Yes yes, we understand what he was saying, but what does that have to do with the discussion. Any excuse you make up for Rift numbers dropping would on average cause a similar drop in all MMOs. The discussion is pointing out that Rift has a 20% drop in hours while most other MMOs do not.
Negating for a moment the fact that all figures can only partially be trusted and should be regarded in perspective: I didn't take daily samples, but I do have some figures that I noted.
I took a sample of sunday, Feb 20th and compared to yesterday's sunday, this is how they compare:
Feb 20th - Apr 12th - % change
- WoW 224k (hrs) 174k - 22.5 %
- Aion 14k 11.1k - 21 %
- LotrO 10.4k 9k - 13.5 %
- GW 8.6k 7.2k - 16 %
- EVE 9.9k 9.5k - 4 %
The major MMO's seemed to have experienced a drop off as well in that timeperiod.
EVE numbers fluctuate often because so many people use multiple accounts so there's bound to be spikes of lost subs due to people letting one or two of their alt accounts expire. Next month might see an increase, that's how often the numbers change. lol
This is true, but also what some on this forum are calling an excuse. Seems like a logical factor to me, though I could care less about any games numbers, ratings, etc.. If I went by what the majority say about games on these forums, I wouldn't ever try a new game out. They are all doomed.
Every single mmo released into this market will drop noticably in subs after the first month of free play. /thread
That only holds true for WoW clones. Alot of old MMORPGs did not lose subs but rather slowly gained.
Eve, EQ, DAoC, Asherons Call, UO, FF IX, Lineage 2 all of them gained subs months after release and in some cases maintained them for YEARS before starting to drop. Check out http://www.mmodata.net/ to see yourself.
Even LOTRO gained subs for over a year before starting to slowly drop. It is rather WAR and AoC (and other WoW clones) which dropped significantly in subs.
EVE, EQ, DAoC, AC, UO, FF IX and L2 were not released into this market now were they? They were all released into a market without near infinite mmo choices - other than EVE; what has happened to the population of all of those other games? Population continues to drop in them all as more and more choices are available.
We used to continue to sub after our first month because....heck, what else are we going to play? We drop our subs after our first month now because we KNOW there are other things on the market we like better. That simply wasn't the case in the early days.
I stand by my statement. All mmo's released into this market will show a noticable drop after the first free month. In addition, my guess is that even WoW, EVE and the other heavier population games have a more people who don't sub than sub - you simply don't know how many people use free trials and then don't sub - retention rate in every game could be similar to Rift, however, it is much easier noticed after a new release's first month has passed; much harder to notice after free trials start.
I still think this thread should close. This is normal for all mmo's and all evidence shows that Rift has a very strong showing when compared to VG , WAR and AoC's pop drops.
imo, when a new game starts and they have to create more server for demand i'd split em with names like "Monsterous Lore Name Server A' and 'Monsterous Lore Name Server B'- then when they have to remerge - remerge to just one "monsterous lore name server' - i think it would take a bit of the sting out.
They had to have that many servers in Rift to handle the initial population; they should have known it would drop after month 1 - they should have thought of a way of handling it that didn't make forum idiots cry that the sky is falling - when it is clearly doing better than most games recently released into this oversaturated market.
This is after 1 month mind you and also quite similar to the drops AoC and WAR experienced. After three months they were down to less than 50% of peak and where are they now?
Rift is going the same route, trust me on this.
I haven't slept in 3 weeks worrying about the possibility of a rise in the population of Rift. Tonight, I'll sleep like a baby.
Many people go check it out after seeing the attractive flyer
Some like it a lot
Some prefer their old restaurant
It's common to see this declining trend....not just in mmo
Well, somethinbg like that.
About 60% of the people buying a MMO pays for more playtime after the free month is up. Wow actually didn't have so much more after that time either but got new players as the word spread.
