I never said that everyone does that (some people may use alt accounts though), but you have to realize that there are also families that only have one console and multiple accounts/users. They don't play at the same time (there's no splitscreen, yet). This inflates the LB records.
I only care about online players, not how many have played since the patch. Why is it so hard to understand this?
You also have to keep in mind that many people have stopped playing the game after the MM debacle. If you want anecdotal evidence, I've seen that in my friends list. I'm not saying that they're not coming back, maybe they'll return when ND reverts the MM back to its previous status. My point is that you shouldn't count them as part of the pool anymore just because they are recorded in the LBs. If I leave the game, I shouldn't be counted either. Got it? That's why we need an online player count. It would be interesting to see the numbers -day by day- since the latest patch was released.
You still don't understand what an online player count means, right? The graph even shows that there are less online players during night (as expected).
Online player count = how many players are playing at any given time
Daily player count = how many players have played/logged in at least once daily
Leaderboard records = how many people have played at least one match since the patch/LB reset
ND switched from online to daily after the 1.05 fiasco to make their numbers look good (otherwise known as "cooking the books"):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_accounting
I'm not a mug who's going to be impressed by inflated numbers, but to each his own.
You should be mad at ND for not implementing an online player count since UC2. Blame them for not revealing the player pool numbers, don't blame me.
Coming from someone who complained about condescension, this is a hilarious post. I didn't say you did, but why would you even mention it if you and I both know it's not statistically relevant? It serves no purpose.
That 130k number is now 150k, so they've "added" 20k overnight. Does this mean 150k are active daily users? Of course not. But the leaderboards were reset four days ago, so it's pretty accurate for now. It's not like this 150k number is from a year 's worth of data. Remember, it's been over two months after launch, so most people who are playing MP now are not brand new players like in the first week. Like every other game, sales will start to level off after the first month or two. Ironically, an easy way to prove this would be if levels were visible to all.
Multiple people using one console doesn't inflate the numbers. If they're all playing the game regularly, they're all active users. They just play at different times. Not sure what the problem is with that as we're not talking about revenue from DLC (which would only be one purchase in this instance). Obviously DAU would be best, but since we don't have it, we can only go with what we do have. My original reply was to refute your claim that TLoU was more popular than Uncharted, which you haven't proven in any way other than literally on launch of the Remastered version for a few hour window.
Honest question: When has a first entry in a series (like TLoU) ever been more popular than an established franchise? In this case, UC4 is the third MP entry for Uncharted. Common sense would indicate that Uncharted is going to be more popular by default. Then you add in the fact that TLoU is a hardcore-focused MP game, certainly not casual like Uncharted is. It's a lot more difficult to pick up and play TLoU than it is Uncharted, what with the crafting system, inventory management, limited sprint, and 4v4 gameplay, all which are non-casual MP elements.
If you're usually first and rarely underperforming, and usually doing better in solo, this is a symptom that the matchmaking is working well, no?. It is matching you with mostly other solo queuers, both on your team and and the opposition. What is your issue then? You only represent 20% of the team and 10% of the whole match, so solo queuing is always going to be a bad time if winning is the priority, since most of the performance variance is determined by the other 90% of the variables that you do not control. But it seems like your getting the expected outcome if the game is mostly matching you against solo queuers, otherwise you would have many instances where no one on your team, would be having a good time. When the game does rarely match us against solo queuers as a party, scores usually range between 1 and 5 for the opposing team, and 40 for us, but those experiences only appear to occur if matchmaking has failed to find us a party to play with.
As for the last paragraph, if parties could only go against parties, how do you propose the party of 4 finds their extra solo player? The thing is, many parties are not composed of five players. Many lobbies are filled with a combination of party sizes, one team might have a team of four, or a team of two composed of two parties of two. How are these matches supposed to be filled if all of the solo queuers are in their own playlist? The only solution that would still enable fast matchmaking would be to force all games in the party playlist, to feature parties of 5. That way, you could always match one team with another. As I said, that is what Rocket League does for its solo and ranked playlists, but it works for rocket league because it also has modes for smaller team sizes. So if you are a team of two you can play ranked doubles instead.
Otherwise, if the lobbies were split, playing with a party of less than 5 means that you would often enter a match with at least one team mate down, or the game wouldn't be able to start and would spend forever (reminiscent of TLOU's 5-10 minute matchmaking times for < 5 parties)
Without solo querers to fill slots, the matchmaking collapses and I get to spend in excess of five minutes on end just finding a game when playing with friends. The Last of Us featured the absolute worst matchmaking experience that I have ever had (apart from Rainbow Six Siege, which actually suffered similar issues to TLOU), and under no circumstances would I want a return of that.
The issue is this is no longer the case, so something is wrong, like Reckless Onion, tapantaola, and others have mentioned. In an attempt to make things more fair or whatever their goal was, they've broken the game. Although I started playing with my regular loadout again and am back to mostly the same numbers, so this may be an overreaction by me. I'll need to play for a few more days to be sure.
As for the parties issue, again, if it's parties allowed (but not required), solo players can still go into that queue--I did. All I'm asking for is a toggle, this way I know in advance what I'm getting myself into. If I want to subject myself to the challenge of going up against a party, let me do it. But don't force me to do it.
FYI, there have been plenty of long MM times in Uncharted 4, both when I've been in a full party and when I've been solo.
Three times in a row I've only gotten 1 reward from the DLC gameplay chest... the grind is real.
Btw, why did they increase max downs from 1000 to 1400 for DLC (hero) weapons? Are they that good?
They did it probably to give an air of superiority to them. Whether they're actually better depends on your playstyle. I prefer the Arrowhead to the Mettler now because it has all the advantages of a Mettler, Copperhead, and Fossa, so I no longer need to carry Rafe's Para, which frees up 5 LP, which is nice.
