Guide to Power Population

I think what happens with fire is new players generally gravitate towards what is familiar, Fire is found in alot of MMOs as a power either in the form of sorcery or what have you. That is why new players and the starting population for Fire is so large. It is hands down the largest fall off from Fresh lvl 30 to end game CR111 and that can not be disputed. Interestingly though it stills garners popularity even now for new characters created as you can see by the comparison between this pull and last pull on PS and PC fire grows quite significantly among lvl 30 characters. One of my goals with this thread is to showcase things like this. If a power is that popular with new players why does it fall off so much when we look at end game. These are things the developers should be looking at and I'm hoping this draws attention to that. As well as why Earth is so low no matter where you look compared to the other DLC powers. Even though Earth was the 3rd DLC power it is last in popularity which is very bad.

Earth is significantly worse when lookinh at the numbers and graphs.

interesting that healing powers are fairly even in population, etc. Reads to me that they are the only truly balanced power category.

Wow. Let the data talk.

Great job. Please keep up the great work.

Per this data, you may not even be the 2%.

I rounded up. The real number was closer to .0187.

If you look at all LVL 30 characters(So not just end game) its 3.01% and actually higher than Celestial which is 2.57%. But if you look at just CR111+ then its 2.34% and the lowest with mental being the closest at twice the population as Earth.

Thx,,,I'll update my sig!

New Pull this Weekend!

MARCH 28th 2015









COMMENTS:

So, this week I have added at comprehensive Lvl30 character breakdown so that we can few the game as a whole and not just end game. I want to start out this week addressing what looks like a big issue in the Mental Data for CR106+. I have checked multiple times and somehow those numbers are correct. I don't know if maybe last week the census data was wrong but this weeks numbers are correct. Mental has officially become the first power to see a DECREASE in its population at end game. Most likely filled by the Rage and Quantum increases. Mental players seem to be fed up with their power and are jumping ship. Surprisingly Quantum again manages to pull out the most significant increase in all the powers. The high of their AM rework is still going and going strong. Rage also sees good bumps this week hot off the heels of its AM rework. Oddly though Celestial is still sitting at normal growth and seeing no real surge from their AM rework. Imo the complexity of the Celestial combos is what is keeping people away. Rage on the other hand has very simple combo mechanics so its not surprising to see people switching or making new Rage toons.

For the game as a whole we again see good growth in lvl30 population on the PS side with 4,024 new lvl characters since last week. PC had a respectible 1,641 new lvl 30 characters. Since last weeks pull was over a two week periods I'll just simply divide last weeks new lvl 30 character numbers by 2 and you can see a slight decrease in growth but it is still growth. As far as the power popularity in terms of Characters Made/Month since each powers release we can again see good growth in all powers with Quantum and Rage taking the cake for most improved. In order of most to least popular this week:

1. Fire
2. Rage
3. Ice
4. Gadgets
5. Light
6. Quantum
7. Sorcery
8. Mental
9. Nature
10. Electric
11. Celestial
12. Earth

Despite being the 2nd and 3rd new powers added to the game Electric and Earth still remain near the bottom. I expect that Munitions will release next week so we will see how the Controller distribution shifts and/or if it will affect the other role power populations as well. As always, latest numbers can be found here in their entirety: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1328TqgQ88buE-DYMdV0IJjN0rntJEf4p1eoRf4DGFn8/edit?usp=sharing

This is some amazing data. I tip my hat to you sir.Keep up the good work +1000.

Where did op get these statistics from?

DCUOlive.com/census. I just manually check the numbers each week and do the math associated to come up with usable statistics for comparison.

When Free to Play players create a new character, if they just click through things they will end up with a fire character. It's the first on the list. People tend to settle on the default provided to them if they don't know enough to pick something different yet. Male vs. female? People know how to answer that. Fire vs. ice vs. sorcery etc? Who knows what that really means to the game before you've played it. Some chunk of them are just going to pick the first one and figure it out later. Those people all end up as fire characters.

Fire isn't even weakish until tier 5, so it's not like they're regret that decision in a hurry either. I didn't realize that Fire had any tanking or damage issues until I got into Nexus.

Wow, the census data is fascinating. I played around with it and answered two questions of mine:
Is Quantum really the dominating power choice among the very top players?
Is there really a lack of certain support roles? Are we ready for Munitions?



We aren't ready for another controller power .

Sheesh. My first official toon was and always will be mental (Mind Mangler) and my second is earth (Sadistic Sands)!

Does that make me a glutton for punishment?

Thumbs up to the folks that stick to the power they enjoy, instead of switching to the flavor of the month!

It is starting to surprise me that Quantum is still growing this much and is steady after 2 more power AM revamps. If the dev's can't see there is an issue yet idk when they will. I thought they would nerf it right before Munitions came but it doesn't look like it. And yes the amount of controller powers in the endgame is overwhelming. I just wish we could somehow seperate out the dpses as well. Quantum was never this popular before As you can see from the popularity (characters made/months the power has been out) this has been a recent surge due likely in part to the amount of damage it can do and how easy it is to achieve that damage. I think we will see a lot of Munitions but I don't expect quantum to take the hit. I'm betting mental and Gadgets take a dip once Munitions is released.

Surprisingly, the healer powers are the most balanced among each other - They are the closest to the "ideal balanced" 8 %.

Maybe the devs should sent a poll to the only 204 Earth players with CR 113+ characters and ask them what would improve Earth, so that more would want to play it....

All these Quantums, yet very few of them are controlling. Depressing lol.

The healer numbers don't surprise me. Healer power sets are very balanced. Celestial numbers don't surprise me either because the learning curve is higher than Quantum for those who want to try to get the most damage without trying hard.

Tank powers are depressing. I think in addition to Ice and Rage being the easier tanks to use, their DPS is also pretty good as well.

I'd be very surprised if Gadgets population took a dive. Most people who are still Gadgets do it out of loyalty/character theme and I think very few will find Munitions appealing. From the DPS side, Gadgets is much faster and smoother than what I've seen from Munitions and as far as controlling, only the shield supercharge offers anything really different.

I expect Mental to take a bigger hit, and since a lot of the Quantum population are bandwagoners, a small dip in Quantum.

Overall, great work and it's really good to see how the communities perceptions of powers match the population data.

If only PvP could be balanced.

People say the healers are balanced in population. PvE yes. But you have to keep PvP in Perspective since Crossplay is coming soon.
And since the new season is coming soon, you definitely have to keep that side in Perspective
Look at it again for PvP. 100 cr?
Celestial at the bottom.
Sorc and Electric at the top.
Nature middle ground.

That's not completely balanced. It's an illusion of balance within the healer powers


For Tanks,
Rage is definitely the more popular choice.
Ice following with a small margin
then the Fire in the middle (barely) and reason why is because of PvP.
and the huge discrepancy with Earth at the bottom.
Earth being one of the unique powersets yet being so underwhelming, least rewarding, and while fun, it's very frustating to those who are competitive.

Then the trolls.
Look again.
Light and Gadgets take the reigns in PvP
quantum and mental at the bottom.

If you want to know what power is the FOTM, just pull the CR110+ data... a lot of quantum and celestial

I think it's really interesting that Earth is pretty much flat. By that I mean that not a lot of players choose earth, but the ones that do tend to stick with their power as it's pretty consistent at ~2% of the population.

It's also telling that at level 30 fire is almost 20% of the population but by CR100 it's about 5%.