That could happen with Rift even if I think Rift will be like EQ2 and LOTRO. A medium sized game with it's own fans and enough money to go buy, but no match against the largest game.
Trion have some rather competent people but I don't see them truly go up against Blizzard, Bioware and Arenanet with their first MMO. For a second game when they got the experience from Rift things might be very different.
Rift is a fine game and it will be around for a long time but it wont be the next Wow.
Heh. There's people that have been posting in the Rift section at regular short intervals(including this thread) since 8 AM my time. It's now 11:22 PM.
People seriously need to do something else. I'm all for forum discussions and what not, but people (on both sides) are getting a little obsessed.
I'm glad they released 1.1 before the 30 days were up. Seeing them fall into the balance tar pit and slowly sinking before they charged me for a 3-month founders price was a good for me. I really liked the game, but another PvE dominant game being balanced around PvP is another MMO I'm not playing. Reaver/Pally/Beast was my main, btw. Not Riftblade
We're not in Azeroth anymore! LMAO. They should have never called out WOW in their ad campaign and they should marketed it differently. Actually they should have made the main gameplay designed around Rifts and invasions no quests. Make the endgame bigger and much harder insane sized rifts with huge invasion. Throw in some RVR type areas where each side uses the rifts against the other to take over landmarks, the game would have been amazing. Instead we have Azeroth 2.0 with human looking characters built on a crappy gamebryo engine, sorry but it's not a good game, its decent but not good or very good.
in your opinion
Obviously in their opinion since they stated this. It also happens to be the opinion of every person that subbed to the game that I know ranging from EQ guys, DAOC guys, WoW guys and people that hadn't played WoW since Burning Crusade. Guess how many out of my friends are still subbed? 0 out 9. That my friends is a trend. People want depth, they want skills on their character that do something other than bash skulls and they want a good story and freedom to move around (yes sandbox AND story can you imagine?). Build it and they will come like no game has since WoW's inception. 10 million subs? nah but 2 million+ is not out of the question.
Thirty years of gaming experience...not sure if I should be proud of that www.mmoexaminer.blogspot.com
You are right, we should all hate boring gear grind games based on WoW. Im ashamed to admit i bought this crap, but i like many others unsubbed before the free month was even over.
You are right, we should all hate boring gear grind games based on WoW. Im ashamed to admit i bought this crap, but i like many others unsubbed before the free month was even over.
Unsub and move on ...
Why look for all kinds off weird reasons to motivate the fact you did not like a game after all, and go post all these weird motivations on forums, just to get backed up by other people so you willl be acknowledged in the fact that you made the right choice. Kinda makes these people seem insecure to me.
But to point out one silly, little thingy ... did you not use the open beta to test the game for yourself?
Kinda weird you bought this "crap" when you had ample posibilities to avoid this "crap"?
One thing that bugs me about this thread is that people are using interchangeably hours played on xfire to indicate how many people are subbed. You can't do that for a very obvious reason: people can be subbed to a game and not actually be playing for whatever reason. Then there are quite simply xfire users who don't fire it up while playing a game. When I used to use it, I didn't turn it on religiously every time I gamed... Now I don't even use it at all because after giving it some thought I didn't like having a tracker on my computer and another potential data source that someone somewhere could mine.
With respect to the 'excuses' the university crowd gave for them not logging on much right now, it's valid because if you are an xfire user and you don't play Rift due to time constraints, rather than because you hate the game, you'll go back at some point. Someone who really hates the game is most likely never going to go back after unsubbing. If people can't understand how this matters to retention rates, well... maybe they shouldn't be prognosticating about numbers
You are right, we should all hate boring gear grind games based on WoW. Im ashamed to admit i bought this crap, but i like many others unsubbed before the free month was even over.
Unsub and move on ...
Why look for all kinds off weird reasons to motivate the fact you did not like a game after all, and go post all these weird motivations on forums, just to get backed up by other people so you willl be acknowledged in the fact that you made the right choice. Kinda makes these people seem insecure to me.
