In Destiny 2, a diligent player statistically evaluated 500,000 posts and created a community sentiment analysis for the last 2 years.
This analysis is about: Currently, there is significant criticism in Destiny 2, as it seems that the Season of Worthy is not well received by players. A Guardian did not want to rely on gut feeling and conducted a data analysis.
He meticulously analyzed the community’s mood over the past 2 years using Google tools. He looked back until the summer of 2018, just before the launch of the major Forsaken expansion.
Via reddit, the Guardian marsman12019 published his findings. In about 12 hours, he gathered 4,500 upvotes and over 360 comments where users discuss his analysis results.
This is what the sentiment analysis shows: To clarify the mood and collected data, several graphics were created:
We see the mood on the vertical axis, and on the horizontal axis, we see the various seasons and DLCs – starting with the releases of 2018 on the left and ending with April 2020 and the current Season 10 on the right.
Does Season 10 have issues because Season 9 ended so strongly?
This is interesting: According to the graph, we are currently experiencing an all-time low that Destiny 2 has reached since the beginning of the recording. Even the infamous Faction Rally event from 2019 fared better overall.
Interestingly, the mood just before Season 10 started was higher than ever. This likely relates to the high expectations that the community event and the return of the Trials triggered. This could partly explain the steep decline – it seems that the overwhelming expectations provoked a significant fall.
How the statistics came together: According to his own statements, the Destiny analyst marsmann12019 wanted to check “if we are really in a worse state than in previous years, or if we are all just looking at the past through rose-colored glasses.”
To do this, he sifted through almost 500,000 reddit posts and evaluated the mood of the posts. He accomplished this using “Google Cloud’s NLP Sentiment AI”. There, the titles of the posts were categorized from negative to positive and assigned a value from -1 to 1:
- -1 is a title with extremely negative sentiment
- 0 would be completely neutral
- 1 receives a thoroughly positive title
As an example of a rather negative title, he cites “Crucible matchmaking is completely broken” – thus, the post receives a negative -0.899. Anyone who wants to delve deeper into the topic can find various additional statistics in the reddit post:
He receives particular praise for his very analytical data evaluation and transparent presentation of his numbers and methodology. Additionally, Guardians appreciate the many stylish, detailed, and sometimes complex graphics.
Do you find it interesting that just before Season 10, the posts were more positive than ever? What do you think about the sentiment analysis? Can it only go uphill from here? The Spring Event 2020 is also on the horizon and looks much more interesting with its competitive mechanics than last year.
