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Seems like the game has peaked on XFire
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Yup, defenders of SWTOR will fight against the validicity of X-Fire but the fact remains it shows trends and the trend is people are losing intrest in SWTOR. The dead severs supporot this.
Well, I actually was in your corner a little, a long time ago, they do not tell you how many people are playing something, if the game company never tells you an official number....But it is good for trends, you may think its not, due to it being a small minority, but time and again, it seems it is a good trend predictor... It gave a trend in Rift, and many other mmos... It also appears to trend in TOR correctly, now here is the tricky part, how well does it trend with what the real numbers are?
If Xfire is at 50% of what it was, does that mean when the 1.7 was announced, the trend is equal to the real population, and it is now 850k.....New patch, free time, and xfire went up...As would be predicted if it was truely tied in to the trend.
I use to think it was bogus, as I do not use it, and no one I know uses it, but it seems to predict the population trend pretty well, and if the next game I play has people using it, and it is steeply trending down, I will not blow it off, and worry about what it means... Which should be thought of in TOR, when you have Lucas lurking about, and his history of tinkering with things.
Yup, defenders of SWTOR will fight against the validicity of X-Fire but the fact remains it shows trends and the trend is people are losing intrest in SWTOR. The dead severs supporot this.
The majority of people defending XFire make limited claims to its relevance, those against XFire make absolute claims to its lack, that for me is quite telling.So I go to xfire and see the following
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Blizzard Entertainment
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wotlkb
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Mojang
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BioWare
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Blizzard Entertainment
Blizzard Entertainment
So how is being number so bad? None of us ever expected to nock of blizard.
The post 30 day freebies and 1.2 provide a lot less bounce back then I expected.
There's definitely increased population in the game, indicated both by X-fire and my own anecdotal evidence, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it's short lived. I think the game can find a bottom(subs) but that is largely predicated by when Bioware gets Ranked/Rated Warzones out into the hands of the players.
If we find rated warzones still AWOL until 1.3, I think that X-fire bottom of aprox 3200, goes lower, much lower, into the low 2000s.
I don't think they were able to capture enough subscriptions(with the Jebus patch) to hold TERA, TSW, and GW2 defections at bay.
That's hours #1, not players.
Secondly, for a project of this scope and cost, should be doing much better than it is currently. At present, it has virtually no competition in the "new MMO" space. When TOR does, the numbers will likely fall lower at an accelerated pace.
Im pretty shocked at how low the Jezus bump was. Was expecting it to be at least a jump to 5k users especially after the free 7/30 day giveaway. That alone whould have had a bunch of people at least loggin on to test the new patch. IF you look at the stats pages and chart 60 day trends, Xfire and Tor status were showing a parallel decline. First two weeks of April had almost 60 servers never reaching standard for more than 1 hour a week and over 45 never even reaching standard.
Well we shall see, but now after the feedback I am seeing, we may want to start comparing TOR to Aion and not WOW. Since Aion is now seeing a fast climb.
Move my Pleasure Barge to another game. I grow tired of this one.
Ballerinas are always on their toes. Why don't they just get taller ballerinas?
GW2 will decimate what's left of SWTOR. I have never been so pissed off at a game until I played swtor and EA/Bioware will never get my money again. Yes I knew it was a themepark going in, yes I knew it would be a lot like WoW, but I didn't expect the game to be so utterly boring after a few levels and the bugs and the UI and the game itself being one long hallways, mobs always being in a group of 3 hanging around like they do, companions being stupid, the lack of a proper LFG tool, the crappy AH UI, boring PvP, there's just so many things wrong with this game and there is no replay value.
This game is dying, face it. It's a big steaming pile of doodoo.
If this game wasn't called Star Wars, if it wasn't made by Bioware, it would have died in 3 months just like APB did. It's a mess and a piece of trash, pure garbage. I hate this game, and I honestly, HONESTLY, hope that it puts Bioware out of business. Complete, utter garbage!
With the huge budget that they had, they should have concentrated on the actual gameplay instead of the voice over crap that gets stale after a week of play. That's another thing that irks me, people saying this game has the best questing experience. It doesn't, not at all. The personal story is OK, but the rest? Oh here's another guy telling me his entire squad got killed by a bunch of cows in a field, oh boy let me go, by myself, kill all this stuff because your squad of elite, military dudes couldn't do it. Oh hey I one shot them all but that's cool, give me my credits and some crappy green gear. Hey wait a minute, here's yet another person asking me to flip 4 switches, off I go to save the galaxy, oh wait, that's just not very heroic is it James Ohlen? But wait, let's have 1000 quests asking me to do these same, non-heroic things all the way to 50.
I hate this @%*&;^(*&^*(%^*(^%@ game.
Total population graph on torstatus.net shows server loads, just like all the other graphs on that site. It's very clearly written below the graph how it's calculated.
Light, standard or heavy servers have very much bearing when talking about a graph that is based on those loads. No matter how the graph is named, it still can't show a population decline on a server that's already light because there isn't any lower population status the server could get.
Considering that all US servers together haven't even reached (average of) standard population this month, it means there are continuosly light servers and even the peak times are affected by light server's population status not being able to get any lower even if the servers lose players.