But to point out one silly, little thingy ... did you not use the open beta to test the game for yourself?
Kinda weird you bought this "crap" when you had ample posibilities to avoid this "crap"?
Do you know how boring these forums would be if no one posted their opinions? You would have almost no threads unless we wanted to discuss nuclear fission or something unrelated to games.
Thirty years of gaming experience...not sure if I should be proud of that www.mmoexaminer.blogspot.com
I can't help but wonder how many subs dropped after the first month of WoW. Thankfully we were not all so obsessed by sub numbers back then.
I'm not sure if wow ever had a drop in sub numbers And indeed, this obsession for sub numbers makes no sense at all!
while it matters not as long as they keep on top of it as regards merging servers just want to point out that WoW actually did not have a million subs in first month but it kept growing and growing .
Same with EQ1 at launch it had about 50k and grew to 500k
modern mmo tend to spike fast in first month and drop.i recall AoC and WAR lost about 20-30% first month and kept dropping .Both those games had over 1 m sales early on too.
You are right, we should all hate boring gear grind games based on WoW. Im ashamed to admit i bought this crap, but i like many others unsubbed before the free month was even over.
Unsub and move on ...
Why look for all kinds off weird reasons to motivate the fact you did not like a game after all, and go post all these weird motivations on forums, just to get backed up by other people so you willl be acknowledged in the fact that you made the right choice. Kinda makes these people seem insecure to me.
But to point out one silly, little thingy ... did you not use the open beta to test the game for yourself?
Kinda weird you bought this "crap" when you had ample posibilities to avoid this "crap"?
Do you know how boring these forums would be if no one posted their opinions? You would have almost no threads unless we wanted to discuss nuclear fission or something unrelated to games.
The problem is "opinions" are thrown around on here relatively freely. Often times the word "opinion" is used just to cause duress among the people that enjoy a game without even experiencing anything to form an opinion.
It's a Jeep thing. . . _______ |___| \_______/ = |||||| = |X| \*........*/ |X| |X|_________|X| You wouldn't understand
Originally posted by Maldach I'm glad they released 1.1 before the 30 days were up. Seeing them fall into the balance tar pit and slowly sinking before they charged me for a 3-month founders price was a good for me. I really liked the game, but another PvE dominant game being balanced around PvP is another MMO I'm not playing. Reaver/Pally/Beast was my main, btw. Not Riftblade
I think your problem is mistakenly thinking that since you care more about PvE that the game company does. Rift is a hybrid game just like WoW is. Content is mostly built around PvE because PvE is almost completely content driven. Balance is heavily influenced by PvP because PvP is almost completely balance driven. If you are playing a hybrid game you are always going to experience this kind of thing so you probably just have to learn to deal with it. PvP is way too large a part of these games to think a pure PvE game is going to be made again any time soon unless it is a small game aimed at a very niche market.
Comments
This is true, but also what some on this forum are calling an excuse. Seems like a logical factor to me, though I could care less about any games numbers, ratings, etc.. If I went by what the majority say about games on these forums, I wouldn't ever try a new game out. They are all doomed.
RIP Jimmy "The Rev" Sullivan and Paul Gray.
A new restaurant open for business.
Many people go check it out after seeing the attractive flyer
Some like it a lot
Some prefer their old restaurant
It's common to see this declining trend....not just in mmo
EVE, EQ, DAoC, AC, UO, FF IX and L2 were not released into this market now were they? They were all released into a market without near infinite mmo choices - other than EVE; what has happened to the population of all of those other games? Population continues to drop in them all as more and more choices are available.
We used to continue to sub after our first month because....heck, what else are we going to play? We drop our subs after our first month now because we KNOW there are other things on the market we like better. That simply wasn't the case in the early days.
