Can a new expansion ressurect this game?

Data from: www.warcraftrealms.com

Original: www.warcraftrealms.com/temp/activity-2008-09.htm

Player Activity in US and EU Servers from 04/2005 until 09/2008.

My regards

That is hardly much of a downward trend at all and it won't resurrect what isn't dead but it will push the subs over 12 million no doubt.

I've never liked how that site gets it data, but it is what it is I guess.

That being said, there were ques on two servers I play on tonight.  Haven't seen that in a long time.

yeah those sites that hope to have good statistics pretty much fail, i log in and see for myself, right now my server is more packed then ever and the servers are hitting the full and maxed statis every night.

Originally posted by Scalebane

yeah those sites that hope to have good statistics pretty much fail, i log in and see for myself, right now my server is more packed then ever and the servers are hitting the full and maxed statis every night.

That site uses a plug-in that basically constanty does /who commands to get a sample of who's online.

Seems like a good system to me - trusting any company to be forthright about anything that affects it's own bottom line is foolish.  3rd parties tend to be impartial, even if they can't be totally accurate at least you know they aren't intentionally misrepresenting their data.

I and thousands, if not milions, have not been able to play since 3.02 trashed the realms. I would call that a downward trend.

I can see it now. "THE LICH KING IS RELEASED"!!

but it can't be played. LOL!!

Originally posted by x_rast_x

Originally posted by Scalebane

yeah those sites that hope to have good statistics pretty much fail, i log in and see for myself, right now my server is more packed then ever and the servers are hitting the full and maxed statis every night.

 

That site uses a plug-in that basically constanty does /who commands to get a sample of who's online.

Seems like a good system to me - trusting any company to be forthright about anything that affects it's own bottom line is foolish.  3rd parties tend to be impartial, even if they can't be totally accurate at least you know they aren't intentionally misrepresenting their data.

Ignoring any issues with how the mod collects data, the results are heavily dependant on how many people run the mod and their playtime.  There are just to many servers where that little to no one runs the mod at all.  The sample size can be to small and the margin of error looks like it can be huge.

I suspect it does a fair job in some regards, but I am more apt to trust the public statements that clearly detail current active paying subscriber numbers from a company that could face legal charges due to investor relations if they lie.

I think a more reliable way to determine that populations are increasing the past month is to just log in and check out how many servers have a queue during primetime.  Last night there were around 20 servers that are queueing now.  That is a lot more than there were a few months ago.

I think July/August were probably the low point because it's been so long since we got new content..  the 3.0 patch solved that.

Also, Xfire show players up about 30% from where they were in August.

AAARRRGGGHHH!!!!!!!

Every couple of months someone creates one of these threads from the same damned site with the same completely innacurate figures!

If you wanna see how the game is doing then play it and see for yourself rather than quoting third hand data collected in the most unreliable way possible.

Is the game on a downturn, well judging from the fact that i ended up 431st in the queue for my main server the other night and i haven't had to queue for a server since the last expansion, i'm guessing not!

Yeah I play on Illidan which has been off and on all week, hopefully more people leave, more horde specifically because last time I heard it was 3/1 alliance/horde ratio which makes questing annoying.. I just started playing a Shaman and should hit lvl 70 this weekend, just in time for the expansion

I wouldn't call that a downward trend - just see how the chart hits a wave pattern at that high level.

I've had to queue on Dragonblight EU most days since patch. The last time I had to queue was back in 2005.

i dont agree with this post .the population is very high .i play on jubei thos server and population is so much high that you have to get in queue to enter it.cuz everybody wants to be lvl 70 before the expansion pack comes .so wow haters can cry a lot .these lame posts cannot hide the truth.

Actually a better site for tracking this now seems to be Xfire which is used by a lot of folks.  A lot more than are using that in-game mod.  Xfire shows that WoW has been #1 in Xfire activity for the past 3+ years except for the recent patch day when the realms were down for an extended period of time.  I haven't looked at the trending lately, but I would imagine it's up rather than down.  Besides, all bets are off once the expansion is released and the holidays roll around, you'll see a definate upward swing again.

Originally posted by x_rast_x

Originally posted by Scalebane

yeah those sites that hope to have good statistics pretty much fail, i log in and see for myself, right now my server is more packed then ever and the servers are hitting the full and maxed statis every night.

 

That site uses a plug-in that basically constanty does /who commands to get a sample of who's online.

Seems like a good system to me - trusting any company to be forthright about anything that affects it's own bottom line is foolish.  3rd parties tend to be impartial, even if they can't be totally accurate at least you know they aren't intentionally misrepresenting their data.

