So, metrics matter to Dev’s besides the actual feedback these forums are supposed to be the avenue to provide?
Since when has WoW had complaints that Blizzard is listening to them?
I don’t ever recall any.
Edit:
Copy-Paste from WoWHead article:
[quote]You’ve said Fun is the ultimate metric that drives the game forward. How do you measure fun?
If you listen to the Activision Earning Call and you hear MAUs, that’s Investor speak and not what the developers use. All they want to do is as engaging as possible. If there’s something that is over rewarding or has a risk/reward ratio that is out of wack, then they see participation rewards (e.g. The Mechanar Problem: In BC, it was the fastest, easiest dungeon).
Some other metrics are:
How frequently do you log in?
How long do you log in for?
What activities do people do?[/quote]
So if the Dev’s can see that people are logging in less frequently, the apparent average player is logging in for less time per log in, and the activities levels on my server are nearing flatline, what does that sound like?
Certainly not that time played is a bad metric, more that it is a different term that is an extrapolation of the overall time invested by as many players as they can get into the game and doing things at once.
If five players play ten hours, and ten players play five hours, they are the same time metric. If however 200 players log in for five hours which is 1,000 hours, compared to 100 players log in for one hour, that’s 100 hours.
The metric is not sound? Then, by all means, why is it used as a monetary equivalency reference in a call where the people investing in the company are told what the game uses to determine if their investment is valuable or not?