I stand by my statement. All mmo's released into this market will show a noticable drop after the first free month. In addition, my guess is that even WoW, EVE and the other heavier population games have a more people who don't sub than sub - you simply don't know how many people use free trials and then don't sub - retention rate in every game could be similar to Rift, however, it is much easier noticed after a new release's first month has passed; much harder to notice after free trials start.
I still think this thread should close. This is normal for all mmo's and all evidence shows that Rift has a very strong showing when compared to VG , WAR and AoC's pop drops.
imo, when a new game starts and they have to create more server for demand i'd split em with names like "Monsterous Lore Name Server A' and 'Monsterous Lore Name Server B'- then when they have to remerge - remerge to just one "monsterous lore name server' - i think it would take a bit of the sting out.
They had to have that many servers in Rift to handle the initial population; they should have known it would drop after month 1 - they should have thought of a way of handling it that didn't make forum idiots cry that the sky is falling - when it is clearly doing better than most games recently released into this oversaturated market.
I haven't slept in 3 weeks worrying about the possibility of a rise in the population of Rift. Tonight, I'll sleep like a baby.
Thank you for this service.
lol xfire . if u go on the main page of xfire right now there is only 67.909 people playing game. and there is alot of game
iam playing Rift right now and xfire is not even open
i dont know how many people play Rift and i dont care but the 67.909 people playing game right now are certainly not all playing RIFT
each day Xfire reset the Minute played by player
(or week)
~The only opinion that matters is your own.Everything else is just advice,~
People still use xfire?
"Because it's easier to nitpick something than to be constructive." -roach5000
Well, somethinbg like that.
About 60% of the people buying a MMO pays for more playtime after the free month is up. Wow actually didn't have so much more after that time either but got new players as the word spread.
That could happen with Rift even if I think Rift will be like EQ2 and LOTRO. A medium sized game with it's own fans and enough money to go buy, but no match against the largest game.
Trion have some rather competent people but I don't see them truly go up against Blizzard, Bioware and Arenanet with their first MMO. For a second game when they got the experience from Rift things might be very different.
Rift is a fine game and it will be around for a long time but it wont be the next Wow.
Heh. There's people that have been posting in the Rift section at regular short intervals(including this thread) since 8 AM my time. It's now 11:22 PM.
People seriously need to do something else. I'm all for forum discussions and what not, but people (on both sides) are getting a little obsessed.
0118 999 881 999 119 725... 3
Doesn't mean anything, all games fluctuate with sub peeks and drops.
Most people go through life pretending to be a boss. I go through life pretending I'm not.
However the name of the game is to keep those customers from going back to their favorite restaurant and making your restaurant their future favorite.
I'm glad they released 1.1 before the 30 days were up. Seeing them fall into the balance tar pit and slowly sinking before they charged me for a 3-month founders price was a good for me. I really liked the game, but another PvE dominant game being balanced around PvP is another MMO I'm not playing. Reaver/Pally/Beast was my main, btw. Not Riftblade
Obviously in their opinion since they stated this. It also happens to be the opinion of every person that subbed to the game that I know ranging from EQ guys, DAOC guys, WoW guys and people that hadn't played WoW since Burning Crusade. Guess how many out of my friends are still subbed? 0 out 9. That my friends is a trend. People want depth, they want skills on their character that do something other than bash skulls and they want a good story and freedom to move around (yes sandbox AND story can you imagine?). Build it and they will come like no game has since WoW's inception. 10 million subs? nah but 2 million+ is not out of the question.
Thirty years of gaming experience...not sure if I should be proud of that
www.mmoexaminer.blogspot.com
Haha, I wonder what would these forums would be like if people had factual numbers to discuss instead of "feeling" and "beliefs".
Bah, I need more sleep, too much time spent on Rift.
you could say it different.....the mmo hoppers that play EVERY mmo when it comes out are gone and whats left now is the real player base.
Many players dont use Xfire to brag about how many hours they game (read: have no social life)
I play rift myself and still enjoying it alot (but then....i didnt rush to endgame.
