devtrackers.gg
Can confirm that we care. I have too many apex shirts and bamboozled sweatshirts to not care.
Another care-xample:
This bit ", especially when it came to player retention" took weeks of solid figure-outing. Why? Because I really needed to be sure. Why? Because I like this job a lot, it's how i get my sweatshirts :D
If the problem is solely for new players, when not try to put it as an unlockable gamemode after you played the "real gamemode" a few times? This doesn't tell me if solo was popular or not by itself, just that it wasn't popular with new players (which, while important for the game's future, isn't the majority of the players currently). I think the new player retention problem can be easily fixed or mitigated if you think about it a bit, or at least try new things.
If the problem is solely for new players
It's not though, that's just one piece of the puzzle.
Thank you for engaging with us here, it means a lot and shows us you care! As a data scientist, could you please explain a bit more how/why you think solos harmed retention of new players? Do you think it was because new players (assuming they're noobs) had no one to carry them/show them the ropes? Or instead of being downed with the chance of the team reviving them, they instantly turned into a deathbox in solos- meaning negative player experience instead of the euphoria of a team clutch?
Good question! I don't know the answer to that, but I can tell you why i don't know :)
Understanding "why" a player did something is a lot harder than "what" they did.
If I really want to know Why, I'd recommend the team conduct surveys or focus groups to get the particular data you need if you want to answer those questions.
Moving on, since I only know what you did and nothing else, I'm stuck in Guesstown. Population: Me. I've been here before, here's my guess: your squad mates are your real mates. So be nice to those new players, you're actually carrying both him and his future. Be a good role model, you've got more influence than you think. taps head knowingly
All they keep saying is "It's bad for new players, and it's bad for teamplay", so maybe there's more to it, but we don't know and they don't share it, so I'm not going to imagine what are the possible other problems.
We could always share more, but ultimately when we say we're not doing A for reasons B or C, the people who want A are going to pick those reasons apart. And doing so isn't generally difficult if they don't have to consider reasons D-Z. We could share those too. We could write a whole thesis about why we're not doing A but, in addition to being incredibly time consuming, it still wouldn't convince everyone because we're generally talking about highly subjective issues.
And in a twist of meta-ironic fate this post exemplifies exactly that, where A is "sharing more". You can pick apart everything I've said, without the context of everything I didn't have the time or the patience to say. I can reply to you (and every other new thread spawned by this reply) and we can debate if it's worth the time or not.
Or I could go work on the game.