What do you class as a high / med / low pop in MMOs

DonY81 · June 2016

As the title says really im curious to know what people class as low, med and high?
Im searching around for something to sink my teeth into right now but obviously i dont want to jump into a dead game which got me thinking of this..

laxie · June 2016

I think the trend is much more important than an absolute value.

Something like EVE Online started with 10.000 people and for many years kept on getting new players. This means regular updates, new content, players to experience the content with.

On the other hand, you can have a game with 500.000 players going downhill, at which point developers decide to not produce new content anymore.

Also, games that are doing financially well for their companies are unlikely to be changed dramatically.

Currently, the games I would bet on personally are: SWTOR, ESO and WoW. GW2 is also doing fairly well.

Games that have a poor outlook are: Wildstar, anything from Daybreak, BDO, Archeage, Shroud of the Avatar.

Amathe · June 2016

To me, and just spitballing:

Low = <249,000
Medium = 250,000 to 999,000
High = > 1,000,000+

Kyleran · June 2016

What's interesting is frequently when this question is asked the player will likely spend their time soloing.

DonY81 · June 2016

Kyleran said:

What's interesting is frequently when this question is asked the player will likely spend their time soloing.

and what makes you say that Kyleran?

waynejr2 · June 2016

Kyleran said:

What's interesting is frequently when this question is asked the player will likely spend their time soloing.

lol. true!

centkin · June 2016

High pop is where you are trying to find a place to hunt and it is already being taken by someone else.

Low pop is where you have trouble finding someone to group with in the place you want to hunt.

Medium is anything inbetween.

Antiquated · June 2016

Kyleran said:

What's interesting is frequently when this question is asked the player will likely spend their time soloing.

I understand the desire for "high pop"; a healthy game is likely to stick around for a while. A healthy game is one you can talk your friends into playing with you, etc.

But at the same time, I know that an individual's perception of how "busy" a game "feels" is mostly a matter of how skilled the dev team is at traffic control. Almost completely unrelated to a game's total population, and only vaguely related to an individual server's population.

I wonder if it's possible to fake it; an expert system faking general channel chatter, random NPC-bots roaming the town and appearing or disappearing when out of player's line-of-sight. Would players be able to tell the difference?

And yes, it hardly matters if you're soloing the entire time, does it?

Loke666 · June 2016

Amathe said:

To me, and just spitballing:

Low = <249,000
Medium = 250,000 to 999,000
High = > 1,000,000+

Sounds about right.

And only counting people who played at least an hour the last 30 days, no matter if they pay a sub, buy stuff or whatever.

syntax42 · June 2016

High: Can find a group to do just about anything relatively quickly.

Medium: Takes some time to find a group to do popular activities, difficult to find a group for less-popular activities.

Low: Difficult to find a group for anything; often impossible to find a group for less-popular activities.

MMOs can have a healthy population at smaller numbers if they focus their content towards fewer activities or shorter durations of time required.

DKLond · June 2016

It depends on what we're talking about.

For a small budget niche MMO, 100K players could be extremely high. I mean, imagine Mortal Online with that kind of playerbase

For WoW, it would be extremely low.

If we're strictly talking about how the population "feels" - that would depend on things like group-centric content and instance technology. In games like ESO or TSW - most of the game is designed around story and grouping is kinda awkward. As such, you don't need many people for the game to feel populated. However, for something like GW2 - where almost everything is "public" - you need a lot of players to sustain the right feeling.

In short, I have no easy answer

Akulas · June 2016

If it's a little game then 100+ on at the same time could be considered alot.

Shaigh · June 2016

Its a question about realm-pop and given that many mmorpg have avoided this problem with megaservers its no longer a real issue. Five years ago it would have been:

High-chance for a server queue during peak hours
Medium-you frequently notice people when you are out adventuring and can find people to group with
Low-its hard to find people for group-content and leveling up feels like a wasteland.

sacredfool · June 2016

I don't care what the population is. The only thing that matters is how populated the game feels.

If I can roam in a random direction and find other players, it's a good sign.
If I can buy and sell items easily, it's a good sign.
If i can find groups for endgame easily, it's a good sign.
If I can find groups for early and mid game content easily, it's a really good sign.

Adamantine · June 2016

Well, I have played Vanguard on the EU server when I was the only one online. Thats definitely low population.

LynxJSA · June 2016

sacredfool said:

I don't care what the population is. The only thing that matters is how populated the game feels.

If I can roam in a random direction and find other players, it's a good sign.
If I can buy and sell items easily, it's a good sign.
If i can find groups for endgame easily, it's a good sign.
If I can find groups for early and mid game content easily, it's a really good sign.

Same here.