Actually that's not even remotely close to accurate.  The site doesn't do anything at all to collect the data, it requires the use of a mod by someone who plays the game and then uploads the data the mod collects to their site.  The mod is seldom used by people (most don't even know it exists) and rarely is the data collected by those who do use the mod uploaded to the site.  Even when the mod is used, all it does is a SINGLE /who and collects the data.  Saying it's doing a constant /who is hilarious.  A quick look at most of the servers will see something like 1 or 2 uploads a DAY.  That's 1 or 2 /who's a DAY.  On top of that, the /who is faction specific so it takes 2 /who's, one from each faction done at EXACTLY the same time, to even get an accurate count for that moment in time.  EVERYONE who's not playing at that moment in time on that given day is NOT counted.  On top of that problem, the data it does collect is character information, not account information.  There's no way of knowing how many accounts or subscribers make up the number of characters.  You could just be seeing a lower number of characters in use, while the number of subscribers is actually increasing.  The mod can't tell you that.

No, they aren't misrepresenting the data.  The problem is the data isn't even remotely close to being accurate.  When the mod first came out and a lot of people were using the mod and uploading the information to the site, then it had some merit and actually if you look at the graph you can see when this was.  You initially saw a fairly steady graph where they were getting enough data feeds for accurate data.  Look at the graph now, it's all over the place.  Sometimes high, sometimes low, very erratic.  My guess is this is largely because of the very limited number of data points they have to work with.  It just all depends on what time of day it is when they do they /who, what day it is, what the weather is like outside, if the local sports team happens to be playing a game right then etc.  It's just not reliable data, not by a long shot.

The following is taken straight from the website:

Question: "At one point Blizzard downplayed the accuracy of census websites. What sort of evidence do you have to backup your numbers?"

Answer:  "It all boils down to what you are looking for. Blizzard can say that the numbers are not correct, and they would be right. There is no way for the numbers to be 100% correct. But the numbers don’t have to be 100% correct to give very good indicators of server population, demographics, and activity. When you are dealing with a sample size of 3 million characters seen in 30 days over level 10, how can you tell me that the numbers presented are not very close to the actual figures?

I will say this though. Some realms are better covered than others. If very few snapshots are provided for a particular faction/realm, then yes, the numbers can be skewed. I do have indicators on the site to let the user know when this is a possibility though so they can make their own judgments. "

Which is exactly what we have now.  VERY VERY FEW snapshots are provided these days.  Nearly EVERY server has the following dislaimer for one faction or another "There are too few Horde entries for this realm to give reliable results! Please help today by submitting data for this realm! Find out more about how to help "  Therefore the numbers are unreliable in total.  No, the data doesn't have to be 100% correct, but it does have to be better than say 50% correct to get anything of value from it.  What if the data is only 1% correct?  What does THAT show?  Nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  And even HE doesn't know how accurate it is.  He'll tell you that.

Trusting this system which is basically run by 1 person, doesn't have to answer to anyone like shareholders or the IRS over a well respected company like Blizzard who does have to answer to shareholders, the IRS and the gaming industry to give accurate numbers is VERY telling.

These statistics are bullshit, plain and simple. I'm not even gonna argue about it... servers are CRAMMED with people at the moment.  As a matter of fact, i have never seen it as crowded as this before.

Don't believe me? Go create a free trail account and see for yourself.

grim batol had 1.2k + qeue to log in

http://www.wow-europe.com/realmstatus/index.html?locale=en_gb nuff said.. wow is more alive then ever :S

Originally posted by antaras

grim batol had 1.2k + qeue to log in

^^ Horde Scumm

Yeah I noticed too the other days on Grim Batol, said 90min wait.. I minimised and played TF2 for an hour.

indeed.. doomsday finnally arived.. oh wait, new realms.. mass queues.. servers going from medium to full/locked .. surely .. must be a sign...

Europe - 23/10 Queues, new realms and migration
Quote from: Thundgot (Source)
Greetings!

We wanted to give you a quick update on the measures we’re taking to address the queues currently experienced on the English realms. We have two ways of addressing these; migration and new realms, depending on other factors.

For PvP realms the main additional factor is the difference between population on high and low populated realms, thus we plan to address the queues by offering Free Character Migration from the highest populated realms to the lowest populated ones. This will address the population concerns on both the source and target realms. We’d like to assure those concerned with moving to a realm with lower population that we have every intention of using the migration to make sure these have a healthy population over time.

However, due to current concerns with realm performance we wish to wait at least until after the upcoming weekend to start any free migrations, making sure the extra load on the realms from the migration doesn’t impact the game performance.

For PvE realms the situation is different; the population is very evenly spread out, and thus migration is not an option. We plan to open new PvE realms to address the current realm queues. These will be fresh realms, allowing no migration to them at first. We will have more about this tomorrow, Friday, but wanted to at least give you a heads up about it today.

We’ll keep you updated on our plans and considerations moving forward. If you have any questions, feel free to post them in this thread. More details will follow as soon as we have them ready.

Blizzard cruisin away from the competitors seeing their customer base increasing, servers fillin up, and lastly the money coming in that ends up smoking over the little mmo companies.