Looks like MP is about 20% of the market

[Alexander's Horse]

I've had a look at most of the polls and its about an 80/20 split between SPer's and MPer's. That would be a rough guide at least to hardcore MPer's.

20% or one in 5 customers is a lot of customers. I would suspect its a growing segment of the market too, particularly with more people getting high speed connections.

Firaxis should give that some thought and maybe make an announcement at least.

[yin26]

I hear you MPers are just afraid of the AI. Is that true?

(...seriously...this MP thing is a mess that never had to happen...)

[Rhysie]

Originally posted by Alexander's Horse
I've had a look at most of the polls and its about an 80/20 split between SPer's and MPer's. That would be a rough guide at least to hardcore MPer's.

MP players are more sociable, so a higher than normal percentage would be present in a sociable environment such as a discussion forum.

MP players are also more likely to have better internet connections, which would also lead to a higher than normal percetange of MP players being present in an internet environment such as an internet based discussion forum.

Therefore your results are meaningless, you cannot determine how many people play MP compared to SP from a sample which is biased towards MP players...

It's like conducting a survey to find out which is more popular, Tesco or Sainsburies, and then asking people in a Tesco carpark... Even if 80% of the people in the country used Sainsburies more, your survey would proclaim that Tesco was more popular.

[MarkG]

Originally posted by Rhysie
MP players are more sociable, so a higher than normal percentage would be present in a sociable environment such as a discussion forum.

and what are sp-ers? i have played less than 10 times in my life civ mp and i run this forum

[Skanky Burns]

Statistics taken from a limited sample cant be trusted. For example, if you surveyed everyone who owned Civ, but didnt have access to the internet or a lan, you would find a whopping 100% would be SP Which means by that survey, no-one plays MP games of Civ

One can safely assume that the ratio of MP to SP players on Apolyton is higher than the ratio of MP to SP players of Civ in the world.

[Ozymandous]

Originally posted by Rhysie


MP players are more sociable, so a higher than normal percentage would be present in a sociable environment such as a discussion forum.

MarkG already answered this so I won't add to his answer except to laugh.

MP players are also more likely to have better internet connections, which would also lead to a higher than normal percetange of MP players being present in an internet environment such as an internet based discussion forum.

Are you serious? What kind of absurd logic are you using when you assume that only people more inclined to play MP frequent discussion boards? I know a lot of people who would never play MP for any game who frequent discussion boards about their favorite games for hints, tips or just to BS. I have had a modem for more than 95% of my Internet access time and this has NEVER prevented me from playing MP games or visiting discussion boards. I also play SP, and even MP over a LAN so the connection speed has NO relevance on who frequents what areas of the Internet (except maybe large warez sites, etc).

Therefore your results are meaningless, you cannot determine how many people play MP compared to SP from a sample which is biased towards MP players...

And your refutation of the initial statements are meaningless because of your own faulty logic.

It's like conducting a survey to find out which is more popular, Tesco or Sainsburies, and then asking people in a Tesco carpark... Even if 80% of the people in the country used Sainsburies more, your survey would proclaim that Tesco was more popular.

See above. An example based on faulty logic is not a valid example.

Thank you, drive through.

[Neuronix]

These forums represent a hardcore Civilization gamer. The hardcore turn-based strategy gamer probably won't care so much about MP because MP support is a latecomer to the Civilization series.

If the game does not have MP support they will lose a large percentage of sales. The reason is NOT the people posting on here, but I believe it has to do with the longevity of the game in the market. Without MP support, the game will die out alot more quickly, and while it may sell well at first, they will lose all those sales of friends trying to get friends to play against them, LAN parties, and just in general setting up websites so that people can play online.

This is NOT The Sims, The Sims appealed to an entirely different kind of gamer (women mostly), where that type of game was almost completely novel and interactions are built into the game. Real humans would probably spoil that game, e.g. the person who wrote the gaming magazing complaining about the fact that the online game would not allow robbery and murder. This is Civ3, where blowing PEOPLE up is so much better than blowing up the AI over and over and over again. It really does get old maybe just not to you hardcore Civers, but to the majority of the market (considering this forum is not the majority of the market). As an added point, the AI is still going to cheat. That's the thing I hated MOST about SP games; I wanted the PC to outTHINK me, not outproduce me. While I don't expect the AI to do that, not including MP and then still making the AI overpower me with 50%+ production is just lame.

You can compare this to a game that had no or very poor MP support, e.g. Oni or Drakan. Oni was a great game, that would have made for a great MP experience, except for the fact that they didn't include it. What happened? People played it for awhile, but the game died quickly. Same thing happened to Drakan, everyone hyped the game up and wanted to ride around on the dragons and all, but when the game was released the net code was very poor and the servers were non-existant so it died a premature death.

