Less and less people playing dst?

[SapoLover]

20 hours ago, Cheggf said:

That's a very good question. Don't Starve Together gives you real life money for having the game open (on Steam), so it's already going to inherently have an artificially inflated number from bots & idlers.

I don't think so. I mean, yeah the game is cheap and each week you get, like 12 skins drops? But how many of them are marketable? Are they even worth the power they consume? And steam money stays on the steam account. And even if you wanted to join that market you'd have to wait months or years for the thousands of items selling before you on top of the few people that buy them. I don't think the number of players is inflated by much if at all.

[Cheggf]

48 minutes ago, SapoLover said:

I don't think so. I mean, yeah the game is cheap and each week you get, like 12 skins drops? But how many of them are marketable? Are they even worth the power they consume? And steam money stays on the steam account. And even if you wanted to join that market you'd have to wait months or years for the thousands of items selling before you on top of the few people that buy them. I don't think the number of players is inflated by much if at all.

The game is trivially easy to run dozens of copies of on the same computer at once, and many items are worth several dollars. If the game didn't constantly go on sale for $0.75-$2.50 I'd agree with you that it isn't worth the effort.

[Uedo]

Just to chime in with my perspective. I don't know if it has dropped off but I find myself WANTING to play, like i'll get the itch, but I tend not to anymore. I checkout the skill trees, get up to rifts and then just kinda fade out from playing. Nothing shakes things up much and there doesn't seem to be an end in sight, so it's hard to motivate myself to play tbh.

[cybers2001]

14 hours ago, Mike23Ua said:

no, to make a human want to play a game longer, they just need to offer that human more options than what DST currently offers it’s players.

You never miss an opportunity to say that, yet I'm sure 98% of the playerbase doesn't care about being able to itemize the stats of every single entity in the game.

[Mike23Ua]

5 minutes ago, cybers2001 said:

You never miss an opportunity to say that, yet I'm sure 98% of the playerbase doesn't care about being able to itemize the stats of every single entity in the game.

That would be… boring.

And Lazy, and if I was a game designer if that was ALL that I offered my players in a huge menu full of things to toggle and flip at their desires, I would personally be extremely disappointed with myself.

No one actually plays any of the other games that I reference so you won’t understand until you actually DO, but changing just a few stats on something is the absolute worst way to make a game more enjoyable for people.

Let’s use lights out mode as an example shall we? People who play this mode, play it to be challenged by a world that’s locked in permanent darkness, but yet the more updates Klei adds to the game, the less challenging this mode becomes when characters like WX78 are running around with a Infinite durability no consequences Night Vision, Winona gets Redeployable Spotlights and immunity to dying. Etc…

Now if on this mode WX78’s Night Vision could be tampered with by Charlie’s shadows randomly short circuiting out or running off battery power, or if Shadow hands physically unscrewed Winona’s spotlights lightbulbs so they drop to the ground and need to be re-socketed, then Lights Out would have its own unique gameplay and challenges.

But until someone actually sits down and discusses “Okay how can we make this mode different from this mode or how can we make this really hard annoying thing significantly easier for relaxed mode”

The game is going to continue to lose player interest simply because it isn’t flexible enough.

 

[cybers2001]

3 minutes ago, Mike23Ua said:

That would be… boring.

And Lazy, and if I was a game designer if that was ALL that I offered my players in a huge menu full of things to toggle and flip at their desires, I would personally be extremely disappointed with myself.

No one actually plays any of the other games that I reference so you won’t understand until you actually DO, but changing just a few stats on something is the absolute worst way to make a game more enjoyable for people.

Let’s use lights out mode as an example shall we? People who play this mode, play it to be challenged by a world that’s locked in permanent darkness, but yet the more updates Klei adds to the game, the less challenging this mode becomes when characters like WX78 are running around with a Infinite durability no consequences Night Vision, Winona gets Redeployable Spotlights and immunity to dying. Etc…

Now if on this mode WX78’s Night Vision could be tampered with by Charlie’s shadows randomly short circuiting out or running off battery power, or if Shadow hands physically unscrewed Winona’s spotlights lightbulbs so they drop to the ground and need to be re-socketed, then Lights Out would have its own unique gameplay and challenges.

But until someone actually sits down and discusses “Okay how can we make this mode different from this mode or how can we make this really hard annoying thing significantly easier for relaxed mode”

The game is going to continue to lose player interest simply because it isn’t flexible enough.

 

Games offering alternative games modes had been a rather common thing for the longest time. Though in the case of multiplayer games, most of the game modes just... never get played. Remember back when League had dominion? Or when Unreal Tournament had like a dozen different game modes? Hell, even DST had player-vs-player modes that I'm not sure even exists anymore.