When logging in, the game isnt even near empty.
And if you are right......they just merge some servers and its fixed.
In trion we trust
hehe (what do you know.....i am a fanboy)
greetz
sloeber
no matter how hard you try, you cant keep them all happy.....thats the way it goes.
This thread is rediculous for all the reasons allready stated.
And just to show how rediculous it is, here are some more recent numbers.
The graph now goes up to april 10th, so lets take a look.
March 10th: 23.587 hours played
April 10th: 22895 hours played
Holy crap the game is loosing subs ... fast Rofl!
Apparently not as fast as the initial statement anymore.
WTF?!
Does that mean the numbers are going up again?!
But, but, then my hate is misplaced ... can't be .. I must hate, HATE I TELLZ YA!
You are right, we should all hate boring gear grind games based on WoW. Im ashamed to admit i bought this crap, but i like many others unsubbed before the free month was even over.
Unsub and move on ...
Why look for all kinds off weird reasons to motivate the fact you did not like a game after all, and go post all these weird motivations on forums, just to get backed up by other people so you willl be acknowledged in the fact that you made the right choice. Kinda makes these people seem insecure to me.
But to point out one silly, little thingy ... did you not use the open beta to test the game for yourself?
Kinda weird you bought this "crap" when you had ample posibilities to avoid this "crap"?
One thing that bugs me about this thread is that people are using interchangeably hours played on xfire to indicate how many people are subbed. You can't do that for a very obvious reason: people can be subbed to a game and not actually be playing for whatever reason. Then there are quite simply xfire users who don't fire it up while playing a game. When I used to use it, I didn't turn it on religiously every time I gamed... Now I don't even use it at all because after giving it some thought I didn't like having a tracker on my computer and another potential data source that someone somewhere could mine.
With respect to the 'excuses' the university crowd gave for them not logging on much right now, it's valid because if you are an xfire user and you don't play Rift due to time constraints, rather than because you hate the game, you'll go back at some point. Someone who really hates the game is most likely never going to go back after unsubbing. If people can't understand how this matters to retention rates, well... maybe they shouldn't be prognosticating about numbers
Edit - speeelinggg!
Playing MUDs and MMOs since 1994.
Do you know how boring these forums would be if no one posted their opinions? You would have almost no threads unless we wanted to discuss nuclear fission or something unrelated to games.
Thirty years of gaming experience...not sure if I should be proud of that
www.mmoexaminer.blogspot.com
while it matters not as long as they keep on top of it as regards merging servers just want to point out that WoW actually did not have a million subs in first month but it kept growing and growing .
Same with EQ1 at launch it had about 50k and grew to 500k
modern mmo tend to spike fast in first month and drop.i recall AoC and WAR lost about 20-30% first month and kept dropping .Both those games had over 1 m sales early on too.
The problem is "opinions" are thrown around on here relatively freely. Often times the word "opinion" is used just to cause duress among the people that enjoy a game without even experiencing anything to form an opinion.
_______
|___
\_______/
=
|X| \*........*/ |X|
|X|_________|X|
You wouldn't understand
I reckon this argument could be solved by a competetive ladder tournament of the original punch out for NES.
I think your problem is mistakenly thinking that since you care more about PvE that the game company does. Rift is a hybrid game just like WoW is. Content is mostly built around PvE because PvE is almost completely content driven. Balance is heavily influenced by PvP because PvP is almost completely balance driven. If you are playing a hybrid game you are always going to experience this kind of thing so you probably just have to learn to deal with it. PvP is way too large a part of these games to think a pure PvE game is going to be made again any time soon unless it is a small game aimed at a very niche market.
The big drop being seen is probably not nearly as bad as it looks...
A lot of the power-gamers rolled Defiant to start and are now rolling Guardians to check out the content on that side.
I think it safe to say that Rift isn't seeing any more actual loss of subs than the average MMO bleeding seen across the board.