What's your outfit's retention rate?

[Aveox]

Starwolf:

1) 16 members
2) 0 (Friends and family invites only so far)
3) 1 squad of anywhere between 2-12 players. 12 out of 16 players have been online in the last 7 days (75%)
4) Number of people has slightly increased since launch. We lost a few, but gained slightly more.
5) Out of 16 people 9 PS1 vets of which 7 are still actively playing.

[Mastachief]

Originally Posted by Figment

How many players signed up?
40+ Vets and 15 new recruits (vets from other empires and completely new guys)
How many players do you typically recruit per month?
1 and it's not for lack of trying
How many are still playing on an average day (number of squads)?
7people
How did that change over the past four months?
It was regular 20 people a day
What's the mix between old (PS1) and completely new players?
Now its 80% new guys to the outfit

The game has zero roles for smaller outfits. There is no metagame its just zerg vs zerg. Due to the lack of defensible positions and the spam and the low ttk, zergfit's like BRTD just roll over you often 10-1 outnumbering you and then think they are uber because they took a base.... seriously how can it be fun to ghost everything after 50 guys have climbed over one another to get those 6 kills with the stupidness of the rush resulting in 14 of them dieing. Generally as soon as i see a zergfit rolling a base and the pointlessness of the fight with your 10 guys and perhaps 7 random friendlies i don't leave the spawns. This typically describes every fight outside of your own zerg.

Essential it's a team death match with no auto balance teams nothing more.

Nobody that craves intelligent gameplay can stomach the shittyness for long.

70% of our members sit waiting on better gameplay/metagame, until that happens we have to rely on trying to poach new members here and there, but we are finding that even new to the game players are not sticking around. We run open squads to recruit potentially good members but it seems most new guys just want to solo whore or zerg but who can blame them there is nothing else to do that rewards them.

[Emperor Newt]

How many players signed up?
Currently we have about 600 people in the outfit. But we surely need to do a cleanup. Again.

How many players do you typically recruit per month?
We don't recruit. We are gaming community and everybody that uses our forums is free to join and play with us. So I cannot say how many people actually join us. But I would say it dropped to maybe one or two players per week.

How many are still playing on an average day (number of squads)?
We have around one to two squads each night. On squad ops nights we can bring one to one and a half platoons.

How did that change over the past four months?
More or less stable, but numbers are dropping. When the game was fresh we could easily bring in a platoon each night and two on ops nights.
Currenlty it's about the same people filling the platoons with a few "randoms" joining in now and then. But the core is the same players.

What's the mix between old (PS1) and completely new players?
I would say about 30% of the "core players" are PS1 vets or have at least played it for some time. But I don't have exact numbers.

Also our login percentages from the PSU stats:
Last 30 days: 48%
Last 7 days: 29%

[DirtyBird]

Shit you have 600 ppl and can only get a squad or two each night

[Eggy]

Originally Posted by Mastachief

The game has zero roles for smaller outfits. There is no metagame its just zerg vs zerg. Due to the lack of defensible positions and the spam and the low ttk, zergfit's like BRTD just roll over you often 10-1 outnumbering you and then think they are uber because they took a base.... seriously how can it be fun to ghost everything after 50 guys have climbed over one another to get those 6 kills with the stupidness of the rush resulting in 14 of them dieing. Generally as soon as i see a zergfit rolling a base and the pointlessness of the fight with your 10 guys and perhaps 7 random friendlies i don't leave the spawns. This typically describes every fight outside of your own zerg.

Essential it's a team death match with no auto balance teams nothing more.

Nobody that craves intelligent gameplay can stomach the shittyness for long.

70% of our members sit waiting on better gameplay/metagame, until that happens we have to rely on trying to poach new members here and there, but we are finding that even new to the game players are not sticking around. We run open squads to recruit potentially good members but it seems most new guys just want to solo whore or zerg but who can blame them there is nothing else to do that rewards them.

This, this and this. My outfit has been active since early beta and we have alot of PS1 vets. We have just under 40 members and still havent managed to get a full squad online in all that time. Most of the time its max 4-5 people. Recruitment is a dead loss, noone wants to join small outfits for exactly these reasons ^^.

People log on, come on TS all enthused and exited to play. We invariably end up sat waiting for a base cap, following a zerg (getting TKd alot) or being steamrolled by a zerg. Add in all the hackers, exploiters and cheaters and 45 mins later they have logged in frustration at lack of actual fun. When you only get a few hours gaming a day, a few times a week the crap parts of PS2 outnumber the good parts and people loose the desire to log on.

As a member of a gaming community, I expected to see people get in of an evening, log onto steam and TS and come and play. Whats actaualy happening is people are prefering to go play other games. With CS, LOL and ARMA3 acounting for a large chunk of people.

[Emperor Newt]

Originally Posted by DirtyBird

Shit you have 600 ppl and can only get a squad or two each night

Most of them don't seem to play the game anymore (as said, we need to do a cleanup. 50% haven't logged in for a month at least) or are more casual players who log in maybe once or twice a week.

So after a cleanup we will be down to roughly 300 people and only about 100 of them are active on several nights per week. The "core" of our outfit is maybe ~40 people, but even from them only a few play every evening.

[Gimpylung]

How many players signed up?
70 odd
How many players do you typically recruit per month?
4 or 5
How many are still playing on an average day (number of squads)?
8 player squad is good at prime time
How did that change over the past four months?
Not significantly, invite 4 or 5 in a month, 4 or 5 recruits from previous month seem to go inactive
What's the mix between old (PS1) and completely new players?
50/50 Vets are still the backbone, new recruits come and go. We found some great new players to the franchise too.

We'd invite more but inviting randoms in the gate is a tad depressing as you get the impression you'd have to invite 10 of them to retain 2 after about 2 weeks.

Incidentally, LFS have no desire to be a huge outfit, but we would like to be twice the size ideally, currently its just about maintaining our current size and expanding very slowly. We'd like to expand much quicker.

It's easier to be a huge zergfit in this game, you just vacuum up every tagless player you see. It's much harder to be a tight coordinated medium sized outfit that actually wants committed friendly players.

[bpostal]

Per PSU:

How many players signed up? 398
How many players do you typically recruit per month? Given previous statistics, about half a dozen. Of those perhaps one or two will remain active over a month.
How many are still playing on an average day (number of squads)? Peak time: a platoon and a half. Ops: Two to three platoons. Off time: anywhere between a couple guys to a reinforced squad.
How did that change over the past four months? Severe drop off in active members since launch. Beta was best for us, as far as player activity and engagement IMO.
What's the mix between old (PS1) and completely new players? Predominantly new blood, estimate aprox 10% of players retained from Planetside to date.

People may refer to BRTD as a zergfit, and perhaps there are times when that is correct. We work with what we've got, always think ahead and maintain a strategic mindset. If you don't like it, then you are free to go fuck yourself.

All estimates are based on personal observation, the content of this post do not represent any bias or official recognition of BRTD leadership.

[Hamma]

Our outfit is pretty good but there are definitely interest issues starting to rear their heads.