To be accurate, I count… (including the holiday event ladder)
12 matches on PS3
9 on 360
12 on PC
Unfortunately, there were another 10 matches or so scheduled on PS3 that were canceled when the servers went down. The server outage at the worst possible time sort of put an end to any momentum it had early on, I think.
Even 43 matches (lets include those 10 that were lost) isn’t exactly great response over a holiday period. I think this clan update has shown us that the community on the consoles is just as small as the community on the PC. We’ve suspected it for a while but there’s no “steam top 100” for the consoles.
If tangoliber’s numbers are accurate it looks like the xbox, in spite of being the largest group to buy the game, are the smallest community. Or maybe they’re just the least active or least interested in rated matches?
I wouldn’t say that 360 is the smallest community. It could be that they just consolidated into fewer clans.
I feel like there are only 10-15 regulars (people who play almost every day) these days on PC. And maybe 15-20 regulars on PS3. Judging from the Bethesda forums, 360 should have at least that many.
We already knew that the community was pretty small. But after the holiday ladder started, there were several matches each day, until the two server outages. Then people got frustrated and stopped challenging.
Also, clans figured out that if they just didn’t show up to a match that there was no penalty. (Neither team gets a win or loss.) So I think that made it so people put less effort into trying to make a match they agreed to. There was one clan on PS3 who accepted lots of challenges, but only showed up to 1/5 of them… and that probably made the other clans frustrated. (Its a good idea not to give people wins for no-show matches… but there could be an attendance record or something.)
Oh yea, there were multiple instances where two clans showed up for the match, but the invite didn’t work…and neither team got a win or loss.
Brink was probably doomed on PC from the start, but if you had 1) custom match browser, and 2) clan system from day 1 on consoles, then I think that 360 and PS3 would have had very active communities, considering their install base, and how well the game suits their platforms. This game is perfect for console clans…it just needed the right framework to support that.
I only count 22 matches ( holiday event) if you take the normal ladder as well you get 43 matches. And I guess we will never know how many of them are no shows
Doing a recount:
PS3 main ladder: (2 matches… these are apparently developer tests so I will not count them.)
PS3 NA Holiday Event: 11 matches (including 1 match that doesn’t show up on the ladder, but does in the profiles of the clans who played it. Another win you have to scroll down to see because the clan ended up with a sub-1500 rating)
360 main ladder: 6 matches
360 NA Holiday Event: 4 matches
PC main ladder: 3 matches
PC EU ladder: 9 matches
So, I’ll say 33 matches.
None of the matches on the holiday event ladder were no shows…because they don’t get recorded unless there are 4 players in a match. There were a lot of no-show matches in the latter half of the month. I would guess 20 or so on PS3. Neither team gets a win or loss in those matches…and they shouldn’t count anyway.
Anyway, its obviously not a lot…Killzone 2 still had hundreds of daily matches even 2 years after release… but I still think that the clans did a pretty good job considering all the issues around Brink and how few people play the game.