Originally posted by lillin Is eq2 growing or dying? A question that is asked daily ................. first ask yourself why do so many ask this question? Do your /who in multiple zones, see what that tells ya. Take into account ten servermergers. EQ2 in all honesty has died and revived many times although the dying has seemed more prominant then the growing has. In eq2 you have many types of players, when this game puts its foot down on which players its aiming for and for the love of god a combat system ............ then we can judge. As of right now they keep swaying thier game design and has pleased and pissed off every type of player at least once. So i hold this verdict when the game stops making major changes and sticks with something ............. then we will see if it rebuilds, holds, or drops population from its current form.
half of those servers became PvP and and Station Exchange servers.
Merging the servers, whether you hated that or not, was not because of people leaving the game. It is because the sheer amount of playable zones almost tripled in 14 short months. Tripling that many zones will create pockets of wide space. By combining 10 servers into others and creating 5 of those into future servers (that is now being used), they saved money from creating newer servers and gave players more people to interact with as the world pretty much almost tripled in size.
As far as the /who command, yes, I urge all who question the population to do that. So many names will pop up (in one zone) that your results will not be able to display them all. If you distrust the server and you think it's a ploy of foul play then I encourage you to /ooc who is here in this zone just say "I." Many people will not respond but the sheer amount that do will give you some indication.
Also, with the Feydark expansion, they are experiencing more server traffic right now that SWG and EQ2 on opening day combined
Just to give you a heads up on server population
People who have to create conspiracy and hate threads to further a cause lacks in intellectual comprehension of diversity.
Only way to know if a game is growing or dying is to roll up a character and go to noob-land, look around, and draw your own conclusions. With a free trial, this is entirely possible.
You cannot trust fanboi's who tell you the world is packed when they are level 60 and all they are looking at is their other level 60 friends. But taking a look at the low-level population in a game will tell you all you need to know.
Originally posted by Billius8 Only way to know if a game is growing or dying is to roll up a character and go to noob-land, look around, and draw your own conclusions. With a free trial, this is entirely possible. You cannot trust fanboi's who tell you the world is packed when they are level 60 and all they are looking at is their other level 60 friends. But taking a look at the low-level population in a game will tell you all you need to know.
Originally posted by Billius8 Only way to know if a game is growing or dying is to roll up a character and go to noob-land, look around, and draw your own conclusions. With a free trial, this is entirely possible. You cannot trust fanboi's who tell you the world is packed when they are level 60 and all they are looking at is their other level 60 friends. But taking a look at the low-level population in a game will tell you all you need to know.
total BS, sry to b so blunt, but thats what this is. "rolling up a character and going to noobland" doesnt "prove" smack, friend.
Oo and ur "fanboi" comment can also b reversed. u cannot trust haters who tell you the world is empty when they r lvl 1 and they sit outside the city gate and beg for coin and groups, and when noone responds they come onto the forums and bash the game and try to convince everyone that the game is "dying". what a load! im truly sry, but im getting sick of this BS day after day. if u dont like the game, fine, thats ur choice, noone is holding a freagin gun to ur head and making u play it. but stop coming in here and trying to recruit followers in ur cult of EQII is Doomed crusade. My god, grow up.
Originally posted by Billius8 Only way to know if a game is growing or dying is to roll up a character and go to noob-land, look around, and draw your own conclusions. With a free trial, this is entirely possible. You cannot trust fanboi's who tell you the world is packed when they are level 60 and all they are looking at is their other level 60 friends. But taking a look at the low-level population in a game will tell you all you need to know.
total BS, sry to b so blunt, but thats what this is. "rolling up a character and going to noobland" doesnt "prove" smack, friend.
Oo and ur "fanboi" comment can also b reversed. u cannot trust haters who tell you the world is empty when they r lvl 1 and they sit outside the city gate and beg for coin and groups, and when noone responds they come onto the forums and bash the game and try to convince everyone that the game is "dying". what a load! im truly sry, but im getting sick of this BS day after day. if u dont like the game, fine, thats ur choice, noone is holding a freagin gun to ur head and making u play it. but stop coming in here and trying to recruit followers in ur cult of EQII is Doomed crusade. My god, grow up.
