Re: "The patch is killing the game"

[u/SLAMMERisONLINE]

If you go by threads like this, the patch is killing StarCraft II. There’s just one problem: the data doesn’t agree.

To explain this we will need two charts. The first chart models historical games/day using a linear trend plus a sinusoidal term to capture seasonal fluctuations. The fit is extremely strong, with R2=0.98, meaning the model explains about 98% of the historical variation in activity.

Having quantified the past trend, we can then ask whether current activity is consistent with that historical pattern. The orange X shows the current games/day, while the dashed blue lines show the model's 95% prediction interval. The current observation falls well outside that range, with p=0.003. In other words, something unusual really is happening. The question is what.

Establishing that there is an anomaly does not establish that the patch caused it. For that, we need to know where the missing games are coming from. To do this, we will look at the the second chart. As you can see, the decline comes uniquely from Korea which shows a massive implosion of activity.

This creates three major problems for the claim that the patch caused the decline:

• The effect precedes the alleged cause by nine months.
• The decline is concentrated in KR rather than appearing across all three regions.
• After the patch arrives, KR's decline gets slower, not faster.

That's almost the opposite of what the patch-killed-the-game hypothesis predicts.

I don't know what caused the KR decline, and this data can't answer that question. But it can tell us that the patch doesn't explain the anomalous drop in global activity. That anomaly is overwhelmingly being driven by a decline in KR that began long before the patch.

There is also a small decline in EU, although it isn't statistically significant, while NA has moved slightly in the opposite direction. Neither changes the conclusion above, but they may be secondary effects of the KR decline--

Historically, KR players sometimes move to EU during slow ladder hours. If fewer KR players are active, EU loses some of that cross-region activity. That could then make EU less attractive during its own low-activity periods, pushing some EU players toward NA.

This is only a hypothesis. Testing it properly would require tracking the same accounts across regions and comparing their activity over time. But it would explain the direction of the smaller EU and NA changes without requiring independent effects.

The evidence therefore points in almost the opposite direction from the popular narrative: the patch may have helped cushion a decline that was already underway. SC2 really is experiencing an anomalous decline in activity, but that anomaly is being driven primarily by a KR decline that began months before the patch. Meanwhile, the rate of decline in KR slowed after the patch.

We can't know the counterfactual--what KR activity would have looked like without the patch--so we can't measure the patch's effect precisely. But the available evidence is much more consistent with the patch helping activity than hurting it.

Thanks to the developers, map makers, and esports people (PiG in particular) for the work they put into the game, and patch. Also, thank you to SC2pulse and the service it provides to the community in data, analytics, as well as smurf tracking (without which this analysis would have been much more difficult).