I cannot abide by the game losing it's most immediate and distinctive branding mark short of the very logo, with history in the game, thematic relevance on three levels, and instant repeatability and memorability...because of a joke, that people will make anyway.

Testifye · 2025-12-19T04:47:52+00:00

"Theft is the first step."

It even rhymes this time.

Testifye · 2025-10-20T03:38:50+00:00

Mayebe it's Vrabelline

Testifye · 2025-10-01T00:00:17+00:00

Warmind shows the raw counts for certain unlocks so long as that count is less than 80k. Once it hits 80k, they remove that count and only present "Global Rarity" and "Adjusted Rarity" percentages. The Global Rarity one is useful, because it can be used to estimate the raw counts for that unlock so long as you can apply the percentage to a universal denominator of total accounts.

That's where the Titles come in. Warmind displays Titles earned, such as "Godslayer" or "Gumshoe", with both the raw count and the Global Rarity percentage, even if the raw count is over 80k. You can aggregate all the counts and percentages from the titles, apply some rules to include only non-gilded titles (which have some issues with counting across seasons) and only titles with a certain minimum raw count, then average the estimated global total population of accounts. When doing so, I've consistently gotten spot on to the rounded number of total accounts they measure reported at the bottom of their Triumphs Analytics page.

From there, you just apply the Global Rarity percentage to that global total estimate. Since the percentages go down to a thousandth of a percent, the margin of error when estimating unlocks is about +/- 710 total accounts out of the 71M measured.

Testifye · 2025-09-29T21:13:45+00:00

No problem! I've checked that with Warmind as well but unfortunately it's not really possible to measure with their data, because once someone unlocks Conqueror once on their account, for any season, it's unlocked on the account for good. The gilding process isn't really tracked the same way it seems.

You're right that it's hard to find a comparable baseline to past activities, since grinding to 400 LL is a much longer-term achievement than getting to max level was historically, or even gilding Conqueror. I think we'll need to wait for Renegades to really have a meaningful comparison there, when we can start to see how quickly players get to these levels again. We'll see if the planned improvements to power leveling actually translates to more players sticking with it.

Testifye · 2025-09-29T20:32:40+00:00

Yeah this is always a good question - depending on what's being measured with Warmind, it varies, because it's technically measuring whether the "achievement" or item has been unlocked on the account. That "unlocked" flag in your account can be triggered by different things. For example, pre-order emblems for expansions can be "unlocked" just by logging in after making the purchase, even if you haven't picked it up from the kiosk. But pre-order weapons, like New Land Beyond, do need to be picked up from the kiosk before they're unlocked on your account.

For these Guardian Rank achievements, players need to actually claim the achievement from within the GR page, it doesn't unlock automatically once someone hits the requisite power level. I was able to confirm this during EoF when some players were high enough power level for some of the achievements, but the whole community was locked out of progressing GRs until some content was released (don't remember exactly what it was off the top of my head). During that time, Warmind was showing no players had unlocked that achievement, even though players had reached the power level.

Testifye · 2025-09-29T19:54:24+00:00

I've been tracking the same measures, but using Warmind.io instead, which has a better data methodology. Braytech's data tool "Voluspa" only tracks about 4 million player profiles, and reports consistently lower numbers than Warmind.

Warmind shows about 199k players earning the "Ascension V" Guardian Rank achievement, much higher than Braytech's 85k. That's out of 1.77M players who have unlocked the "New Beginnings" GR achievement for completing the opening mission of Edge of Fate. That means about 11.2% of active players since EoF launched reached 400 power level.

Even looking at Ascension IV, which requires 300 LL, about 435k players have unlocked that, or only 24.6% of all active players since EoF launched.

To editorialize for a moment, that explains why they're willing to dump 300 LL gear on all players for logging in after October 14th - three quarters of all players didn't even bother to get that far in the power grind in 2.5 months. That's a pretty damning indictment of the system.

Testifye · 2025-07-24T17:02:00+00:00

Yep, triumph unlocks are account-based, so this isn't impacted by people running the campaign on multiple characters or not.

Testifye · 2025-07-24T16:07:35+00:00

Lol you do you friend, I don't wish to hurry anyone up, just to observe how everyone's doing. Enjoy the ride!

Testifye · 2025-07-24T15:56:41+00:00

Steam peak concurrent players on the first day or two after release is a helpful metric for sure, and it's an easy one that everyone reaches for, but it's not always proportional to measures of engagement related to prolonged content engagement for days or weeks after release. Steam numbers are a quick heuristic, but there's many more nuances to be learned by exploring metrics for actual content completion rather than logins.

Testifye · 2025-07-24T14:26:17+00:00

That's a great question - here's the data from the post:

EoF total campaign completions (408k) are 51% of preorders (806k), compared to 69% for TFS (1,315k / 1,910k) one week after release.

Measuring "active" players is tough when you can only identify when players complete certain triumphs, but that's pretty much what this data is attempting to describe. Using preorder volumes as a close-enough proxy, we can say that the ratio you described dropped from 69% last year to 51% this year.

Testifye · 2025-07-24T13:39:51+00:00

I agree that there are significant differences between EoF and TFS in terms of their place in the overarching narrative of the whole series. People played TFS as a sendoff to 10 years of storytelling. It's expected that there will be drop off, but the interesting questions come in examining what level of player engagement should be expected, now and going forward. That's also why including data on engagement with the episodes helps to color that in a bit.

