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The runescape player base. Facts, Figures, and Explanations of what really affected the player count
Since there seems to be much debate about the actual facts, figures, and popularity surrounding RuneScape, I'd like to clear this up. Here we have a graph about RuneScape's unique visitors, provided by compete.com:
Now, I will explain the graph. Please note that not all Losses/Gains can be attributed to game features, but large updates at the time of visitor change is a logical reasoning for my given narration.
In July of '07, Jagex released the widely contraversial "Pest Control Update." It was basically a nerf of skillpoints, and did little to help the game besides splitting level groups - which it did improperly. You can see the dip in players visiting the website. The total loss was between 50,000-100,000 visitors.
During August and September, Visitor Decreases are unreliable due to players leaving to begin the school year.
Despite the resistance some players gave to the "Unlimited Store Stock Update" in October of '07, the decrease in macroers was almost immediately visible, and it caused many angry players to return because of the end of store-bots. This, compounded with Lootshare in the same month helped boost visitors.
However, during November of '07, players began to realize that the hyped updates were only half baked, but continued to play and visit because they were told fixes were coming.
NOW FOR THE BIG ONE:
The trading restrictions of December '07, January '08.
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Contrary to statements by many people that macroers leaving caused this large dip you see between December of '07 and January of '08, the fact is that many mainstream macroing tools used by the gold farmers *did not* connect to RuneScape in the normal way, and thus could not have generated website visits. Website visit counts are generated by a web client visiting any page using the Http protocol. Java, however, is not counted in these rankings, since it is a direct and encrypted connection between the client and the server. Therefore, when a macroing utility directly loads the client, it DOES NOT count as a unique visitor.
In the very same month they released the trading restrictions update, they lost over 750,000 visitors (Not macroers!!), and have yet to regain them.
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Some people came back, expecting fixes or changes over the next month, but as it became clear that nothing would change, memberships expired, and players were fed up. Angry veteran players that were reluctant to leave and the initial quitters who had returned, once again left.
In may of '08, the hyped graphical update managed to get some players to return, and some new sign-ups, but once it was released, the flatlined player count says it all: *Not enough RuneScape players care about graphics for it to make a bit of difference.*
The graph will only show August of '08 once the month is complete; it will be interesting to see what the PvP announcement will do to the number of visitors. However, their recent change of putting an ad before allowing a f2p's game to load (sometimes, you may or may not see it) may cancel out the good effects of this announcement (If there were any) or even make the player count drop further, being that most players are f2p, and uncommited (not paying) players generally don't like to wait to play their games.
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Throughout the graph, you may notice that about 3/4ths of the userbase is quite solid: those are the f2ps. Jagex no longer advertised their high member count after the trade release, signialing that logically, a good portion of lost players were the more dedicated p2p's, and still more p2p's switched to f2p.
The reality of it is that they need less f2p servers because f2p players play less consistantly, meaning only several thousand will be on at one time, but will visit 1-5 or so times throughout the month. P2p players generally play the game far more often (twice a week to every day), during longer periods of time, so it seems to be an equal number of p2p's and f2p's on the game at once, but in fact its just that f2ps are lazy gamers. (to put it bluntly)
I hope you enjoyed my anylization of the RuneScape playerbase, and that this sheds some light on the issue.
~ A formerly dedicated RuneScapian ~
~ Simiswimm ~
Comments
Nice find Swim! ! ! I enjoyed the read; it made my day much better.
It looks like they have around 3million unique visitors. I highly doubt that one of every three visitors is a member; it doesn't seem very likely.
It seems as if JaGeX has dropped below the one million member spot.
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In memory of Laura "Taera" Genender. Passed away on Aug/13/08 - Rest In Peace; you will not be forgotten
Yea Good Job swimm! I have been wondering where to find this info. Now yes this cannot tell us how many people are actually playing the game, Because i too have logged in randomly for about 5 min at a time, to see if they have done any changes, and I know many that have done the same in the past year. Then we take a look at all the increase in new members from the" lifting of the lil kiddie ban" last june and apprently that didn;t put a dent in the graph because we all know they would not have the patience to play the game long enough to get anything done anyhow.
They have such a high amount of players comming in from places like mini clip and fun orb but yet no jump in the graph because of their turnover rates. They can get people in the door, but then don;t bother keeping them there. I have been able to see the player count briefly when i logged in recently quickly before the page loads, and it is always around 73,000 in the last few months . So it appears to me that there may be alot of site visitors, but not that many actually playing. Prior to the fall trashing of the game, I had never seen the counter below 150,000 even during slow times.It was almost always above 200,000. It is sad and their "opening of the game for the 13 under crowd" and excessive advertising they have been doing lately has not seemed to affect their numbers all that much, because of all the players that have been still giving up on the game since. With the kind of strong advertising they did out at e3, and miniclip, and on the internet the numbers should have skyrocketed, but nah too many have been disappointed with Jagex for that to happen at this point.
Alot of players are coming back when the PvP update is out!
We'll when it comes out i'm gonna play runescape for sure
Playing: WoW, Eve online, guild wars
Played: Everquest, runescape, archlord,lineage, lotro
Waiting for: Aion
I repeat a previous post; "The new PvP system will drop coins based on the level of player I kill. So when I kill a level 100, I get 800 coins maybe. Great. Well lets say he comes back and kills me? I lose 50 million in armor, because you still lose stuff as usual."
Umm... thats total bs... I would never play that.