Torstatus.net and XFire do not contradict each other.
The Jebus patch it's not that bad, it sent SWTOR back to numbers from three weeks ago, and if it stops the decline it will be very good.
Added WOW in the graph for reference. Now the SWTOR line is a bit flatter and looks not so dramatic, at least the last months
An honest review of SW:TOR 6/10 (Danny Wojcicki)
I never did either, but I am very grateful that people do. Before the XFire-tracking, it was complete guesswork, dotted with a few industry leaks, that could not be verified.
What really baffles me, is how a free month can keep people playing. Is it less boring, just because it is free? I value my time a bit higher than that.
I never used xFire either, and don't intend to do. If that makes anyone laugh means they didn't understand anything.
An honest review of SW:TOR 6/10 (Danny Wojcicki)
FYI the free 30 days have not occured yet, and will only occur for players who have an active sub, alelve 50 or a Legacy level 6.
So all the people who have not subbed will not be getting the free 30 days and thus will make no impact on these figures.....
not that I rate Xfire with any kind of validity at all anyway
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ab/Norsefire-logo.png
An honest review of SW:TOR 6/10 (Danny Wojcicki)
But the 7 days for the expired subs I thought has started now? I imagine some will want to check out the Jebus patch.It's showing a normal decline during the week days, not a sharp drop like the first free week end, and the increase was bigger, so it seems the jebus patch is doing ok so far. Well and the free month and the free week and all that too.
An honest review of SW:TOR 6/10 (Danny Wojcicki)
I believe people were given until the 20th to reach level 50 or legacy level 6 for the free month so eveyrone is racing to reach that. I know the imperial fleet on vrook lamar is a lot more crowded at prime time than it was a few weeks ago.
Currently Playing: World of Warcraft
Maybe EA's latest offer is because SWTOR has sold so many copies they are rolling in money - although that doesn't fit with their talk about possible serv er transfers / mergers because their peak concurrency is lower than it was.
Maybe they are genuinely apologetic for poor <>; which would be unusual.
They need something to report at their quarterly reports.
Assuming that it is a major marketing push because subs are "not what they would like" to report what does this suggest? And how might this relate to what XFire is showing.
Option 1: subs are above 500k but below the 1M mark required to generate a return on their investment or are expected to be above 500k but below 1M after the 3 month renewal window.
Option 2: subs are below 500k or expected to be below the 500k mark after the 3 month renewal window.
The timing of the XFire peak and the numbers given out by EA don't match but we can make a couple of assumptions:
Assumption 1: the XFire peak player number of 11,800 relates to a 1.7M number.
Check: if it is lower then what follows is optimistic and the true situation is worse; if it is higher than 1.7M what follows is pessimistic but it means that EA decided not to report a number higher than 1.7M.
Remember the big caveat: we don't know the plus or minus margin of error. It could be "huge", +/- 20% or more. This is pushing the boat out. We don't know. OK. So with tht massive caveat:
Prior to the big push XFire was showing sub 4,000 numbers. Roughly about 1/3 of the peak XFire number. And 1/3 of 1.7M is in the 5-600k number. The XFire number was also heading lower down towards 3,000 indicating 1/4 of 1.7M or sub-500k.
Would subs - actual or predicted by EA - falling below 500k (the stated break even point) cause EA to push the pamic button. Possibly yes. And that would seem to fit.
Of course this is all hypothetical because this may be a reward, servers are packed and subs may be growing (continually rather than on a single day!)
If pre-1.2 subs dropped below 500k somebody would've been fired by now. I mean somebody important enough to be noticed by journalists.
The reason why they pushed "the panic button" is most probably that they didn't expect to drop below 1m so fast (even before D3 release). It was a very embarassing free fall because it proved SWTOR couldn't compete even with older MMOs.
MMORPG genre is dead. Long live MMOCS (Massively Multiplayer Online Cash Shop).
I've played a couple of days so far on their free 7 day offer. It will be lame for them to count me in any sort of financial statement as they aren't getting a dime from me. There's nothing in 1.2 to get me to subscribe, but I'll take the free pet and maybe the title if I have time.
They still are months away from features that should of been included in the launch. Namely:
1) Cross Server Flashpoint Finder
2) Cross server Rated Battlegrounds and premade vs. premade and pug vs. pug matching only
#1 would of gotten me to pay for a month subscription. Awesome space sim multiplayer combat could keep me for months.
Could be actual between 500k and 1M
and predicted below 500k post the 90 day window - 120 to maybe c. 135 days after launch, equivalent to people buying / installing the game from the "20th Dec" through to New Year.
Notice that number of players went up and total hours went down.
So more people are playing but giving up sooner
MMOs played: WoW, Star Wars Galaxies, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Guild Wars, Planetside, Global Agenda, Star Trek Online, RIFT, Everquest 2, Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, EvE online, APB
Best MMO Companies: Trion Worlds, ArenaNet, CCP
Worst MMO Companies: Electronic Arts
Interesting to see how the #'s look after this weekend.
D3 beta started... and yesterday didn't have the usual friday uptick - actually lost players from thur, though more hours played (which make sense).