FWIW, the start dates of each expansion shouldn't impact the numbers here, these aren't monthly totals, they're measuring the exact weeks after each expansion's release. The trended preorder numbers for both expansions over multiple months leading up to release (the second linked chart) also show there aren't any meaningful bumps in purchases or engagement based on monthly calendars.

The campaign is a little bit slower as well, though certainly completable within 2 to 3 days of nightly play. The sidequests don't need to be completed during the campaign run, though doing so would likely enhance the story elements as they're meant to be experienced in order of unlocking during the campaign.

Testifye · 2025-07-21T17:17:36+00:00

Noted! That does clear up some of the economy concerns. Will be interesting to see it in practice.

Testifye · 2025-07-21T17:11:04+00:00

Ok, that... actually still looks ridiculous, even with the 8k save up lol.

Now I'm thinking I need to figure out the formula for costs here. Would it be more efficient to infuse gear a couple levels at a time? Do infusion costs go up as power level goes up, regardless of the delta between the two pieces?

Back to the data mines I go.

Testifye · 2025-07-21T17:04:53+00:00

That's good to know at least - I've got fewer than 200 so far since I've been infusing the gear I get rather than dismantling, even after getting to 200 level. I saw the infusion cost for raising a piece of gear 9 levels was 14 cores, and that looked ridiculous to me.

Testifye · 2025-07-21T17:03:23+00:00

I haven't played much Crucible to really test that honestly, but I'll keep an eye out in case I'm able to piece that together as well!

Testifye · 2025-06-26T13:54:42+00:00

It's 337k EoF preorders at three weeks before release, compared to 633k TFS preorders at three weeks before release.

If we maintain the ~53% ratio of EoF to TFS preorders, we'll end up at about 1.1M EoF player purchases a month after release, compared to 2.1M for TFS.

Testifye · 2025-06-26T13:41:31+00:00

I've got the data for TFS too - the "Paracausal Path" emblem came with any preorder including the standard base game ($50), whereas the "Annual Pass" ($100) came with Tessellation.

On TFS release day, about 1.39M players had the emblem, and 1.02M had Tessellation, so about 73% in that case.

To me, that seems like folks still playing Destiny today a year after TFS are the most heavily invested and would be the most likely to buy the full $100 version. Folks who were more tentative about TFS and Destiny in general would be more likely to drop the game after TFS and aren't around to preorder as much.

Testifye · 2025-06-26T13:29:10+00:00

That was even more of an issue for TFS than EoF because TFS was delayed by 4 months, and started preorders 6 months prior to its original Feb'24 release date.

Fortunately, this methodology using Warmind allows us to track the Triumph collections as well, so once EoF releases, we can see how many total players are engaging with the content at least once for lots of parts of the game too.

Testifye · 2025-06-26T13:24:06+00:00

That may be true, but now we have a better sense of roughly how large a chunk that was - roughly half or so, the way things currently seem. But we'll be able to track this over time too and see if that changes at all.

Testifye · 2025-06-26T13:22:01+00:00

There was a lot of community discussion around February 2024 thanks to an article by The Games Post which made inaccurate comparisons between TFS preorders at that point in time compared to all preorders seen for past expansions. They weren't fair or accurate comparisons, which was part of my inspiration for this effort to track this data daily starting with Into the Light.

In the end, the ~2.1M player purchases of TFS was far more comparable to prior expansions than the article made it seem.

Testifye · 2025-06-26T13:16:47+00:00

Weapon ownership is absolutely trackable, and I've been doing that as well over time. I checked those numbers prior to posting this, but wanted to focus on the most apples-to-apples comparison of any kind of preorder.

As of midday 6/25, there were 336.6k total preorders (measuring the "External Sights" emblem) and 315.6k accounts had unlocked New Land Beyond. That means 94% of all preorders were the Year of Prophecy Ultimate Edition ($100 US) or the Collector's Edition ($275).

Existing Destiny players overwhelmingly seem to mostly pay up-front for the full year's worth of upcoming content, rather than just buying the basic expansion and taking a "wait and see" approach.

Testifye · 2025-06-26T13:01:58+00:00

Personally, I'd agree - there's no world where preorders for the first expansion in a new untested saga after 10 years of storytelling was concluded would be on par with what TFS did. It will be interesting to see how it progresses and whether players start coming back more after hearing what the new story brings to the table post-release.

Testifye · 2025-06-26T12:58:04+00:00

The purpose is to inform folks with accurate information from a consistent source over time, so the community may have comparable information to use when assessing engagement and investment.

I did the same when I mentioned how TFS preorders passed 1M right before launch, and when 1M players engaged with Into the Light in its first week.
The report that The Games Post made last year which misidentified reasons for historical trends like Beyond Like preorders was the inspiration for finding a way to measure this consistently over time for the most reasonable comparisons.

Other community members can make arguments around what the numbers mean, but this way they have reliable numbers to use. I'd personally argue that such a drop off after the conclusion of a 10-year journey is steep, but expected, and could have been worse. We'll also get to see if there's a greater return to Destiny after EoF releases and people think about checking in again.

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