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Current Graphs Showing Decline - (Found something interesting).
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Since both graps are from different sites and more or less look the same it tells us at least part of the story.
But I think most people except possibly the worst fans thought the game would loose plenty of players after the first few weeks, the question is still if it can stabilize and turn the curve around the next few months or not.
I will not call TOR either failure or success just yet.
Does anyone really care if SWTOR has 1 million or 10 million subscribers? In the end its all about wether or not YOU, the player, are enjoying the game.
I know when the game first launched, I was on break from college and on vacation from work. So my girlfriend and I played quite a bit each day. Now its back to school and work, so you can guess where all my time is going now.
The game launched during the holiday, when most people have off from work or school. Its no big mystery as to why the amount of time played has gone down. Does this mean the game is crashing and burning? No one in this thread will ever be able to give you that answer.
Of course like anything else, people will just use whatever data there is to push their argument, regardless of which side of the camp they are on.
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Or to elaborate on this in more detail:TOR showed in Xfire the following player numbers (not hours) that go with that graph:
- in the week after launch it had 8.9-10k players per day
- the first days after New Year's Eve it reached a peak of 11-11.5k players per day
- a week ago and last weekend it had 10.3-11k players per daySo, if we have the figures of this weekend we can compare how things are with before the free month ended and with the launch weeks. However, when it comes to player numbers instead of player hours, I can't say that it is synchronous with the shown graphs in OP, for the obvious reasons (hours =/= players, server status has been variable, not constant).
At some other places, people reported that 30% player retention loss after the first month is usually seen with MMO's, I think some analists talked about that figure too at the time of WAR and Aion. Will probably have been some more for AoC, DCUO and WAR (or not, no idea). Will be interesting to see how TOR will compare.Ding! Winner.
Fact remains, the anti-SWTOR crowd tries to tout the SWTORArena website's graphs as proof of population decline. While, the website actively states that it only shows server loads. There's a big difference there.
This is basic statistics, you take a group of people, ask them their opinion and then extrapolate towards the whole population. And yes it works, in my country media can predict the result of general election to within 2-3% accuracy before a single vote got counted, and thats with a samplesize of a couple thousand people.
That being said xfire graphs are a bit unpredictable for a whole other reason, its because they don't show what people try to read into them. Xfire only logs how much time people spent playing a game, thats what these graphs are about. However if you want to make predictions about subscriptions the number you need is how many unique people are playing a game compared to the day/week/month before(or in other words how many people that played before but stopped playing).
If 4 people go from playing 4 hours a day to 1 hour a day that does not mean they are all going to cancel their sub, however if out of 4 people playing the game 4 hours a day 3 suddenly stop playing completely ... yeah chances are they are dropping sub. These two situations would be indistinguishable on a time based graph(both would show the graph dropping to 1/4th of its value), however the ramnifications regarding subs are vastly different.
So yeah, currently all we are seeing is that people are playing the game less than during its release around christmas time, which is natural since that was a combination of vacation time and the game being shiny and new and people being glued to it for obscene amounts of time. However we simply do not know wether its due to players leaving in disgust, or simply adapting more sane gaming habits due to work and family and stuff.
That being said im not very optimistic, judging by the speed they pushing out content we will be pretty much where we are now in half a year, plus maybe guild banks a new warzone(maybe you can even choose which to join) and an operation and 2-3 FPs. And then we are already in the hot hype phase for all the new MMOs about to launch while having 80% of the current playerbase through with the story driven content, which means it will be a comparsion of their endgame vs Tors endgame. A comparsion Tor will imho loose because they didn't built the foundation for it.
And tell me how your crystal ball tells you that? Fact is, Universities, schools, work vacations have ended. People are regaining their sanity after being absorbed in the game. They're playing more reasonably...this happens in EVERY MMO. Perhaps if one followed the industry like I do, they'd know that.
And tell me how your crystal ball tells you that? Fact is, Universities, schools, work vacations have ended. People are regaining their sanity after being absorbed in the game. Their playing more reasonably...this happens in EVERY MMO. Perhaps if one followed the industry like I do, they'd know that.
So your crystal ball works better than his?
Uh... yes it would. They measure server load, not actual population. So, more people allowed on a server = less full the server is until those new slots are filled.
Your premise is false. I'm not using a crystal ball. My observation is based on the history of MMOs. His is an exercise in unfounded speculation. Perhaps you can see the difference? (then again you may not be able to).
Most other MMORPGS's are rising over the last couple of weeks if you take Xfire as a "sample" so your "holidays over" argument is kind of flawed..