EDIT: In addition, I would like to note, about 4 million unique visitors per month before the messed up updates, and 3 million now, means that their 6 million accounts claim proves my point: most people have 2 or more accounts, so Jagex DOES NOT have 6 million unique active players, just 6 million unique active accounts. Nice propaganda, Jagex.
..Look at this everyone (new chart):
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/runescape.com/?metric=uv
runescape.com 2,682,440 -12.9% -26.8% The number of people visiting a site.
From 3.75M from the chart SWim had and now this. Seems like this means they lost 1million unique visitors.
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In memory of Laura "Taera" Genender. Passed away on Aug/13/08 - Rest In Peace; you will not be forgotten
Well then it's official. Runescape is dying. It's had a long healthy life but they shot themselves in the flippin' spleen when they got rid of trade that's what got me most. I didn't PvP much but it had an impact on player levels.. The worse part is, I can't get into any games anymore because runescape had me hooked and i don't like anything with less than 100k players because i need people to talk/level with. I hope the numbers decrease to something really low like 100k and then maybe they'll see some sense and be forced to reverse their changes. Hopefully it will happen really soon like maybe tomorrow lol because i need a game!
"If they can make Penicillin out of mouldy bread, they can sure make something out of you," - Muhammed Ali
Oi, I got an outdated chart! If I had just waited one day I woulda got a new one lol. Man, yet another big drop when they announced the retarded PvP. Proves that people aren't so stupid after all, and didn't to fall for a dumb PvP system like they were suggesting.
http://www.worldsinmotion.biz/2008/08/wait_interview_henrique_olifie.php
Your literature says that you have 6 million accounts. Is that active accounts?
HO: Yes. Those accounts are specifically those that were played in the last month – or more accurately the two weeks, because we like to keep it tight. And over 1 million of those players pay $6 a month for a full account, a number that has been growing faster and faster since we launched RuneScape HD.
We really are the second largest Western MMO after World of Warcraft. And we're happy to have people playing our free-to-play section. 40% of our game world and quests are free-to-play. You do get more frequent updates and new content if you're a subscriber, but even still, we update our free-to-play section very regularly. Every two weeks or so. Rather than only put out updates every 6 months or expansion packs every few years, we have a team working round the clock to keep the game fresh, and as a result we have 35% growth every year.
There you have it boys and girls, the biggest lies of the year!
Not only that, but this proves that most RS players must have plenty of accounts. When you have less than 3million players but somehow have 6million accounts log on...It also makes me doubtful of how they have one million paying members, yet they lost all these players. Something is fishy around here!
Also, a 35% growth each year? I think not!
P.S. if anyone else finds more RS articles then post 'em here!
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In memory of Laura "Taera" Genender. Passed away on Aug/13/08 - Rest In Peace; you will not be forgotten
Yea.. I have known they were big fat liars for a while now. They lie to their players, they lie to the press, and when you call them on it, they just ban you and delete the threads. I dare anyone to attempt to post this Data on their forums.. but yea it ireally is pointless, because no one will be able to read it there anyways, they will just remove it and ban you. Those charts just show website hits, so many of those hits aren't even players. They will serve you poo on a platter and tell you it is chocolate cake... The sad thing is all these kids eat it up and think it is great anyways!
looks like a job for me,they wont get rid of me so easily,i'll try to make sure someone reads it,or get auto-banned by one of their forum bots,like i got auto declined after i sent an appeal,Jagex are also hypocrits..(dunno how to spell it and i dont care
hmmmm
looks like a job for me,they wont get rid of me so easily,i'll try to make sure someone reads it,or get auto-banned by one of their forum bots,like i got auto declined after i sent an appeal,Jagex are also hypocrits..(dunno how to spell it and i dont care
wow.....you have to be a member to post on forums (i didnt know that) so basicly...you have to pay to see the other 30% of the extremely childish community that is RuneScape....jagex is low...very..very..low
hmmmm
Maybe they got growth and shrinkage mixed up?
Very good explanation, deviliscious
. They are always trying to hide something. Well, ive been observing the Runescape people count for months now. Now they usually get like 96000 max average and 33000 min average everyday! What a surprise....If I saw runescape having 30000 players at midnight and early morning everyday, that would be a shocker am I right? But sadly, its a common sight these past few months, and its all their choice. If they just made better plans....well I don't want to rant about that but I can say that unless they make some thing thats both creative and unique they are doomed for a long ride down.
The funny thing about their counters though .. People have been thinking they are padded for a while now, I thought it was a glitch at first, but when more and more people were saying the same thing.. it was appearing as if it wasn't just a page refresh problem. When every world was offline it would still say there were alot of people playing. There have been a few threads on this here I found one of them:
www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/167099
The thing is prior to the fall updates I never saw less than 150,000 players online at any given time, and normally it was around 250,000 on. It i sad regardless if they are padding counters or not that it has dropped that much.
The funny thing about their counters though .. People have been thinking they are padded for a while now, I thought it was a glitch at first, but when more and more people were saying the same thing.. it was appearing as if it wasn't just a page refresh problem. When every world was offline it would still say there were alot of people playing. There have been a few threads on this here I found one of them:
www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/167099
The thing is prior to the fall updates I never saw less than 150,000 players online at any given time, and normally it was around 250,000 on. It i sad regardless if they are padding counters or not that it has dropped that much.
Now that really shocks me. Another big conspiracy behind the curtains I guess, and they though that we couldn't find out. This just shows how childish and immature they are when it comes to affairs like this. It makes me feel sick.
This is what I was talking about....low player count
http://i63.photobucket.com/albums/h137/jamesarkoss/Capture_003.jpg