ok - Xfire do not gives us any insight into total account created, but it gives a decent insight into the games relations between each other in the meaning of popularity - because even if only 0.5% of population are using it there is no reason why players of one title will use it more then the other. And like in every opinion pool - the more ppl participate, the more true the outcome is.

Originally posted by teiohFromSWG

It was just announced that WAR has 1 million CURRENT SUBSCRIBERS. This does not include any canceled/banned accounts or accounts in their first free month. This only includes accounts which have been subscribed after their free month and are as of the announcement, still active.

Not if some of those "millions of subscribers" would log in maybe the servers wouldn't look like a ghost town.

Originally posted by Antarious

http://vnboards.ign.com/Message.aspx?topic=109046183&brd=22997&start=109049459

 (you have to scroll down about 5 posts but you'll see the large Mark Jacobs in red letters)

For those to lazy to click:

"Folks,

As everyone knows today was the end of the 30 days trial period for WAR. No MMORPG, not even WoW, has had 100% of the people who buy the box then sign up to play the game. For a good reference check, when DAoC first launched it had one of the highest conversion rates (those who buy the box and then become paying customers) at the time when in it's first month it had 72%. Of course, most industry people (including myself) think WoW's conversion rate was much higher than that. Thus, it is expected that you will lose some people when you first switch to billing (unless you don't sell well the first few weeks). In our case, we sold exceptionally well and so we expected our peak numbers to go down a little bit. While I can't disclose the exact numbers (and neither does WoW, EQ, etc.) for reasons I've talked about before (public company, financial disclosure), I can say that as of five minutes ago our peak server population was only about 3% lower than yesterday's peak numbers. Considering that this was our first billing day (well second actually but the first was very small) and that our competitor is certainly trying to attract people back this weekend, I'm extremely happy with that number. Also, it is pretty standard for all MMOs that the number of people who miss their billing day, start to trickle back within the next few days to enter their CC information and resub. In the case of DAoC, we gained about 5% from each billing day as customers reactivated their accounts.

So, I'm sorry to disappoint some of you but the sky is not falling (again), unless you expected that we'd have a 100% conversion rate in which case, I'd love to sell you some oceanfront property in Arizona.

Edit: And yes, we did raise the server caps as well not too long ago.

Mark "

****

"It was just announced that WAR has 1 million CURRENT SUBSCRIBERS. This does not include any canceled/banned accounts or accounts in their first free month. This only includes accounts which have been subscribed after their free month and are as of the announcement, still active. "

 

They didn't have 1 million subs before the end of the first month.. they didn't have 100% retention rate (according to Mark Jacobs).

They they gained over 250,000 subscriptions from the last stated total... that had a complete month already but weren't subscribed ...  (according to the OP) 

*hint*

You have to have over a million subscriptions in order to retain after 30 days 1 million subscriptions.  The retention rate would dictate the amount past 1 million you would need to still have a million.

Where was the 1 million subscription mark announcement?  I remember the 750,000 one..

Oh I'm sorry I didn't use Xfire.. I figure a Mark Jacobs post on Warhammer VN boards might be as good tho.

 

Oh and btw.. an 80% retention rate would be pretty high.  Even with an 80% rate (with no banned accounts etc) you would need close to 1.3 million accounts.. to retain 1 million after the first 30 days.  Just as an example..

Where do you see that there are 1M subs.  I read that thread and other then the first paragraph I don't see anything about 1M subs.  I even looked at all of Marks recent posts and nothing. 

Is this post a Baffle them with BS post??  Cause your 1M number is total BS and like someone said xfire doesn't back it at all.  I'd guess they are around 400-500K, not even close to 1M.  

So troll elsewhere.  You are just making shit up.

I really don't care about x-fire , my guild got 50+ accounts we got 300+ in our alliance and none of us use x-fire , this means those 300 people don't play WAR at all?

Originally posted by Xtort

Originally posted by b4t3m4n

And here is a little taste of reality...

 

http://www.xfire.com/games/who/Warhammer_Online_Age_of_Reckoning/

 

Reality and Xfire? 

I am sure you use Bush and World Peace in the same sentence as well...

Xfire is reality.  The OP is fantasy...  Get a clue.

Originally posted by aretina

I really don't care about x-fire , my guild got 50+ accounts we got 300+ in our alliance and none of us use x-fire , this means those 300 people don't play WAR at all?