I didn't say the game was dying. About my statements being total "B.S." as you say, I think the logic is really quite simple:
1) There are a finite number of max-level or high-level characters and they will attrition over time.
2) It takes new players (i.e., folks rolling up first level characters) in significant numbers to offset the attrition from Point #1 above.
THEREFORE, if you roll up a new toon, join a game (say at a busy time like a Friday or Saturday night) and the server is mostly devoid of lower level characters, then that tells you something.
And you'd be blind to ignore that.
And I think my logic could be applied to assessing the general health of any game. I simply answered the post the best way I could, which was to say "roll up a toon and go look." Nothing wrong with that.
Originally posted by Novaseeker Ive noticed many, many, many more people in WoW's starting zones recently than in EQ2's. Just for sh&ts and giggles I started new alts in each game a few weeks ago to do some anecdotal checking on this, because I was curious. What I found was that most of WoW's newbie zones had a good deal of people in them at various times of day, whereas EQ2's did not. This was both on RP servers in each game, so as much of an apples to apples comparison as I could manage. It's anecdotal, but it leads me to believe that less people are starting new characters on EQ2 now than in WoW. .
Try it on the horde side. It's empty at the very least was on my server. I play on Alliance server (both my 60s there) and horde and Both have very little newbies around. I have to get my upper level buddies because there is no one around working any of the quests. I went from level 1-35 on my horde shaman and saw a total of about 10 people.
Course tonight you login to EQ2, start of a fae or any race that can start in Kelethin and there are tons of newbies. I expect BC will have that same reaction to WoW when it comes out.
maybe u didnt notice this, but not just newbies rolling new characters, so ur numbers will b off. time of day, server, and day of the wk all play an active role in population density. me point is simple, ur not going to b able to tell if the game is dying or dead with the /who command. and u never mentioned in ur first post anything about the time or day to roll a noob char. u just said that "Only way to know if a game is growing or dying is to roll up a character and go to noob-land, look around, and draw your own conclusions." this will get u nowhere. do that in WOW at a low point in the night, and u might think that WOW is dying cause yesterday there were 3x that many ppl in that zone. populations go up and populations go down, its the nature of the beast. me biggest quam with this post is that its being treated like it really matters whether there r 5 million ppl playing it, or 200k ppl playing it. as long as u have fun, wth do u care how many ppl play it or how popular it is. btw, i have played WOW b4 and been in the lowbie zones when there was noone at all in the zone, does that mean that the game is dead, or dying? didnt think so. so y would u apply that logic to this game, or any game for that matter.
Oo and me real deal with ur post is the fanboi comment. there really was no need for that.
yeah, and like the ^poster above me just posted, if u were to roll a noob char right now, u would think that the game is at its peak and growing. but we dont know. maybe every1 there in the newbie zones on eQII r just rolling alts. misleading info, eh?
Originally posted by PlanoMM maybe u didnt notice this, but not just newbies rolling new characters, so ur numbers will b off. time of day, server, and day of the wk all play an active role in population density. me point is simple, ur not going to b able to tell if the game is dying or dead with the /who command. and u never mentioned in ur first post anything about the time or day to roll a noob char. u just said that "Only way to know if a game is growing or dying is to roll up a character and go to noob-land, look around, and draw your own conclusions." this will get u nowhere. do that in WOW at a low point in the night, and u might think that WOW is dying cause yesterday there were 3x that many ppl in that zone. populations go up and populations go down, its the nature of the beast. me biggest quam with this post is that its being treated like it really matters whether there r 5 million ppl playing it, or 200k ppl playing it. as long as u have fun, wth do u care how many ppl play it or how popular it is. btw, i have played WOW b4 and been in the lowbie zones when there was noone at all in the zone, does that mean that the game is dead, or dying? didnt think so. so y would u apply that logic to this game, or any game for that matter. Oo and me real deal with ur post is the fanboi comment. there really was no need for that. yeah, and like the ^poster above me just posted, if u were to roll a noob char right now, u would think that the game is at its peak and growing. but we dont know. maybe every1 there in the newbie zones on eQII r just rolling alts. misleading info, eh?
De-nial is not just a river in Egypt. Very well, as long as you enjoy the game and it's up and running, so be it.
But I think I gave a satisfactory answer to the original poster, whom I was addressing anyway. He asked how you tell if a game is "dying or not". I answered that question.