Any actual number is beyond arbitrary... it's simply random. Take the 249k suggested above as "low". How does one even try to break down, quantify, or assess such a number? Number of servers, size of world, density of population, PCU... Spread that group across WOW's servers and everything seems dead. Try to fit them in ATITD or Puzzle Pirates and the servers would implode. This is especially true when you look at world sizes. Put 2,000 people in Asheron's Call's 500 sq miles and it's cozy. Put the same amount in Lord of the Rings Online's 30,000 sq miles and pop gets really thin everywhere.

Some games can feel well-populated with a couple hundred players ( ex: Salem, ATITD). Others feel devoid of life without at least a couple thousand players there (ex: EVE Online). The only thing that really matters is how populated it feels.

Laxie brings up another interesting variable which is the direction the population is trending; something that speaks directly to the OP's concerns about not wanting to jump into a dead game or, similarly, a game that's on it's way out.

Warlyx · June 2016

Antiquated said:

Kyleran said:

What's interesting is frequently when this question is asked the player will likely spend their time soloing.

I understand the desire for "high pop"; a healthy game is likely to stick around for a while. A healthy game is one you can talk your friends into playing with you, etc.

But at the same time, I know that an individual's perception of how "busy" a game "feels" is mostly a matter of how skilled the dev team is at traffic control. Almost completely unrelated to a game's total population, and only vaguely related to an individual server's population.

I wonder if it's possible to fake it; an expert system faking general channel chatter, random NPC-bots roaming the town and appearing or disappearing when out of player's line-of-sight. Would players be able to tell the difference?

And yes, it hardly matters if you're soloing the entire time, does it?

of course is possible look at WoW CRZ ....u see tons of player but not on your server , u cant trade , form guild ect , bu they are there.... phasing out/in....

cameltosis · June 2016

Priority number 1 - server population

This is the most important population number to me but has no fixed numbers - it varies from game to game. As others have already said, its about how the game feels:

Can I find people to group with?
Can I find new members for my guild?
Is the raiding scene active?
Is the pvp scene active?
Is the auction house active?

Server population is something that is noticeable every time I log in, but what is usually the most telling is ability to recruit new guild members. If the game is doing well then it is usually really easy to recruit. When the population starts to drop, competition for new raiding members skyrockets so it becomes really hard to get new members in. This is when you start seeing lots of guild mergers and is usually the first sign that the server population has dropped too low for me.

Priority number 2 - game population

This is more about long term outlook for the game. I like to commit long term - I want virtual worlds I can inhabit and enjoy for years, which means regular updates and expansions. If the game population drops too low, content stops coming. As I'm an endgame focused player (raiding + pvp), my content is usually the first to be dropped.

Again, actual numbers vary game to game. SW:TOR, for example, failed hard at launch - at the 6 month mark they had less than 500k subscribers which wasn't enough for the developers to recoup their initial investment, so they had to switch models to get more money and then switch the focus of the game to focus on monetary gain. Something like LotRO, with a much smaller budget but a long term stable community, has been able to survive for years and continue to pump out content regularly (even if the quality hasn't always been great).

Axehilt · June 2016

Doesn't really matter how many other players are playing a game. If it's fun, I'll play it. Most of the time the exact quantity has no meaningful impact on my ability to enjoy the game.

The one place it can potentially impact is group queue times, and those really deserve to be improved in all cases (even the best MMORPG queue time is longer than the worst Starcraft/MOBA/etc queue times.) The solution here is dynamic dungeon difficulty scaling, where the matchmaker adapts to the current supply of players (has the ratio of queueing players been 1:1:2 tank:healer:DPS? Well then create groups of 4 with that ratio. Or maybe it's 1:1:8, in which case it'd create 10-man groups with that ratio.) The difficulty of dungeons would dynamically adjust to the group, just like in City of Heroes. Significant bonuses would be provided to the most demanded role type. The result would be that queue times would be dramatically faster than current MMORPG queue times.

Deivos · June 2016

It can also affect the economy, social level and activities, any competitive play, events, etc.

And I don't think a group finder that can turn dungeons into a cluster-f**k is gonna solve any problems...

As for that actual OP discussion.

It's more about user distribution for me. A "low-pop" game of even only a few thousand players can still feel populous as long as the players aren't strung out across multiple servers. The megaserver concept ends up helping with this a reasonable amount and games like ESO and GW2 consequently have a relatively stable feel to it's volume of users to interact with because of it.

That's where a lot of MMOs have a mechanical failing, with servers that so heavily segregate the user base and kills any scale the population globally has for the game.

Otherwise I agree with Cameltosis statement.

olepi · June 2016

The first M in MMO stands for "massive", meaning at least 1,000 players on a single server. If you are surrounded by at least 1,000 players in your area, then it the population is good.

Kyleran · June 2016

olepi said:

The first M in MMO stands for "massive", meaning at least 1,000 players on a single server. If you are surrounded by at least 1,000 players in your area, then it the population is good.

Most games can't handle 1000 in a single area, so not a good criteria.

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What do you class as a high / med / low pop in MMOs

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What do you class as a high / med / low pop in MMOs

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Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV

Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV