These Xfire threads are a pain, so lets nip this in the butt, lets have a poll about it, how many of us in the MMORPG community use Xfire.
The number of people who use x-fire is irrelevant, and not the problem with x-fire. You can get incredibly accurate data from a very small sample size. Most political polls for example only survey between 500 and 1500 people to represent the 100 million plus voters (in American politics). Guild wars 2 itself has between 9k and 12k on a given day. Many researchers would murder wives/husbands in their sleep for a samble that big. The problem with xfire is not the size of the sample, but the method of collecting the sample. Since x-fire users are self selected, there's no generalizability. So you can't compare game to game in any meaningful way regarding size of population. But you can detect trends within the sample itself and the game itself. X-fire is very good at detecting week to week trends within a game as long as the number of users for that game stays obove 300 or so. Lower than that and you start to see games with erratic points on their lines.
Comments
The big problem with xfire is the sample is not representative of the population.
Still, the trends do usually correlate.
This ^^
This looks like a job for....The Riviera Kid!