Many of us have played several MMORPG's over the years and you can kind of tell when the server community is thriving or dying. Rolling up a toon on a Saturday night, going into a major city and finding it nearly empty, IS a strong message. It's a clue, take it for what it is.
Now, you look at WOW's major cities: packed. (Not that I love WOW, but it is a successful game).
Look at EQ's 2 main beginning cities: kind of empty (at least last time I looked at them a month ago). Those are clues. Step out into Commonlands or Antonica and do a /who check, and if it's kind of empty, again another clue.
Follow the path of "clues" through the zones until you find more than a dozen folks and maybe you can start to see the pattern and draw your own conclusions. If you are in Qeynos at the bank or the auction house place and there is no one else there, well... you don't have to be Columbo to figure some things out.
Originally posted by Billius8 Only way to know if a game is growing or dying is to roll up a character and go to noob-land, look around, and draw your own conclusions. With a free trial, this is entirely possible. You cannot trust fanboi's who tell you the world is packed when they are level 60 and all they are looking at is their other level 60 friends. But taking a look at the low-level population in a game will tell you all you need to know.
What are you talking about? My highest level char is level 26.
Originally posted by PlanoMM
total BS, sry to b so blunt, but thats what this is. "rolling up a character and going to noobland" doesnt "prove" smack, friend. Oo and ur "fanboi" comment can also b reversed. u cannot trust haters who tell you the world is empty when they r lvl 1 and they sit outside the city gate and beg for coin and groups, and when noone responds they come onto the forums and bash the game and try to convince everyone that the game is "dying". what a load! im truly sry, but im getting sick of this BS day after day. if u dont like the game, fine, thats ur choice, noone is holding a freagin gun to ur head and making u play it. but stop coming in here and trying to recruit followers in ur cult of EQII is Doomed crusade. My god, grow up.
Originally posted by PlanoMM maybe u didnt notice this, but not just newbies rolling new characters, so ur numbers will b off. time of day, server, and day of the wk all play an active role in population density. me point is simple, ur not going to b able to tell if the game is dying or dead with the /who command. and u never mentioned in ur first post anything about the time or day to roll a noob char. u just said that "Only way to know if a game is growing or dying is to roll up a character and go to noob-land, look around, and draw your own conclusions." this will get u nowhere. do that in WOW at a low point in the night, and u might think that WOW is dying cause yesterday there were 3x that many ppl in that zone. populations go up and populations go down, its the nature of the beast. me biggest quam with this post is that its being treated like it really matters whether there r 5 million ppl playing it, or 200k ppl playing it. as long as u have fun, wth do u care how many ppl play it or how popular it is. btw, i have played WOW b4 and been in the lowbie zones when there was noone at all in the zone, does that mean that the game is dead, or dying? didnt think so. so y would u apply that logic to this game, or any game for that matter. Oo and me real deal with ur post is the fanboi comment. there really was no need for that. yeah, and like the ^poster above me just posted, if u were to roll a noob char right now, u would think that the game is at its peak and growing. but we dont know. maybe every1 there in the newbie zones on eQII r just rolling alts. misleading info, eh?
De-nial is not just a river in Egypt. Very well, as long as you enjoy the game and it's up and running, so be it.
But I think I gave a satisfactory answer to the original poster, whom I was addressing anyway. He asked how you tell if a game is "dying or not". I answered that question.
Many of us have played several MMORPG's over the years and you can kind of tell when the server community is thriving or dying. Rolling up a toon on a Saturday night, going into a major city and finding it nearly empty, IS a strong message. It's a clue, take it for what it is.
Now, you look at WOW's major cities: packed. (Not that I love WOW, but it is a successful game).
Look at EQ's 2 main beginning cities: kind of empty (at least last time I looked at them a month ago). Those are clues. Step out into Commonlands or Antonica and do a /who check, and if it's kind of empty, again another clue.
Follow the path of "clues" through the zones until you find more than a dozen folks and maybe you can start to see the pattern and draw your own conclusions. If you are in Qeynos at the bank or the auction house place and there is no one else there, well... you don't have to be Columbo to figure some things out.
so im in Denial because i dont agree with u. lol, typical answer. its the "i cant come up with a real answer, so ill just give a blanket statement to cover me arse and make me look professional". gj, columbo.