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My crystal ball predicts graphs will be much more fun during the next 7 days.
It also predicts negative subscription numbers. I told it to stop bashing TOR, but it won't listen.
Hype train -> Reality
If the samples are decent samples, ie. large enough and without too much bias of various sorts, then they should follow similar trends.
Xfire is not necessarily INVALID. It is simply too hard to tell if it is actually VALID. If you get a few different samples all with the same trends then that is a pretty good indiciation even if you can't really prove that any of those sample are truly low bias.
It doesn't really matter that much, you'll never convince a fanboy of much even if you get 20 sample showing the same trend. These are statistics. They inherently prove nothing. They can indicate some correlations for statistic of any sort can never prove anything. Anyone telling you different is either wrong or lying.
Since you can't technically prove anything there is always a glimmer of hope for a fanboy and that is all they need to call you a hater.
Not flawed at all. Tell me, what other MMOs have launched in December? That's right, none. You're trying to compare apples and oranges. But I understand this is subtle stuff, so not surprising.
Heck, I even played LOTRO for a bit over the Holiday. I'm sure, because LOTROs numbers are depressed to begin with, that xfire would show a spike for people like me who might jump on another game for a while. Means nothing.
? Which ones have shown a rise? You meant Xfire, right?
I kind agree with you on some points. But the last sentence, aren't you doing exactly the same as you're accusing fanbois of, namely calling them fanbois when they disagree with Xfire as the valid choice for trendspotting? (I personally find Xfire pretty handy for the global trends, but I'm also aware of its limitations)The arena graph is interesting and quite telling if BW doesn't fiddle with how they define standard, heavy, full, etc ... It won't tell the whole story though as it will treat a fairly large range of online players as being equal. It could say standard but be really close to the next delineation. It could say heavy but be at the minimum for that designation. The trends themselves are important , but it's far from an exact science given the small number of server descriptions.
You have to be very careful not to read to much into XFire. There is a nugget of value there but you have to polish carefully!
A part of the decline is fewer people who use XFire playing - down from an initial 11k, then 10k and now 9k. This could represent a 10% drop.
The other key element however is hours played. After the initial splurge this settled at around 5-6 hours a day; pretty much in line with EA's own statement. Now the hours played seems to have dropped to 4 to 4.5 hours. So a part of the reason for the XFire decline is simply people (who use XFire) playing less.
To get a like for like comparison you would have to multiply todays 'hours played' by 33 to 50% (to get an equivalent number based on 5-6 hours played).
As for the SWArena statistics there is no reason for Bioware to adjust there server caps a month after launch. Imagine:
"Some bod is tracking our server caps, quick better adjust them upwards." "Shouldn't we have done this when there were queues." "What? Pamper to paying customers. Image is much more crucial; get it done."
Doesn't wash. A decline in server loads is - as with XFire - a combination of (probably) less people and those that are left playing less. And there are server consolidation threads out there so no surprise.
Now what none of the graphs suggest is that SWTOR is increasing. Again it is possible given the hours played factor but it doesn't look like it. A decline although maybe not a huge decline atm.
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The two graphs combined do hint that, as I suspected due to observations, there was a server cap increase in early january. The peaks and valleys are obviously weekdays and weekends, and the xfire weekends didnt fluctuate as much in activity as the swtorarena ones.
There obviously is a decline, and this week looks terrible, but the real test will to see where the weekend peaks fall.
SWTOR does seem to be heading the Rift route of PvPers extremely unhappy with the first patch, and people getting bored in general. SWTOR has the added fun of people being unhappy with the delay bug. I thnk the AA thing matters about as much as Rifts first month security flaw: very very few ultimately give a shit.
I've already explained to you why...but you've conveniently refrained from responding.
Of course there is a reason. To reduce queues. The cap adjustment happened, but it happened fairly early (late dec/early jan)
This only tells you how active players are, not anything to do with subs. The activity for every single themepark game players goes down significantly once they hit max level due to the nature of each game. This won't change in SWTOR. All this proves is that people are playing less which is what always happens anyways.
I turned AA off after they implemented it in the patch. It just kills my FPS. The texture issue seems kind of big though. I doubt my machine could handle them, but if you built a machine for the game you should be able to play the version they were advertising.
Hey sweetie when you were formulating this hypothesis did you happen to check the graphs of any of the other games on xFire? You might want to do that before you start forming any more opinions.
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I looked at other MMOs out of curiosity and that HUGE drop between jan 14 and jan 18 is across the board. Some games are even worse.
However, most games had their peak of the month on Jan 14