[Mike23Ua]

15 minutes ago, cybers2001 said:

Games offering alternative games modes had been a rather common thing for the longest time. Though in the case of multiplayer games, most of the game modes just... never get played. Remember back when League had dominion? Or when Unreal Tournament had like a dozen different game modes? Hell, even DST had player-vs-player modes that I'm not sure even exists anymore.

Your comparing games which in order to enjoy those modes you need multiple players to play with (& queue into matches) to a game that should be releasing modes and DLC as if it were still a single player game.

Everything in DST (with maybe exception to the now discontinued Gorge & Forge Stuff) can be played completely by yourself in Singleplayer.

So think of it as more like that.

[cybers2001]

Anyway, game looks pretty healthy going by steam charts, at least.

DST's 24 hour peak was 39k players. Compare that to:

• Factorio: 18k
• Satisfactory: 13k
• Terraria: 32k
• Lethal Company: 34k
• Phasmophobia: 26k
• Palworld: 31k

Though Stardew Valley has, uh.. 86k. Apparently everything changed for Stardew Valley back in March, because its ATH prior to that looks to be closer to 60k.

[lowercase skye]

1 hour ago, cybers2001 said:

DST's 24 hour peak was 39k players. Compare that to:

• Factorio: 18k
• Satisfactory: 13k
• Terraria: 32k
• Lethal Company: 34k
• Phasmophobia: 26k
• Palworld: 31k

Higher than Lethal Company on a weekend is CRAZY. I knew DST was doing well, but not THAT well, wow.

[Bumber64]

2 hours ago, cybers2001 said:

DST's 24 hour peak was 39k players.

How do we know how many of those are actually playing? That number includes any accounts AFKing for free skins.

(Stardew got a major update back in March, IIRC.)

[gaymime]

2 hours ago, Bumber64 said:

How do we know how many of those are actually playing? That number includes any accounts AFKing for free skins.

(Stardew got a major update back in March, IIRC.)

probably about the same as terreria which kinda makes it easy to afk. i once left that game running overnight because i tabbed out then forgot about it, and in the group i am in that isn't exactly a unique experience XD

[Duck986]

On 8/30/2024 at 8:42 PM, nimzowitsch10 said:

Most of my DST friends have all quit playing for a while now. Is this the case for anyone else? Nowadays I just play on a solo world. I tried to play the beta but very few people have servers in the beta.

Feels like DST is in a slump in terms of updates and long time fans arent as excited for beta/updates anymore. Guess that is the life cycle for every game. 

Surely the case for me, brother. In a small Discord community I'm still a part of, I used to have plenty of friends who play DST. But right now? Radio silence. Everyone scattered around to other games they like or wanted to try.

I still kinda follow the updates, but the last time I actually played DST was before skilltrees. After that, the game stopped being my cup of tea (for many reasons, not just skills) and I abandoned it.

[Bumber64]

16 hours ago, gaymime said:

probably about the same as terreria which kinda makes it easy to afk. i once left that game running overnight because i tabbed out then forgot about it, and in the group i am in that isn't exactly a unique experience XD

That's not deliberate, though. It's not going to be done as often, or by as many.

[Cheggf]

16 hours ago, gaymime said:

probably about the same as terreria which kinda makes it easy to afk. i once left that game running overnight because i tabbed out then forgot about it, and in the group i am in that isn't exactly a unique experience XD

The only thing you get in Terraria for idling is in-game resources which are trivially easy to just spawn in. The amount of people idling in Terraria to farm things is probably equal to the amount of players idling in DST to farm things, so DST has people/bots grinding real money in addition to those fake items that you can just spawn in. 

[gaymime]

8 minutes ago, Cheggf said:

The only thing you get in Terraria for idling is in-game resources which are trivially easy to just spawn in. The amount of people idling in Terraria to farm things is probably equal to the amount of players idling in DST to farm things, so DST has people/bots grinding real money in addition to those fake items that you can just spawn in. 

eh, the money thing is not really relevant. i used to sell all my stuff and i made about 2 quid after three months of selling every thing i could. a lot of items arent sellable and most items arent sellible for more than a single penny. you shouldnt let yourself get worked up over it

that being said the reason an idle happens is less important than it happening

[Cheggf]

47 minutes ago, gaymime said:

eh, the money thing is not really relevant. i used to sell all my stuff and i made about 2 quid after three months of selling every thing i could. a lot of items arent sellable and most items arent sellible for more than a single penny. you shouldnt let yourself get worked up over it

Even if you got every single drop every single day for those three months and even if that's the expected average to get, if you had a hundred copies of the game open that'd be 70 quid a month just for setting up some scripts. In poorer regions that's a lot of money.