In febuary i took advantage of the free one month for everyone with no credit card required.During this time i played roughly 4-5 hours per day after work and i got to about 46 in 30 days played.Thow i knew the 1-50 player base was highley inflated due to this i didnt think the drop off of new characters and players for that fact would be as bad as it would when it was over.When i got tired of my templar around late may i started a monk twink and finding a group in the low 20s was very hard no matter what time of day.Whenever i did a /who 20-29 it would never come back with more then about 12-15 people.
Ive bean siting here today bored thinking about why not give the new expansion a shot but i dont wanna take the chance of blowing money to find a server more empty then i left it.
Originally posted by Enigma I never seen a large decline in this game and Ive been playing for 2 years
To be honest, I dont think I ever ran in a zone and found no one
If anything, I've seen more people
Totally agree. Its not like the first 3 months when we were seeing like 5 Antonicas, 4 Thundering Steppes etc etc but the population is healthy and even playing in Australia there are heaps of people around, and this is off peak time for most everyone else.
Merging the servers, whether you hated that or not, was not because of people leaving the game. It is because the sheer amount of playable zones almost tripled in 14 short months. Tripling that many zones will create pockets of wide space. By combining 10 servers into others and creating 5 of those into future servers (that is now being used), they saved money from creating newer servers and gave players more people to interact with as the world pretty much almost tripled in size.
I find this statement hard to swallow. I remember reading something from Blackguard stating that they had supposedly 'heard' what the masses wanted and that was more players in zones. To me they took the Chicken Little ( Sky is falling ) approach and merged 10 servers since there were 3 MMo's that was supposed to come out in June. DDO and another MMO were one that actually came out while Vanguard got out from under Microsoft and joined the ranks of SOE at that time. I personally felt that they thought they were going to loose a lot of people to those titles and did a bit of a bit of preemptive measure to ensure that they had enough players left on their servers.
I quit the game right when this was announced by BLackguard , cuz if it sounds like it, reads like it I didnt need to taste it to know that it was BS.
Originally posted by Tutu2 Like an earlier poster sad, SOE don't give out census stuff so no one can give you hard facts. But here's the experience of players on the official forums. I no longer play EQ2, but when I did the world was so empty it was depressing. There's something wrong when you've got entire sites dedicated to flaming and bashing SOE, like EQ2flames. It just shows you that they're obviously doing something dead wrong and really pissing off their playerbase http://eqiiforums.station.sony.com/eq2/board/message?board.id=gameplay&message.id=134586
Yet...as someone said...they have about 225,000 (mostly) satisfied users.... so they must be doing something right as well.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Today i will purchase EoF if any stores here sell it ............... lot of game stores do not cary eq2 products on stock here. I will load the game up to start my review process, then i will go to every single non instanced zone and do a /who.
ill report back here with the numbers.
Several months later, maybe 2 or 3 after the newness wears off of EoF, ill do a /who again to emulate what is was like before a big expansion launch ............... see what the numbers say.
This will all be done on kith server, ill probally hit the rp server and nagafen since they are thought to have the greatest populations.
why argue when you have a way to check. Another thing ill do is compare a screenshot from several diff times of the lfg window. One from eq1 and one from eq2. Povar server of eq1 and kithicor server of eq2.
i can tell you as of two months ago, my eq1 server had 87 names of all diff levels lfg , eq2 at the same time of 8 pm central time had 4 names of all diff levels.
Here's a fact for you: There are so many people trying to play EoF that it was taking 5-6 hours just to log in last night because the login servers were all so overloaded. And now servers are down to fix that issue.
Growth is great, but I like it a little more spread out! HAHAHAHA! I just want to go play! *idly watches the EQ2 chat spam while waiting for servers to return to normal operations*
Originally posted by Xandrya Here's a fact for you: There are so many people trying to play EoF that it was taking 5-6 hours just to log in last night because the login servers were all so overloaded. And now servers are down to fix that issue. Growth is great, but I like it a little more spread out! HAHAHAHA! I just want to go play! *idly watches the EQ2 chat spam while waiting for servers to return to normal operations*
Wow, really? What server you play on? On Crushbone I was able to login easily... though the expansion patch did take a bit.
