Higby once posted MBT stats. Why not do that again to get context for these changes?

There really is no context to any of these discussions. He stated that they want to bring tanks closer together, but there's obviously going to be larger balance implications and the discussions going on right now are almost entirely based on anecdotes about how people think their MBT is performing that may not necessarily reflect reality.

I've learned to not trust the stats/info they put up now.

In the topic about player populations one of the devs posted and said the real stats show the player-base is at a healthy level. That's total BS. Many servers can barely even keep one continent populated during prime-time hours.

He didn't say they were "healthy", he said they haven't reached "run around in panic" levels.

What I imagine that means, from an SOE perspective, is that while game population is relatively low compared to at launch (evidenced by server mergers), a relatively high percentage of the remaining population is paying and playing with regular frequency.

The general "rule" for conversion on a Free to Play title is 25/5. You need 25% of your launch day population to stay, and you need 5% of your population to spend to survive (not thrive or make money, just to break even).

Using the usual google suspects for PS2 population, BorderLine Tactical in this instance, the furthest we can go back is Aug 2013 where the population was 8468 and yesterdays peak was 6463. That puts us at 75% of the population a year ago, and means we could drop down to about 2000 players before it would be at the "oh no" level - with 100 of them regular paying customers.

If we want to do a little theory crafting, we can take the Aug 2013 to Jun 2014 time frame (about a year), and assuming it averages out to a steady decline, speculate that at launch in Nov of 2012 the population was 10585. With our current population that puts us at 61% launch population and our "oh no" level at about 2600 players - with 130 regular paying customers.

Those numbers are just general "rules" in free to play of course, and I imagine PS2 takes more than ~$2000 USD to run, but the base theory is sound.

So do we have the people to fill the mass of servers we had at launch? No; we didn't even really have the people to fill all the servers we had at launch at launch. But we do have plenty of people still playing, and I can only assume still paying; if the fat checks the Player Studio kids keep getting are any indication.

Especially in Planetside 2's case server mergers don't always mean that something is going wrong. It really means the Infrastructure people at SOE did their job right. They figured the maximum number of players they could possibly get, added some to that, and got servers to support it at launch. Now that they actually know the figures and can predict, they now re-allocate the servers to provide the experience they want.

People just aren't used to this because they have become "accepting" of how mega-game companies like EA do it; they buy the bare minimum number of servers they think they can get away with, and then do damage control from launch day trying to find the middle point between lost costumers and the populations with additional servers.

People don't believe stats or ignore them if they say something they don't already assume is happening.

From the oracle of death data the guys on the planetside universe extracted the magrider generally is the best performing tank v other tanks due to the high performance of the saron. I have never seen even one magrider expert on these forums admit that the saron is anything other than worthless trash that nobody in their right mind would use.

I say give us the stats.

If I am paying to help keep this game running as far as I'm concerned I have a right to know what they are basing the changes on

Dude... stop trying to look smart with these thories, you're making a fool of yourself. 100 paying customers is the trouble line? Assuming they're all high rollers spending $100 a month, that's 10k a month, enough to pay 2 engineers, and no bill payments... 2k a month to run ps2? Do you even know what s data center looks like? How about 10 times that on electricity alone? Plus other bills and all the engineers.

Don't try to think too hard, you'll hurt yourself.

They are correct when saying the player number are much higher, or they'd be bleeding money and shutdown. One partial api sent rumors flying.

The main reason for the MBT changes:
They're trying to make it more fun. It didn't work, but there you have it.

Source: Kevmo last night after the PTS tank moshpit.