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xfire shows AoC numbers decreasing :(
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I love the way a rabid fanboy is claiming this game has 700k subscribers. ANYONE who has actually played the game since release will let you know that:
a) The number of instances spawned has dropped and many zones now run in a single instance.
b) Many of their friends and guild members have quit. Its pretty easy to tell a subscription is being lost when your friends say things like ' this game is s**t, Im going back to WoW'.
c) Just running around the game world you see less people playing the game than a few weeks after launch (I say a few weeks rather than at actual launch because it didnt take much more than that for people to spread across the majority of zones).
d) Finding groups in many areas has become harder as there simply arent people there to group with.
None of the above need any figures to substantiate - simply play the game from launch until now and you would have to be immensely dense to even think this game is growing at all. This game has bled subscribers since launch faster than any MMO since the genre started. I dont even think this game has 25% of the intial registered players since launch left in the game.
Too much stuff in this game is broken and there is too little content - simple - even those with too little sense to leave after the first paid month will be leaving within a month or so after that, because put simply there is absolutely nothing to do after a certain point - any ideas you have of sieges being fixed soon and active forget it - Funcom have already proven that they cant fix s**t and there wont be enough players available and willing at the time to actually get a full siege going.
Anyone who does stay after, say 3 months, of playing needs to see a psychiatrist because they either have too much money, believe all the bulls**t Funcom are spouting, or are so desperate to play an MMO that they will put up with ANYTHING in the hope AoC will work. They certainly wont be there in 3 months because this is a polished game brimming over with content. This turd will take a hell of a lot of polishing before it shines.
People stuck with Eve through many rocky months of crap. Some gamers will play anything. Gotta love em.
I don't use Xfire myself so it isn't taking into account the fact I'm a subscriber still. I am enjoying the game quite a lot. It has lived up to my personal expectations of what I wanted from the hype.
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omg
Since X Fire is self selecting, and you don't automagically log into it when you launch whatever game you're about to play, the numbers don't mean too much to me.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
Xfire isn't counting every player. What it does is count a sample. Kinda like any form of polling does. It is a subset of players that use Xfire. what it shows is what that subset is doing and as long as that is a fairly large subset without the trending of the numbers is representative of what the player population as a whole is doing.
So if Xfire shows a 20% drop is game play hours or number of players over 2 weeks then that is a fairly accurate representation of the entire player base. The numbers of players xfire shows are only meaningful in judging the size of the sample. Polling organizations can use sample sizes to gate the level of accuracy of the results. The larger the sample the better the accuracy of the results.
Of course things like this thread likely skew the results some to make AoC look better then it should. Meaning that this tread will likely encourage some people to start using xfire. this would cause the numbers to be better then they should be. Also as others have pointed out a bug in AoC causes the game to continue to run even when the player is logged out. I'm not sure however this really affects the results if it is again a consistent bug that isn't affecting xfire users more then non xfire users.
---
Ethion
Hmm, some players have quited, Probably half or so but there is still comming a lot of new ones, the game is selling a lot. One of the problem with statistic based on hours is that at least I kick in quite a few extra hours the first few weeks with a new game, then I return to my normal a few hours every day or so. I really don´t have the time to play more but when i got a brand new game I make me some extra time to learn how it works and get out of the Noob thing. So I would say that the graph will plain out soon.
Anybodys guess on the number of players is as good as mine, I would say it is just over 300K but it is a guess. And I would also say that the sale will up a bit when the beta keys get out. If it get more players than WAR at the end of the year? Who knows. But the next game that will be tough to beat is Guildwars 2, not War. I somehow doubt that AoC will beat GW2.
I'd be very interested (and not just trollingly so) in what you expected from the hype then. No tirade, no flames....serious question. I honestly believe you, and want to know what YOU wanted from the game based on everything you heard.
I'd also like to know (but is not required, and I won't press the issue) how you feel about what the hype has failed on, even though you took from it what you wanted. Even more (and equally un-required), I'd be terribly interested in how you feel this company is as a whole, and whether or not you feel they have lived up to their responsibilities...or if they have acted rather poorly considering the nature of the market they are in.
Mostly, the first question is what I really want to know. So be sure to focus on that, and give detail where possible.
Neither do I. I used to play I don't any more. Your point is?
It's a sample.
Glad you are enjoying the game I did immensley too for thr first couple of days /played. I played a couple more and left on a reasonable high note. I hope yoy enjoy your time there and get out before you get frustrated too.