Well I was able to log in easily at 4 PM pst yesterday, it only took me about 15 minutes, but I had friends that started their login later at about 7 pm and it took them until midnight to get patched and in...all due to server overload. And that was on Lucan Dlere RP server, one of the lighter ones.
My friend said he thought it was due to the patch servers placing people in que with so many people attempting to patch during prime time and really had little to do with the login servers. Once he was patched he was ablle to login just fine, just took 5 hours to get the patch done...and that was after loading EoF from DVD.
it took me forever to get into game last night after i patched for 4 hrs. whew....... talk about overload. fae everywhere.
a selfmade census in this game will not "prove" anything, just so you know. i could do the very same thing and come up with the opposite of whatever someone else came up with. i dont know why its so important to some ppl to speculate and try to figure out when or if the game is starting its decline. like it really matters. its already been said once, stop overanalysing and enjoy the game. its retarded to keep bringing this up over and over in every thread that youre apart of. the long and short of it is this, if you feel that the game is dying or dead, go play a game you feel is alive and growing. if its that important to you. the rest of us wont even know that youve gone because were too busy enjoying the game we love. let me reemphasis, a census made by a player will not being taken seriously. take all the screenshots you want, it doesnt prove squat.
Originally posted by Billius8 Only way to know if a game is growing or dying is to roll up a character and go to noob-land, look around, and draw your own conclusions. With a free trial, this is entirely possible. You cannot trust fanboi's who tell you the world is packed when they are level 60 and all they are looking at is their other level 60 friends. But taking a look at the low-level population in a game will tell you all you need to know.
Well the thing about this is that *most* MMOs do not have packed newb zones 2+ years after release. So it's hard to use that as a proxy for how a game is doing. A game can go on for many years with a dedicated veteran population and only a modest level of newcomers. WoW is not like this, but on this point WoW is an outlier, and not really a good bellweather I think.
Originally posted by Xandrya Here's a fact for you: There are so many people trying to play EoF that it was taking 5-6 hours just to log in last night because the login servers were all so overloaded. And now servers are down to fix that issue. Growth is great, but I like it a little more spread out! HAHAHAHA! I just want to go play! *idly watches the EQ2 chat spam while waiting for servers to return to normal operations*
Is this really a fact?!?!?!?!
No, no do not be confused it is just an assumption !
During KoS the servers were being patched this is what was not letting people in. Also this same expansion had quite a few last minute fixes that made quite a large patch to download. So when you have everyone downloading the same patch they wait in a que. Ok, what determines que and download speed? Its not the many people rushing to download so much as the availible mirror sites availible or the traffic alotted to downloading that patch.
So say a game has a million subs and another has 1000 subs. the one with 1000 subs could have a higher que then the million sub game becuase they did not have the ability to handle that much traffic while the other may have ............ this does not prove a game has tons of players.
Want a fact?
About a month before kos was launched most the population had already been stagnated in the dof expansion zones. All was well the two main overland zones usually only had one instance and about 80 to 100 people in each. There was no lag on my system and all was normal, then a month before kos launched the dof zones became extremely laggy while i was using the same computer ........... hmmmmm, kos luanched and the outside zones were laggy beyond playability. Most people waited it out or canceled yada yada ......... you can check eq2's forums from this time for proof of this going on. It was fixed later i guess either by people quiting or they finally fixed the problem.
Now i ask you, with what you learned in the paragraph about allotted traffic from patching how does that tie in with how the game was ran prior to kos launch? Maybe they cut some more traffic down to save money, maybe a whole bunch of people resubed a month before kos launch ( why still normal /who numbers though? )
I dont know about kos but DoF expansion and down made a new instance of the main outside zones when it capped at 100 people. So what does that lead you to believe? There are more people in the pok of eq1 then in all three outside kos zones combined.............
it is a fact, there really were that many ppl trying to get in last night. check the forums, and the mods even admitted as such. i was one of them trying to get in. i dont know anything about the launch of KOS or DOF, but im here for this launch and im an active member of the Official forums, so i am paying attention to how thiings r going down, and ur wrong about it this time.
Comments
I never seen a large decline in this game and Ive been playing for 2 years
To be honest, I dont think I ever ran in a zone and found no one
If anything, I've seen more people
People who have to create conspiracy and hate threads to further a cause lacks in intellectual comprehension of diversity.