I'm sure that people will say my comparisons are invalid for x reason, however I maintain that without MP support they will lose more than 20% of sales in the long-run. Notice that Half-Life is still selling alot of copies!

[drake]

I like your point neuronix......

Where can you find a more dedicated group of civ players in the world than at apolyton?

If there is another place where thousands of civvers congregate on a regular basis, please lead me in that direction!

The people of this sites opinions should be very important to firaxis. Sp or mp, we represent some of the most dedicated civ people in the world.........

And 20% of us should mean a lot. We should have some pull.

We should

[me_irate]

I played ctp2 multiplayer and found that on the average night about 20-30 people on. This out of maybe 50,000 games sold tells me that most dont play multi-player. However this could be atributed to only 20-30 people actually playing it at all.

By the way i believe that the pole results are missleading. I believe that far less regular people would play mp and that half of the people who would play are the people posting here. The problems with turn based mp are many. For one its very difficult to continue games with more than 2 people. I would guess 60% of my games are unfinished. Second reason it takes a long time to play. Even when i played about every night i finished a game once every 2 weeks or so. Most of the games that were actually finished were all night affairs and still were not often finished. These very to reasons would hurt the regular players chances to play mp.

[Jason Beaudoin]

That's 20% of the market in these forums. I'm sure that the results would be different globally.

I don't think multiplayer makes up a huge amount of the consumer base, otherwise, Firaxis would have thought twice about not including MP. They realize that this game is mainly played SP.

But... if Blizzard were to try that with Warcraft III, they would get blasted because I'm sure the percentage of MP players is much higher than TBS.

[ColdWizard]

our opinions don't count

[Rhysie]

To answer all the negative responses to my post in one posting:

Firstly, the sociable issue. I was talking in generalisations, and was not saying that SP's are unsociable. If you take part in discussions you have to see things in shades of grey, not just assume that what I am saying is either black or white. I am well aware that people are not 100% determinable from a single aspect, and if people want to constructively debate a point they shouldn't assume I am a bigoted moron who believes that someone whose favourite colour is blue must be a man.

To clarify, the more sociable a person is, the more likely it is that they will be inclined to play with others, rather than alone. Note the word likely. I am not saying you automatically play with others because you are sociable. From this original assumption that sociable people like social activities (Surely that's not so hard for you to agree with?) then it leads that the people doing the social activities (In this case MP's) are likely to be sociable people. Again note the word likely. It then leads that because there is a big chance they are sociable, there is a big chance they will be involved in other sociable activities, such as discussion boards. Note the use of the word 'chance'.

Next, the internet connection issue.

Now, to play some forms of MP, you do not need any internet connection. To play most of it, you do. Therefore if you classify each MP by their favourite form of MP, most of them would be classed as internet MP's (These include those who play by email and those who play in real time against other players).

As most of these MP's are going to be internet MP's, it therefore follows that most of them will have decent internet connections. If they have useless ones, then they will not be able to enjoy real time MP (By this I do not mean RTS, I mean waiting for the other person to do their turn, then doing yours, then waiting for them, etc) because they would be swamped by connection issues which would detriment their enjoyment.

SP's on the other hand, do not need any sort of internet connection. This means that people who would be classed as MP's are often moved into SP territory through lack of ability to be MP's. Now this means that even if the internet connections of the wannabe SP's and the wannabe MP's are identical, the wannabe MP's without internet connections or with awful connections will shift into being SP's, because they are unable to be MP's. That will lower the average quality of the internet connection of the SP's, and raise the average quality of the MP's internet connection. This is basic maths. The end result is that the average quality of an MPer is higher than that of a SPer. I presume the argument that people with higher quality internet connections are more likely to join in with internet forums is not disputed.

Sorry for the long reply, but I do not believe I am wrong, and the responses I got (MarkG's I think was not meant viciously, but the comment about laughing at me obviously was) implied that people did not think I was right. I believe this was through lack of understanding of what I was saying, so here is my full explaination.

[Pembleton]

Originally posted by Rhysie
Sorry for the long reply, but I do not believe I am wrong, and the responses I got (MarkG's I think was not meant viciously, but the comment about laughing at me obviously was) implied that people did not think I was right. I believe this was through lack of understanding of what I was saying, so here is my full explaination.

I agree with your analysis and have attempted to use this argument many times in the past, but am now tired of explaining it as well as getting into debates about it.

Now for a guess. I think Infogrames had more to do with releasing Civ3 without MP than Firaxis. Infogrames is a publisher that has done marketing and sales research. I'm sure they are aware what leaving out MP will do to sales. Because of this, I think they also realize that it won't hurt sales significantly enough to warrant a delay that will include MP. This reinforces my belief that MP is a small minority of players *IN A GAME SUCH AS CIV*. It is a turn-based game that takes up to days (and possibly weeks for people who don't have much time), to finish.