47 minutes ago, gaymime said:

that being said the reason an idle happens is less important than it happening

The reason an idle happens is what causes it to happen. Do you think that Don't Starve & Cookie Clicker have the same ratio of people actively playing the game vs simply having it open that? The more reasons a game has for someone to keep it open the more people are going to keep it open. Every game is going to have people who just don't close it because they're coming back to it soon or forget to close it. Every game does not have mechanics that encourage you to keep it open like passive item drops (Don't Starve) or automatic gameplay (Cookie Clicker).

[gaymime]

5 hours ago, Cheggf said:

Even if you got every single drop every single day for those three months and even if that's the expected average to get, if you had a hundred copies of the game open that'd be 70 quid a month just for setting up some scripts. In poorer regions that's a lot of money.

The reason an idle happens is what causes it to happen. Do you think that Don't Starve & Cookie Clicker have the same ratio of people actively playing the game vs simply having it open that? The more reasons a game has for someone to keep it open the more people are going to keep it open. Every game is going to have people who just don't close it because they're coming back to it soon or forget to close it. Every game does not have mechanics that encourage you to keep it open like passive item drops (Don't Starve) or automatic gameplay (Cookie Clicker).

ok, you don't know how steam works. that is fine, i am going to tap out here though since it is not reasonable to explain how much cost goes into something like this and how incredibly inefficient and time-consuming and risky it would be to try and make back the investment cost and then make some sort of profit after that. jeez.

[Cheggf]

20 minutes ago, gaymime said:

ok, you don't know how steam works. that is fine, i am going to tap out here though since it is not reasonable to explain how much cost goes into something like this and how incredibly inefficient and time-consuming and risky it would be to try and make back the investment cost and then make some sort of profit after that. jeez.

Literally 90% of accounts that have Team Fortress 2 open are idle bots for farming drops. You're projecting about who doesn't know how Steam works.

[DegenerateFurry]

42 minutes ago, Cheggf said:

Literally 90% of accounts that have Team Fortress 2 open are idle bots for farming drops. You're projecting about who doesn't know how Steam works.

Funny that you bring up Team Fortress 2, because I was just about to bring it up myself: it shows that DST is not heavily botted. Here's TF2's graph. 

TF2's day-to-day player graph is a weird, choppy mess with a very high constantly-active player count uncharacteristic of other games. The reason is tens of thousands of idle bots constantly active, which tend to go offline and come on in batches (and it used to be much worse before Valve mass-banned a lot of bots). This is what any heavily botted game's player graph will look like, or it might be even flatter. 

DST, however, has this graph: 

DST's graph has basically the exact same pattern, with some mild variance, day-to-day. It shows players gradually coming online, peaking, going down as they go to sleep, and coming back up as they wake up. There's a bit of a baseline because timezones and, yes, some idlers mean that there's always gonna be someone with the game open, but it's not a huge fraction of the playerbase by any means.

Also, side note: look at the over-the-years graph on the bottom there. It shows that DST has steadily increased in players over the years and has stayed about the same since the end of the single weird spike in April 2023, with regular dips and rises (we are now in a dip). 

[lowercase skye]

Funnily enough, I used to see public servers with the specific purpose of joining to idle with godmode in an empty world that automatically opens your gift boxes for you... in like 2017. I'd also see locked servers with 50+ player slots all full of Steam accounts with the same name + a number, likely just one person farming skins for that market money.  But as marketable skin prices plummet and the majority of profitable ones (like character skins) get removed from the drop pools, this sort of thing disappeared, and I'd be very surprised if any bot networks like that still exist. At least to any degree worth considering.

[Vultureneck]

People out here talking about old the old player base leaving cause they're growing up n'stuff as if these same people wouldn't put in 10,000 + hours into it all over again even without any updates.

Dst has changed so much over the years that it's scarcely the same game, while before it was more of a sandbox interaction game, the devs have been pushing of more of an action adventure genre. 

Because of the more simplistic designs of earlier bosses different strategies to do wacky interactions to clear bosses showed up and I know many people who got satisfaction from using/discovering new ways to make a setup to deal with different bosses and to turn base building into a form of combat.

Nowadays whenever a new boss drops the way they are designed seems to be intended to make it difficult for any of these strategies, and some long time methods for dealing with bosses are getting patched out so people have to beat bosses the "right way" which usually involves grabbing a weapon and learning to kite them and beat them to death. I don't know about y'all but the combat system in dst has very little to do with why I like to play the game and yet with each big fight it gets more focus and the general management that used to be very prevalent is taking a back seat. 

 

While the number of people who play dst has remained high there has been a huge shift in the people that are playing the game, and anyone who has been on the forums for a few years will know that there's been a huge shift in the perception in the game and the way people talk about/play it. I'd say the player base has largely grown, but a very large percentage of the long-term players have been shifting away from this game. 

[Mike23Ua]

Remind me later today when I have time to get online and actually play DST how many people are hosting worlds.