Merging the servers, whether you hated that or not, was not because of people leaving the game. It is because the sheer amount of playable zones almost tripled in 14 short months. Tripling that many zones will create pockets of wide space. By combining 10 servers into others and creating 5 of those into future servers (that is now being used), they saved money from creating newer servers and gave players more people to interact with as the world pretty much almost tripled in size.
As far as the /who command, yes, I urge all who question the population to do that. So many names will pop up (in one zone) that your results will not be able to display them all. If you distrust the server and you think it's a ploy of foul play then I encourage you to /ooc who is here in this zone just say "I." Many people will not respond but the sheer amount that do will give you some indication.
Also, with the Feydark expansion, they are experiencing more server traffic right now that SWG and EQ2 on opening day combined
Just to give you a heads up on server population
People who have to create conspiracy and hate threads to further a cause lacks in intellectual comprehension of diversity.
Only way to know if a game is growing or dying is to roll up a character and go to noob-land, look around, and draw your own conclusions. With a free trial, this is entirely possible.
You cannot trust fanboi's who tell you the world is packed when they are level 60 and all they are looking at is their other level 60 friends. But taking a look at the low-level population in a game will tell you all you need to know.
playing eq2 and two worlds
total BS, sry to b so blunt, but thats what this is. "rolling up a character and going to noobland" doesnt "prove" smack, friend.
Oo and ur "fanboi" comment can also b reversed. u cannot trust haters who tell you the world is empty when they r lvl 1 and they sit outside the city gate and beg for coin and groups, and when noone responds they come onto the forums and bash the game and try to convince everyone that the game is "dying". what a load! im truly sry, but im getting sick of this BS day after day. if u dont like the game, fine, thats ur choice, noone is holding a freagin gun to ur head and making u play it. but stop coming in here and trying to recruit followers in ur cult of EQII is Doomed crusade. My god, grow up.
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total BS, sry to b so blunt, but thats what this is. "rolling up a character and going to noobland" doesnt "prove" smack, friend.
Oo and ur "fanboi" comment can also b reversed. u cannot trust haters who tell you the world is empty when they r lvl 1 and they sit outside the city gate and beg for coin and groups, and when noone responds they come onto the forums and bash the game and try to convince everyone that the game is "dying". what a load! im truly sry, but im getting sick of this BS day after day. if u dont like the game, fine, thats ur choice, noone is holding a freagin gun to ur head and making u play it. but stop coming in here and trying to recruit followers in ur cult of EQII is Doomed crusade. My god, grow up.
I didn't say the game was dying. About my statements being total "B.S." as you say, I think the logic is really quite simple:
1) There are a finite number of max-level or high-level characters and they will attrition over time.
2) It takes new players (i.e., folks rolling up first level characters) in significant numbers to offset the attrition from Point #1 above.
THEREFORE, if you roll up a new toon, join a game (say at a busy time like a Friday or Saturday night) and the server is mostly devoid of lower level characters, then that tells you something.
And you'd be blind to ignore that.
And I think my logic could be applied to assessing the general health of any game. I simply answered the post the best way I could, which was to say "roll up a toon and go look." Nothing wrong with that.
Try it on the horde side. It's empty at the very least was on my server. I play on Alliance server (both my 60s there) and horde and Both have very little newbies around. I have to get my upper level buddies because there is no one around working any of the quests. I went from level 1-35 on my horde shaman and saw a total of about 10 people.
Course tonight you login to EQ2, start of a fae or any race that can start in Kelethin and there are tons of newbies. I expect BC will have that same reaction to WoW when it comes out.
http://www.greycouncil.org/
maybe u didnt notice this, but not just newbies rolling new characters, so ur numbers will b off. time of day, server, and day of the wk all play an active role in population density. me point is simple, ur not going to b able to tell if the game is dying or dead with the /who command. and u never mentioned in ur first post anything about the time or day to roll a noob char. u just said that "Only way to know if a game is growing or dying is to roll up a character and go to noob-land, look around, and draw your own conclusions." this will get u nowhere. do that in WOW at a low point in the night, and u might think that WOW is dying cause yesterday there were 3x that many ppl in that zone. populations go up and populations go down, its the nature of the beast. me biggest quam with this post is that its being treated like it really matters whether there r 5 million ppl playing it, or 200k ppl playing it. as long as u have fun, wth do u care how many ppl play it or how popular it is. btw, i have played WOW b4 and been in the lowbie zones when there was noone at all in the zone, does that mean that the game is dead, or dying? didnt think so. so y would u apply that logic to this game, or any game for that matter.
