It all started with a screenshot.
It was me ranking 152 in tier 19 inside of the FEH arena. This is nothing special -- I have given up fighting in arena for a very long time since it was heavily biased to merged units. At a point around duel skill lv4 was just out, when some grail units were score comparable with those premium units, I actually tried hard spending up to 50 swords(?) (that arena ticket thing) to get the best possible scores. It actually worked and I ended with a few arena crowns. But then I quickly stopped doing that since it's too tiring and gruesome. I even stopped caring about staying at least above tier 18. All I do is to come up with a team with the bonus unit and hope for 5 auto wins at easy.
What's different is the number 2857: this is a special number to me, and I am even surprised to find that this is the first time I talked about it here. It is special in many ways: it's the decimal approximation of 2/7 (that's why the cut off is beautifully at 1000), it's room number in tenhou where I played 10000+ games in, it's the osu! map ID of a classic song...but here, this is what attracted me to write something about it.
I wrote about proportions of players in different tiers in 2017, then updated when they added tier 21 (crown tier) in 2018 although the distribution stays almost the same with the update. If we know the approximate proportion of players in each tier, we can use it to approximate the number of active players around.
According to what I calculated, tier 19 contains about 14% of players. With 2857 players in tier 19, that is ~20k active players in total. And what did we have in the past? Quoting what I wrote:
What is surprising is that they did not make the top tier unreachable -- tier 20 contains top 7% of the players... This is quite generous --- or overly generous. Consider that there are around 100k active players in the pool currently...
That is a 80% drop in active players!!!
Well that's not a big shock after all, as we all know the game's been declining since the wave of three houses resides. We know that from the number of votes in the choose your hero event, sensortower rankings the complete failure of SD mode... and this arena figure is merely another straw adding to the declining situation.
I remember how the AR cutoff drops gradually -- in the past you needed a score close to tier 39, something like 20980 or so to get a gold chair (rank 3000+). Then it gradually creeped down to 20950, then 20900, then 20850...and now you basically secures a golden chair by staying at T38. Some has been arguing the change due to the shift in balance between offence and defense, but all such arguments pale in front of the plain number of players in a tier, not to say IS is still rotating metas between attacking and defending units.
Many modes become stupid and unenjoyable -- some too easy and auto-able, while some too hard and rage baiting (Pawns of Loki...). Content creator leaving. Devs start recycling old artworks to produce new units. Powercreep at borderline out of control. This is a game with its fate in sight.
The only question is...when will we see Fortune Weaves and related units in FEH?
*
Another dwindling game I want to talk about is Godville. This is a game where I might have implicitly talked about, but I am quite surprised that I never covered it clearly on my blog.
This is a 'ZPG' game, a 'zero' player game where you observe your stupid hero working on his own quest with limited interference. This is inspired from the classic Progress Knight which is strictly ZPG -- it caught my eyes for a while, but eventually abandoned because it takes up CPU resources constantly (this is another thing I want to talk about sometimes in the future!), if so why don't I use the resource to mine bitcoin instead? That was the time where regular laptop computer could mine bitcoin with proper value in 2026.
And for Godville, they started from scratch: a diary written by the hero, interferences like voice command, encouragements and punishments; guilds; PVP modes like arena and dungeons; long term goals like temple and arks...
For once, I was so dedicated to optimizing my hero's performance. I had 100/8, 100/4, 100/2 in my first 300 arena duels. There was a random roadside skirmish mechanic in the past where you could run into duels even without entering arena -- and I left a party temporarily just to deal with that stupid fight. I wrote guidelines for those modes -- the guides are called "guide to sailing", not "xxx's guide to sailing". I was top 10 for reaching 3 consecutive long term goals, all while playing in a rather relaxing pace.
(Fun fact, this is a game maintained by two Russian devs with payment accounts in Hong Kong. Perhaps not fun anymore since 2022...)
It was a game that I fully endorse until the new adventure modes and the new long term goals became slightly more biased to P2W. You can't gain extra progress without very dedicated and resource consuming gameplay. I was mildly annoyed when the long term goals like that was produced, although I still ranked 10 at the end. But then we get yet another long term goal of similar nature, so that was the time where I decide to enjoy the game in a backseat instead.
I still enjoy the game in terms of what my hero would do:
05:46 Forretrio told the funniest joke in the world. Shyborg cracked a rib laughing. 05:48 Shyborg told the funniest joke in the world. Blackpony cracked a rib laughing.
or when my little pet did something stupid but adorable:
02:15 Pokie healed the monster. the Headless Chicken looks confused, but happy.
...who doesn't like that? Every diary entries are voted and filtered with the single goal of being universally humorous, and I think the game is doing a great job in that aspect. It is totally free to read all these. The game provides absolutely enough resources as long as you don't blow them into competitive rank racing.
It was the game's 16th birthday a few days ago. The devs were honest: "We’ll be straight with you: the community has been quietly shrinking. Not dramatically — but enough that it matters."
We were given the task to invite players to try the game, and I am more than happy to do so. If you want some simple humor, want games that do not necessarily need any input, want some numbers growing (but not the quick way), please give Godville a try!
No invitation link, no commission. Just pure passion on a game I have spent long enough on. :)