What it means is you don't understand.  So before posting something like this and removing any doubt you would at least be well served by reading past forums or doing some research.  So let me ask the question as a challenge, if you don't have xfire on your computer or any of your guildie computers how can xfire be used to tell if a game is growing or shrinking in the number of subs it has?  You might also ask yourself how do they know how many people watch a TV show week to week?  Or how do they know how many people will vote for obama this week over last week etc?

Originally posted by Vallador

ok - Xfire do not gives us any insight into total account created, but it gives a decent insight into the games relations between each other in the meaning of popularity - because even if only 0.5% of population are using it there is no reason why players of one title will use it more then the other. And like in every opinion pool - the more ppl participate, the more true the outcome is.

Actually this is wrong.  It would only give a good measure of relative game popularity if demographics for games were the same.  Xfire isn't a completely random sample it is likely skewed a bit.  Not much mind you but enough to cause relative comparisons to have a larger error factor.  Not to say you can't do these relative comparisons just that the range of error will be higher.  What xfire does really well is track changes in game populations.  This lets you do a good estimate of subs cause you can take a published number and compare it.  For example if a month ago it is published that there are 500K subs in a game and a month later xfire numbers are 50% then the current subs are 50% of 500k or 250k.

Originally posted by ethion

Originally posted by Antarious

http://vnboards.ign.com/Message.aspx?topic=109046183&brd=22997&start=109049459

 (you have to scroll down about 5 posts but you'll see the large Mark Jacobs in red letters)

For those to lazy to click:

"Folks,

As everyone knows today was the end of the 30 days trial period for WAR. No MMORPG, not even WoW, has had 100% of the people who buy the box then sign up to play the game. For a good reference check, when DAoC first launched it had one of the highest conversion rates (those who buy the box and then become paying customers) at the time when in it's first month it had 72%. Of course, most industry people (including myself) think WoW's conversion rate was much higher than that. Thus, it is expected that you will lose some people when you first switch to billing (unless you don't sell well the first few weeks). In our case, we sold exceptionally well and so we expected our peak numbers to go down a little bit. While I can't disclose the exact numbers (and neither does WoW, EQ, etc.) for reasons I've talked about before (public company, financial disclosure), I can say that as of five minutes ago our peak server population was only about 3% lower than yesterday's peak numbers. Considering that this was our first billing day (well second actually but the first was very small) and that our competitor is certainly trying to attract people back this weekend, I'm extremely happy with that number. Also, it is pretty standard for all MMOs that the number of people who miss their billing day, start to trickle back within the next few days to enter their CC information and resub. In the case of DAoC, we gained about 5% from each billing day as customers reactivated their accounts.

So, I'm sorry to disappoint some of you but the sky is not falling (again), unless you expected that we'd have a 100% conversion rate in which case, I'd love to sell you some oceanfront property in Arizona.

Edit: And yes, we did raise the server caps as well not too long ago.

Mark "

****

"It was just announced that WAR has 1 million CURRENT SUBSCRIBERS. This does not include any canceled/banned accounts or accounts in their first free month. This only includes accounts which have been subscribed after their free month and are as of the announcement, still active. "

 

They didn't have 1 million subs before the end of the first month.. they didn't have 100% retention rate (according to Mark Jacobs).

They they gained over 250,000 subscriptions from the last stated total... that had a complete month already but weren't subscribed ...  (according to the OP) 

*hint*

You have to have over a million subscriptions in order to retain after 30 days 1 million subscriptions.  The retention rate would dictate the amount past 1 million you would need to still have a million.

Where was the 1 million subscription mark announcement?  I remember the 750,000 one..

Oh I'm sorry I didn't use Xfire.. I figure a Mark Jacobs post on Warhammer VN boards might be as good tho.

 

Oh and btw.. an 80% retention rate would be pretty high.  Even with an 80% rate (with no banned accounts etc) you would need close to 1.3 million accounts.. to retain 1 million after the first 30 days.  Just as an example..

 

Where do you see that there are 1M subs.  I read that thread and other then the first paragraph I don't see anything about 1M subs.  I even looked at all of Marks recent posts and nothing. 

Is this post a Baffle them with BS post??  Cause your 1M number is total BS and like someone said xfire doesn't back it at all.  I'd guess they are around 400-500K, not even close to 1M.  

So troll elsewhere.  You are just making shit up.

If you actually read his post, or more importantly read and PROCESSED what he just wrote you would se ehe was debunking the OP's stated 1 million subs.