Oo and me real deal with ur post is the fanboi comment. there really was no need for that.
yeah, and like the ^poster above me just posted, if u were to roll a noob char right now, u would think that the game is at its peak and growing. but we dont know. maybe every1 there in the newbie zones on eQII r just rolling alts. misleading info, eh?
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De-nial is not just a river in Egypt. Very well, as long as you enjoy the game and it's up and running, so be it.
But I think I gave a satisfactory answer to the original poster, whom I was addressing anyway. He asked how you tell if a game is "dying or not". I answered that question.
Many of us have played several MMORPG's over the years and you can kind of tell when the server community is thriving or dying. Rolling up a toon on a Saturday night, going into a major city and finding it nearly empty, IS a strong message. It's a clue, take it for what it is.
Now, you look at WOW's major cities: packed. (Not that I love WOW, but it is a successful game).
Look at EQ's 2 main beginning cities: kind of empty (at least last time I looked at them a month ago). Those are clues. Step out into Commonlands or Antonica and do a /who check, and if it's kind of empty, again another clue.
Follow the path of "clues" through the zones until you find more than a dozen folks and maybe you can start to see the pattern and draw your own conclusions. If you are in Qeynos at the bank or the auction house place and there is no one else there, well... you don't have to be Columbo to figure some things out.
well said.
De-nial is not just a river in Egypt. Very well, as long as you enjoy the game and it's up and running, so be it.
But I think I gave a satisfactory answer to the original poster, whom I was addressing anyway. He asked how you tell if a game is "dying or not". I answered that question.
Many of us have played several MMORPG's over the years and you can kind of tell when the server community is thriving or dying. Rolling up a toon on a Saturday night, going into a major city and finding it nearly empty, IS a strong message. It's a clue, take it for what it is.
Now, you look at WOW's major cities: packed. (Not that I love WOW, but it is a successful game).
Look at EQ's 2 main beginning cities: kind of empty (at least last time I looked at them a month ago). Those are clues. Step out into Commonlands or Antonica and do a /who check, and if it's kind of empty, again another clue.
Follow the path of "clues" through the zones until you find more than a dozen folks and maybe you can start to see the pattern and draw your own conclusions. If you are in Qeynos at the bank or the auction house place and there is no one else there, well... you don't have to be Columbo to figure some things out.
so im in Denial because i dont agree with u. lol, typical answer. its the "i cant come up with a real answer, so ill just give a blanket statement to cover me arse and make me look professional". gj, columbo.
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In febuary i took advantage of the free one month for everyone with no credit card required.During this time i played roughly 4-5 hours per day after work and i got to about 46 in 30 days played.Thow i knew the 1-50 player base was highley inflated due to this i didnt think the drop off of new characters and players for that fact would be as bad as it would when it was over.When i got tired of my templar around late may i started a monk twink and finding a group in the low 20s was very hard no matter what time of day.Whenever i did a /who 20-29 it would never come back with more then about 12-15 people.
Ive bean siting here today bored thinking about why not give the new expansion a shot but i dont wanna take the chance of blowing money to find a server more empty then i left it.
I find this statement hard to swallow. I remember reading something from Blackguard stating that they had supposedly 'heard' what the masses wanted and that was more players in zones. To me they took the Chicken Little ( Sky is falling ) approach and merged 10 servers since there were 3 MMo's that was supposed to come out in June. DDO and another MMO were one that actually came out while Vanguard got out from under Microsoft and joined the ranks of SOE at that time. I personally felt that they thought they were going to loose a lot of people to those titles and did a bit of a bit of preemptive measure to ensure that they had enough players left on their servers.
I quit the game right when this was announced by BLackguard , cuz if it sounds like it, reads like it I didnt need to taste it to know that it was BS.
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Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Today i will purchase EoF if any stores here sell it ............... lot of game stores do not cary eq2 products on stock here. I will load the game up to start my review process, then i will go to every single non instanced zone and do a /who.
ill report back here with the numbers.
