was for a discover test over that period of time.
This metric would give more value to understanding Session Length. As a combat heavy game may suffer in session length when the discover test doesn’t reach high levels of exposure. Allowing designers to better choose where their focus should lie on their next iterations.
This can also help refine the matchmaking queue control settings for games (IE Queue Overtime Duration, Queue Main Duration, Overtime Player Target, and Minimum Players). Allowing players to fine tune their settings in the early term while their new game is attempting to break through.
For example, my game Inception, while it is a combat map it is also a nice environment to explore early on due to its procedural aspect and potentially different styles. I’m ok with my game having a single player minimum in the short term to allow players to explore and decide if they will comeback for a future play if the game has the numbers. Knowing the average Session Player Count can help me understand whether players are getting primarily the solo experience, or a minimum players for combat experience, or a healthy average player combat experience.
Yes this would be nice because it would show a major flaw in the regional system and I am going to make a guess that It is going to be 1 player in most sessions, you can already kind of tell by Unique Players vs Sessions while you get new and updated discovery.
Ill use one of my maps that recently got discovery as example (this happens with every map I get discovery on)
It isn’t completely accurate but notice 203 unique players and 229 sessions.. That means its basically everyone in their own session, Most probably just leaving quickly to find real players even. The only reason I get play time is because I heavily use Guards/AI as BOTS cause this lobby system is absolutely broken.
This is also even with about 50-100 players in the map as far as what the number on the map showing, but those players are separated into a possible 8 different regions..
I hate constantly repeating myself on this but the Lobby system is heavily flawed, and by lobby system I mean the servers the players are on, back in day we would click a server in a server browser and it would say 4/20 players for example, We were going into that server expecting 4 other players to play with..
Today or at least In Fortnite, you don’t see anything but how many players are in the map and even that is being heavily controlled in search query (fake results.. delayed numbers?) so the consumer expects to go into a map with 4 players and finds there are none because they were in a different region or a private server.