Almost all MP players want to finish a game in a sitting. I've played MP games *a lot* such as Age of Empires, Age of Kings, and Diablo 2 (My MP addiction to AOK lasted several months). But I have no interest in playing a game such as Civ MP because I know the game will probably never finish, and also the appeal of Civ is the "one-more turn" continuation that you can only get while playing an opponent with infinite endurance, which is a computer.

But hey, I'm not dogmatic in all my beliefs. Maybe the MP market for Civ is larger than I thought. Surprising facts about things occur all the time. But my impression is that it isn't for this case.

[drake]

First of all, you don't need a good connection. I've played games with people that have low end 14-33k modems and didnt have any problems. I've rarely played games with high speed connections, and when I have, I havent seen any significant difference (I have a 56k myself). It does help to have a host who has a good connection, as they are the ones whos machine is actually crunching all the data. But bottom line is, if you're online period, you can't use your lousy connection as an excuse.

The most discouraging aspects of the connection phase occur when people get "dropped" or "booted" from the hosts machine. Restarts often have to occur and this can be time consuming. It takes a great degree of patience. Lag can sometimes be irritating, but it usually isn't an issue to the patient gamer.

Also about the social thing. I agree that style of play will each have its own variety of introverts and extroverts. We certainly have our fair share of people who play MP without talking to their opponent the entire game. Its basically like playing the AI with some people. And I'm sure there are plenty of socialites in the sp rank. I mean, its crazy to think theres not.

Almost all MP players want to finish a game in a sitting. I've played MP games *a lot* such as Age of Empires, Age of Kings, and Diablo 2 (My MP addiction to AOK lasted several months). But I have no interest in playing a game such as Civ MP because I know the game will probably never finish, and also the appeal of Civ is the "one-more turn" continuation that you can only get while playing an opponent with infinite endurance, which is a computer.

Well there are plenty of different camps in the Mp community. There are some that want to finish a game in one sitting, and some that want to actually enjoy the game, and its intracacies. There is a wham bam thank you maam crowd, a diplomacy crowd that likes long and drawn out affairs and of course theres the people in the middle. If a short game is what you want, you can find it. If a long game is what you want, you can find that too. Theres something for everyone.

As far as finishing a game, yeah un-fortunately theres a lot of mp games in the civ graveyard that never get finished. This often happens when the game gets too imbalanced or someones schedule changes. Make no doubt, that civ mp requires a real dedication and a huge amount of patience. And that is why the community is so small. Because of the amount of work it takes to make a game really work.

I think all sp people should atleast try it and not dismiss it immideately like they do. Its just discouraging when people say MP sucks when theyve never tried it.

Anyway, I'm ranting as usual.......and I dont know if i had a point, so I'm stopping for now

[drake]

It is a turn-based game that takes up to days (and possibly weeks for people who don't have much time), to finish.

Oh, and might I add, I'm currently playing in a game that has been going on since February and having a hell of a time

I like a game of epic proportions

[DanS]

"I don't think multiplayer makes up a huge amount of the consumer base, otherwise, Firaxis would have thought twice about not including MP. They realize that this game is mainly played SP."

What game? Civ2? I'm sure you realize that few had internet connections at the time and that nowadays the vast majority do?

There is absolutely no telling how popular MP would have been in Civ3. There is no precedent.

[squid]

Originally posted by Rhysie


MP players are more sociable

I am *very* sociable, but in a computer game, Worms excluded, I don't try to be sociable. It's supposed to be engrossing. Now, if I had the time, MP would be very cool. But I think it would be best in an all night LAN party environment. Like I'd be able to get THAT staged.

Bowling is social

On another note, I installed RedHat 7.1 at work today and included the games package. FreeCiv is in there. I am soooooooo fired

[splangy]

Originally posted by yin26
I hear you MPers are just afraid of the AI. Is that true?

(...seriously...this MP thing is a mess that never had to happen...)

Hmmm, arent you the same yin that said IF CIV3 DOESN'T SHIP WITH MP DONT BUY IT? However I totally agree with the above. MP is just a waste of time, it takes SOOO long its vertualy unplayable...

[d_dudy]

Originally posted by splangy
Hmmm, arent you the same yin that said IF CIV3 DOESN'T SHIP WITH MP DONT BUY IT? However I totally agree with the above. MP is just a waste of time, it takes SOOO long its vertualy unplayable...

finally, a voice of reason

[CapTVK]

Originally posted by d_dudy


finally, a voice of reason

When your postcount starts to rise and you get more adept at Civ that will change.


MP is the ultimate level beyond deity.


Trust me

[Ralf]

Originally posted by CapTVK
MP is the ultimate level beyond deity.

And above is exactly why Firaxis will add multiplayer along with other additions, in that expansion-pack.


Trust me