It might be different on PC and PlayStation who have Klei Servers, and I’m not sure about Switch… but Xbox can certainly give off the impression that dst is a “Dying Game”

The Important thing you have to keep in mind here though is that even though you can play DST with other players, You can also still play it completely by yourself.. while a game like say “Dead By Daylight” requires queuing into matches and relies on having that active player base to still be playable.

[NPCMaxwell]

2 hours ago, Vultureneck said:

People out here talking about old the old player base leaving cause they're growing up n'stuff as if these same people wouldn't put in 10,000 + hours into it all over again even without any updates.

Dst has changed so much over the years that it's scarcely the same game, while before it was more of a sandbox interaction game, the devs have been pushing of more of an action adventure genre. 

Because of the more simplistic designs of earlier bosses different strategies to do wacky interactions to clear bosses showed up and I know many people who got satisfaction from using/discovering new ways to make a setup to deal with different bosses and to turn base building into a form of combat.

Nowadays whenever a new boss drops the way they are designed seems to be intended to make it difficult for any of these strategies, and some long time methods for dealing with bosses are getting patched out so people have to beat bosses the "right way" which usually involves grabbing a weapon and learning to kite them and beat them to death. I don't know about y'all but the combat system in dst has very little to do with why I like to play the game and yet with each big fight it gets more focus and the general management that used to be very prevalent is taking a back seat. 

 

While the number of people who play dst has remained high there has been a huge shift in the people that are playing the game, and anyone who has been on the forums for a few years will know that there's been a huge shift in the perception in the game and the way people talk about/play it. I'd say the player base has largely grown, but a very large percentage of the long-term players have been shifting away from this game. 

Thanks for explaning why I don't like combat especially in THIS game in comparison to DS where I exploit every way possible to deal with the monsters just to not end up in permadeath xD

[Echsrick]

3 hours ago, Vultureneck said:

People out here talking about old the old player base leaving cause they're growing up n'stuff as if these same people wouldn't put in 10,000 + hours into it all over again even without any updates.

Dst has changed so much over the years that it's scarcely the same game, while before it was more of a sandbox interaction game, the devs have been pushing of more of an action adventure genre. 

Because of the more simplistic designs of earlier bosses different strategies to do wacky interactions to clear bosses showed up and I know many people who got satisfaction from using/discovering new ways to make a setup to deal with different bosses and to turn base building into a form of combat.

Nowadays whenever a new boss drops the way they are designed seems to be intended to make it difficult for any of these strategies, and some long time methods for dealing with bosses are getting patched out so people have to beat bosses the "right way" which usually involves grabbing a weapon and learning to kite them and beat them to death. I don't know about y'all but the combat system in dst has very little to do with why I like to play the game and yet with each big fight it gets more focus and the general management that used to be very prevalent is taking a back seat. 

 

While the number of people who play dst has remained high there has been a huge shift in the people that are playing the game, and anyone who has been on the forums for a few years will know that there's been a huge shift in the perception in the game and the way people talk about/play it. I'd say the player base has largely grown, but a very large percentage of the long-term players have been shifting away from this game. 

exactly how i feel, the newer stuff just gets made overly complicated just for the sake of combat wich never realy was the games strong point but now it feels like every update HAS to have something about combat, the big worm is part of it, and the fact the rabbit king wich seems to be way stronger then your average sandbox enemy with a knockback attack and enemy summon alsol plays into it, like why cant there be something simple for once anymore if you can fight it?

[Mike23Ua]

28 minutes ago, Echsrick said:

exactly how i feel, the newer stuff just gets made overly complicated just for the sake of combat wich never realy was the games strong point but now it feels like every update HAS to have something about combat, the big worm is part of it, and the fact the rabbit king wich seems to be way stronger then your average sandbox enemy with a knockback attack and enemy summon alsol plays into it, like why cant there be something simple for once anymore if you can fight it?

What game have you guys been playing for the last few years? Lol… Like I’m sorry I legit don’t intend to come off as sounding Rude, BUT Klei added Combat based stuff throughout all areas of the game, AND they keep doing it.

If you need examples-

Players who enjoyed going out on Hunts to bring back food had hunt surprises added in as Combat challenges, and to top that off things like No eyed Deer could no longer be stun locked to death so they now run away which causes you to likely run into a MacTusk camp and get darts shot at you Etc..

Players who enjoyed Peaceful Seafishing were met with a boss that spawns if your fishing, or Attacks from SkitterSquid, Or Monkey Pirates.

Players who enjoyed Gardening were met with a literal binding weed, Fire nettles, and oh yeah a boss that can spawn from neglected crops, that doesn’t even touch on late game rift Brightshades intentionally targeting your farms to make your life a nightmare.

There’s never been a time where DST was NOT about Combat.. so for people to be complaining about it now, doesn’t make a whole bunch of sense to me.