Several months later, maybe 2 or 3 after the newness wears off of EoF, ill do a /who again to emulate what is was like before a big expansion launch ............... see what the numbers say.
This will all be done on kith server, ill probally hit the rp server and nagafen since they are thought to have the greatest populations.
why argue when you have a way to check. Another thing ill do is compare a screenshot from several diff times of the lfg window. One from eq1 and one from eq2. Povar server of eq1 and kithicor server of eq2.
i can tell you as of two months ago, my eq1 server had 87 names of all diff levels lfg , eq2 at the same time of 8 pm central time had 4 names of all diff levels.
Here's a fact for you: There are so many people trying to play EoF that it was taking 5-6 hours just to log in last night because the login servers were all so overloaded. And now servers are down to fix that issue.
Growth is great, but I like it a little more spread out! HAHAHAHA! I just want to go play! *idly watches the EQ2 chat spam while waiting for servers to return to normal operations*
Wow, really? What server you play on? On Crushbone I was able to login easily... though the expansion patch did take a bit.
http://www.greycouncil.org/
Well I was able to log in easily at 4 PM pst yesterday, it only took me about 15 minutes, but I had friends that started their login later at about 7 pm and it took them until midnight to get patched and in...all due to server overload. And that was on Lucan Dlere RP server, one of the lighter ones.
My friend said he thought it was due to the patch servers placing people in que with so many people attempting to patch during prime time and really had little to do with the login servers. Once he was patched he was ablle to login just fine, just took 5 hours to get the patch done...and that was after loading EoF from DVD.
it took me forever to get into game last night after i patched for 4 hrs. whew....... talk about overload. fae everywhere.
a selfmade census in this game will not "prove" anything, just so you know. i could do the very same thing and come up with the opposite of whatever someone else came up with. i dont know why its so important to some ppl to speculate and try to figure out when or if the game is starting its decline. like it really matters. its already been said once, stop overanalysing and enjoy the game. its retarded to keep bringing this up over and over in every thread that youre apart of. the long and short of it is this, if you feel that the game is dying or dead, go play a game you feel is alive and growing. if its that important to you. the rest of us wont even know that youve gone because were too busy enjoying the game we love. let me reemphasis, a census made by a player will not being taken seriously. take all the screenshots you want, it doesnt prove squat.
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Well the thing about this is that *most* MMOs do not have packed newb zones 2+ years after release. So it's hard to use that as a proxy for how a game is doing. A game can go on for many years with a dedicated veteran population and only a modest level of newcomers. WoW is not like this, but on this point WoW is an outlier, and not really a good bellweather I think.
Is this really a fact?!?!?!?!
No, no do not be confused it is just an assumption !
During KoS the servers were being patched this is what was not letting people in. Also this same expansion had quite a few last minute fixes that made quite a large patch to download. So when you have everyone downloading the same patch they wait in a que. Ok, what determines que and download speed? Its not the many people rushing to download so much as the availible mirror sites availible or the traffic alotted to downloading that patch.
So say a game has a million subs and another has 1000 subs. the one with 1000 subs could have a higher que then the million sub game becuase they did not have the ability to handle that much traffic while the other may have ............ this does not prove a game has tons of players.
Want a fact?
About a month before kos was launched most the population had already been stagnated in the dof expansion zones. All was well the two main overland zones usually only had one instance and about 80 to 100 people in each. There was no lag on my system and all was normal, then a month before kos launched the dof zones became extremely laggy while i was using the same computer ........... hmmmmm, kos luanched and the outside zones were laggy beyond playability. Most people waited it out or canceled yada yada ......... you can check eq2's forums from this time for proof of this going on. It was fixed later i guess either by people quiting or they finally fixed the problem.
Now i ask you, with what you learned in the paragraph about allotted traffic from patching how does that tie in with how the game was ran prior to kos launch? Maybe they cut some more traffic down to save money, maybe a whole bunch of people resubed a month before kos launch ( why still normal /who numbers though? )
I dont know about kos but DoF expansion and down made a new instance of the main outside zones when it capped at 100 people. So what does that lead you to believe? There are more people in the pok of eq1 then in all three outside kos zones combined.............
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