If I'm not mistaken it launches automatically when your PC turns on my default. The majority of people who intend on using the program for what it is designed will leave that option on. Apart from that, wherever you launch the game from on your PC is will detect that it is running.
I consider it quite accurate considering it is collecting data from such a large sample of users.
I am afraid that you are just paying all that money for one good game ..
EQ2
The rest of the games under that pass is just a bonus, and are not worth the extra you pay.
AoC deserves better than that.
If I'm not mistaken it launches automatically when your PC turns on my default. The majority of people who intend on using the program for what it is designed will leave that option on. Apart from that, wherever you launch the game from on your PC is will detect that it is running.
I consider it quite accurate considering it is collecting data from such a large sample of users.
Correct.
It launches automatically by default. And I also agree that is gives an accurate picture of the gaming market since it has a large user base.
People just dont want to knowledge xfire when their own game goes bad. AoC is dropping like a sack of potatoes when you look at the charts. But hey, it still is a popular game. But in a year AoC is not gonna be better than any other random mmo. It's still brand new and therefore people are giving it a try.
If I'm not mistaken it launches automatically when your PC turns on my default. The majority of people who intend on using the program for what it is designed will leave that option on. Apart from that, wherever you launch the game from on your PC is will detect that it is running.
I consider it quite accurate considering it is collecting data from such a large sample of users.
Correct.
It launches automatically by default. And I also agree that is gives an accurate picture of the gaming market since it has a large user base.
People just dont want to knowledge xfire when their own game goes bad. AoC is dropping like a sack of potatoes when you look at the charts. But hey, it still is a popular game. But in a year AoC is not gonna be better than any other random mmo. It's still brand new and therefore people are giving it a try.
Big agree.
The overall Xfire system has a base of 10 million + players on various games. Yet, I have even seen on the AoC forums people saying "No one uses it"
10 million "No ones" (lol)
The data is clear. The game has lost roughly half or more of it's Xfire base. 50% loss is not something to shake a stick at.
But, I also wish to point out how much the games fluctuate. And lets keep an open mind. AoC CAN improve..
The game to compete against at this point is going to be WAR. This gives AoC roughly 3 months or maybe more (I feel a slight tinge we may see a delay on WAR until Christmas or further than September at least) to get their act together.
Funcom screwed up, but can fix it. Fix the game to what they promised, lets the players who left come back free for a month in September, and this could change the spiral and get a good base of players.
Overall populations do not suck yet thanks to people still buying and trying or those who do not want to go back to their old MMO's, or the casuals who like the PvE (which does not TOTALLY suck).
Look at these stats and you can see a grim picture
http://classygamer.blogspot.com/
This guy tracked all AoC EU servers, and got a rough average of players. Based on this sample, you usualy take the overall count and can multiply that by 10%. This % covers users logging on and off during the day and brings in the US servers. We still see a better population than say Tabula Rasa, Vanguard, EQ2 or LOTRO.
If Funcom gets their thumb out of their A**, then this can at least be a good NICHE game like Guild Wars or EQ2 or CoH/CoV.
They need focus is all. And watching patches will give us an idea if that focus will work.
If I'm not mistaken it launches automatically when your PC turns on my default. The majority of people who intend on using the program for what it is designed will leave that option on. Apart from that, wherever you launch the game from on your PC is will detect that it is running.
I consider it quite accurate considering it is collecting data from such a large sample of users.
Well, I don't, because even though XFire launches whenever I reboot my PC, I don't automatically log into it.
I have to take an action to do so.
If I don't log in to Xfire, It's not tracking whatever game I launch.
So, how many people have Xfire on their computers but don't log into it? Sure, Xfire has a base, but it's still a self selecting base. Of people who actually log in to XFire before they start gaming. One of the reasons I don't log into it often is that an Xfire chat window is too disruptive to my gaming experience.
Hence my point. How this indicates how well AoC is doing is thus open to some interpretation. Which is why AoC fanbois are not totally out to lunch on their interpretation.
I'll agree that if a whole lot of regular Xfire users were logging in to AoC and are no longer, then AoC may very well have a problem. If you had 100k regular Xfire users logging in a month ago, and only 50k now, yeah, that doesn't look very good.
Which kind of leaves the AoC fanbois in a situation where fanboi denial definitely seems to be kicking in.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
I think the Xfire numbers show a trend, but I don't think Xfire is representive of the entire gaming population.
If I had to wager a guess, and this is just a guess. I would think that xfire attracts the mahority of its user base from one segment of the gaming population. It most likely attracts tech savy avid gamers who spend lots of time surfing websites and not much of anything else. I don't know what someone would lable that type of player and it doesn't really matter. In the end Xfire represents a certain segment of the gaming population and can't really be taken as evidence of the entire populations reaction to a game.
