Sure, I’ve played the game for enjoyment, too. But I was almost always doing things I wanted to work towards/get a reward from.
I rarely have ever seen people say “I want to go this time consuming thing that offers no reward whatsoever”
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Blizzards best bet would be to allow and to do survey’s. Finding out what people actually enjoyed about the game. Much of what has been removed from its core, over the last three expansions. Only then will they really know.
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Did you not listen to the QA? They said this is something they look at. Are people still PvPing after they cap Conquest? Are people doing low level keys after they have done the M+10/progression for the week? Etc.
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You have ONE data point, one measurable. And it’s not universal to all players.
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The original metrics you complained about are enough to create a solid baseline which is the starting point for real analysis.
Parsing the data occurs after gathering the measurables and comparing them to see if an obvious narrative presents itself. A deeper dive into correlations or other data sets can add to that narrative.
At this point it would make sense to add your smaller metric as a possible talking point.
And finally, I am pretty certain that your objections to the limitations of these metrics have already been pointed out by Devs in meetings. I don’t believe those metrics are anything more than a starting point for design team convos.
OP isn’t wrong. If you just look at activities people are spending most of their time on in BFA you’ll probably see Islands, Warfronts, World Quests, etc. These aren’t fun activities for most, they are activities that give good rewards in relation to time/effort needed, so people do them.
Look at the Mage Tower and class mount quests from Legion. Or the Challenge Modes from MoP and WoD. These activities gave only cosmetic rewards and people spent a ton of time doing them because players found them fun and/or rewarding.
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Obvi.
And you can measure all that in the metrics provided.
Blizzard has the metrics, I don’t. If I did I would look at the participation between the Stormgarde and Darkshore warfronts. Also look at the item levels of the players in these. Are these people doing them for fun? Or are they doing them because they give out a free 400 ilvl piece for minimal effort? Are people doing more than 1 warfront per cycle?
You can take all this data and I’m sure what you would find is that people either run these on undergeared alts for the 355 completion gear, or once a cycle for the free 400. If you took the gear out, the participation would be almost non-existent.
Except by and large this doesn’t happen for any content.
Despite Ulduar being one of the best raids ever when ICC was out there weren’t people lining up to do it just for the enjoyment.
The few groups that did were there for achievements (rewards).
How many people participated in the Mage Tower after they received the reward/beat it?
Those are the types of metrics the OP asked for.
Kind of like a raid tier?
I’m not defending warfronts I feel they over reward and are WAY too easy.
Once you beat it you couldn’t do it again for that spec. So your question doesn’t make sense.
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So I guess the example doesn’t make sense?
The OP wanted there to be metrics based on how often content was done after you got all the rewards from it.
No not really. I’m 417 ilvl in bags and I’m still going to finish this raid tier even though I have very few chances at an upgrade. Most guilds killing Mythic Jaina now are 415+ average ilvl so they aren’t killing her for gear.
Fun is never just fun. Seriously. Think about going on a great date. The date is fun but all the time needed to make the money to afford the date, acquiring transportation, buying clothes, checking breath for the 100th time and so on generally involve not fun things in order to make the fun things possible.
In this context their metrics make sense as people need to level and gear to go back and solo dungeons, raids, multiplayer quests and so on to farm tmogs, mounts, pets, achievements, unlocks or just completion. How many times did the Lich King go down to players above level 80? That’s probably farming and fun… in a masochistic way for Invincible.
In short, they have a lot of ways to get an idea of things players are doing that are not required for leveling classes or gear. If they see players who have been level 120 for a month but have sub 310 gear, these players are either altaholics or not having much fun. It would not take a terribly sophisticated data mining operation to give the devs a rough sense of how the expansion is playing out via these fun data proxies.
For an achievement, mount, and completion (rewards).
For the warfront completion is automatic, but people still go back to finish up achievement and you can guarantee if the last boss dropped a mount people would be farming it like crazy.
Again, rewards.
One metric they should find a way to measure is are you participating in activities you previously did or didn’t?
Specific examples for me this expac. While I am still collecting pets, battling trainers or pvp have not been engaging for me for a long time.
On the other hand, I was surprised to find wpvp occasionally fun, something I haven’t done since vanilla.
In legion, I leveled up many of my alts. I don’t foresee doing that again any time soon. The class experience and the rewards just aren’t there.
You could look at how many people did the mage tower on alts or offspecs. I personally didn’t like some of the tmog and will never use it but I loved the solo challenge of doing the mage tower on a class/spec I don’t play often.
I agree that players probably don’t know how things work and then they extrapolate based on things that don’t apply, but that’s on Blizz too because they aren’t transparent. I didn’t get to watch the Q&A (first time since Legion and they don’t get a VoD out right away and of course that’s the one I miss. Go figure).
The waters get muddied though. Personal example: I hate BGs since I moved to Alliance. There is a tangible difference in random BGs that has been noted more than once, and merc mode doesn’t help. If there wasn’t a difference then merc mode wouldn’t even be needed right?
However, two things: they don’t balance PvP around random BGs, and now it looks like they are experimenting with AI? That doesn’t make random BGs more fun though, and I dunno how they would gauge the changes in my fun if I am still playing the game. Did they notice that I stopped doing as many BGs? That I AFK out of a lot more now? Is there a trend on one side that they picked up on? I find it hard to believe that they haven’t, but I am not seeing these things being addressed (excluding AI which isn’t any more fun) or even mentioned. Just one example.
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If you had actually watched the Q&A instead of just reading Wowhead’s recap you’d know that is exactly the type of thing they look at when evaluating how successful content is.
I wish I could upvote the original post 5 times.
Those metrics might be useful if they were correlated to when people unsubscribed. In and of themselves, larger numbers on those metrics are not necessarily a good thing.