In some cases though it does make a very valuable tool for trending. While Conans sales are doing extremely well, the play time is going down. Also Conan as a game seems more targeted towards a crowd that would use xfire type programs in general. I don't think Xfire proves that the game has lost X% of its subscribers though. Not that there isn't plenty of other aecdotal evidence that the game is struggling to retain.
I agree with Paragraph 2, I tried to work out a rough estimate of AoC subs suing a ratio between WoW numbers on xfire and its estimated 10mil subs. The number I got for AoC was about 900K subs which is obviously well off the mark. I think the only deduction you can make is that xfire (more hardcore gamers) number are decreasing.
If I'm not mistaken it launches automatically when your PC turns on my default. The majority of people who intend on using the program for what it is designed will leave that option on. Apart from that, wherever you launch the game from on your PC is will detect that it is running.
I consider it quite accurate considering it is collecting data from such a large sample of users.
Well, I don't, because even though XFire launches whenever I reboot my PC, I don't automatically log into it.
I have to take an action to do so.
If I don't log in to Xfire, It's not tracking whatever game I launch.
So, how many people have Xfire on their computers but don't log into it? Sure, Xfire has a base, but it's still a self selecting base. Of people who actually log in to XFire before they start gaming. One of the reasons I don't log into it often is that an Xfire chat window is too disruptive to my gaming experience.
Hence my point. How this indicates how well AoC is doing is thus open to some interpretation. Which is why AoC fanbois are not totally out to lunch on their interpretation.
I'll agree that if a whole lot of regular Xfire users were logging in to AoC and are no longer, then AoC may very well have a problem. If you had 100k regular Xfire users logging in a month ago, and only 50k now, yeah, that doesn't look very good.
Which kind of leaves the AoC fanbois in a situation where fanboi denial definitely seems to be kicking in.
By default Xfire launches and logs in automatically
You people can't eb serious judging games by their xfire ratings. Cmon it's not because in lotro and eve most ppl dont use xfire that these games are going down. Honestly xfire is one more of these kinda useless tools, never been in a guild where many ppl used it and most ppl never saw the point with xfire.
I'm not a no life that sits in front of his computer all day long, I'm an intern that sits in front of his computer all day long.
Have you seriously not been following this thread? We aren't judging the game due to the fact that its Xfire numbers are falling drastically (now out of the Top 10). What we're saying is that it is a random sample of people and within that group of people, the numbers are falling. That could very well be a representation of the majority of gamers (and most likely is, at least in my opinion). Whether or not you think its useless, it's doing the tracking and showing the results.
No 11 out of 1036 games is Silkroad Online.....
I think that the 3 top positions in the X-fire ranking are really popular titles. Their hours played number is so much bigger than the fourth, that it is hard to ignore. The rest though are just random data.
once more for less bright readers. No one, at least I am not, trying to determine overall population from the Xfire numbers. What they do show really well though is the trends.
When the game first launched it was logging 95 K hours. Once the initial play all night surge was over 2 weeks later it was in the 60K hour range which I would use as a base number for trending purposes. Now it is down to 30K on a Friday night.
The game is bleeding players, even the densest fanbois should be able to see that. Sales are just now starting to drop off a bit so during this time period it had a good size influx of new players. Now that sales are beginning to drop off a bit I think you will see even more precipitous drops. Wait till the initial purchasers who were giving FC "one more month" to get their act together see that it is going to take FC several more months, and I am being a optimist here, to get the game up to full speed.
I miss DAoC
Plus, even if Xfire isn't a proper representation of the gaming community as some say, the fact of the matter is that the majority of people who were logging into Xfire when AoC was launched are most likely still logging in now. As a result, at least between those (many) users, play hours are decreasing. There's no escaping that fact.
Oh really? This dollar in my hand bets Avery begs to differ ^^.
Yes, really. Let's take those on my friends list and friends of friends' list for example. At launch there was at least 6 people playing, now those same people are still online regularly, but I only ever see 1 of them play AoC anymore. It really isn't rocket science.
another 6500 hours down again between last Saturday and last night. It is down to 33K on a Saturday night now. Wonder if next Saturday it will be 27K or lower? It lost 8 K between the 22nd and the 29th so my bet it will be at 29K , it is time for the curve to start to flatten a bit I think. Mostly just diehard fanbois left now.
I miss DAoC