So next time why don't you read what people say and actually attempt to understand it before jumping down their throats and name calling?

1 Million? no way. considering WAR is only in NA and Euro thats impossible.

It doesn't really matter, you can't have a million players on a server anyway.

 Edit: I mean Don't have a million on a server. Basically saying we shouldn't be worried about game subs considering we don't actually play with everyone that subs to our game (unless you play Eve).

And yes I realize servers could have more users than that it was a Typo.

Give me one server that has a healthy community and im good the rest means nothing.

Originally posted by metalhead980

It doesn't really matter, you can't have a million players on a server anyway.

Please tell me this  was /sarcasm. 

Originally posted by Alienovrlord

Originally posted by metalhead980

It doesn't really matter, you can't have a million players on a server anyway.

 

Please tell me this  was /sarcasm. 

Uh, pretty sure no game supports one million players on a single server, not even eve online.

Originally posted by Newhopes

Originally posted by Valentina

X-Fire numbers don't mean shit, What like 1/5th of the population might even use that? I don't know anyone who uses X-Fire.

 

I always laugh at people who say xfire doesn't mean anything.How the hell do you think they do polls for elections and things like that do you thing they go around and ask everyone in the country how they're going to vote, of course they don't do that they ask a small number of people often less than 0.01% of the population what there going to do and estimate the results from that small cross section of people and do you know what they get pretty damn close to the results 9 time out of 10.

Xfire works pretty much the same way as the polls it may not be a exact science but it can be used to see general trends in games.

XFire doesn't mean shit. Why? Cause XFire users are highly biased in their use of XFire ie you can start it, and stop it whenever you want, you can only let it collect that data you want it to collect. The poll example you throw around would be equally useless if they only asked, lets say farmers, or fishermen. They don't represent the majority of the population and any poll based on them is inherently flawed.

XFire doesn't work in the same way as polls do, and ain't an exact science and can't be used to see general trends in gaming habits. Only numbers that matter is the numbers the developers and publishers sit on. Rest is spectulation and the numbers can be turned either way when they are that inaccurate.

Polls are seldom accurate anyway. Only politicians, and people with an political agenda care about the polls when they argue about it on all those debate programs. The every day man or woman don't care jack about the polls and answer bullshit when asked just to fuck with the poll takers. I know I do the rare times I get contacted by those jackasses

OP is a bloody troll though with his flamebait thread. As the saying goes, especially in forums, link/picture or it didn't happen.

Originally posted by slask777

Originally posted by Newhopes

Originally posted by Valentina

X-Fire numbers don't mean shit, What like 1/5th of the population might even use that? I don't know anyone who uses X-Fire.

 

I always laugh at people who say xfire doesn't mean anything.How the hell do you think they do polls for elections and things like that do you thing they go around and ask everyone in the country how they're going to vote, of course they don't do that they ask a small number of people often less than 0.01% of the population what there going to do and estimate the results from that small cross section of people and do you know what they get pretty damn close to the results 9 time out of 10.

Xfire works pretty much the same way as the polls it may not be a exact science but it can be used to see general trends in games.

 

XFire doesn't mean shit. Why? Cause XFire users are highly biased in their use of XFire ie you can start it, and stop it whenever you want, you can only let it collect that data you want it to collect. The poll example you throw around would be equally useless if they only asked, lets say farmers, or fishermen. They don't represent the majority of the population and any poll based on them is inherently flawed.

XFire doesn't work in the same way as polls do, and ain't an exact science and can't be used to see general trends in gaming habits. Only numbers that matter is the numbers the developers and publishers sit on. Rest is spectulation and the numbers can be turned either way when they are that inaccurate.

Polls are seldom accurate anyway. Only politicians, and people with an political agenda care about the polls when they argue about it on all those debate programs. The every day man or woman don't care jack about the polls and answer bullshit when asked just to fuck with the poll takers. I know I do the rare times I get contacted by those jackasses

OP is a bloody troll though with his flamebait thread. As the saying goes, especially in forums, link/picture or it didn't happen.

Wrong X-fire is accurate
 

Originally posted by TheBrewer

Originally posted by slask777

Originally posted by Newhopes

Originally posted by Valentina

X-Fire numbers don't mean shit, What like 1/5th of the population might even use that? I don't know anyone who uses X-Fire.

 

I always laugh at people who say xfire doesn't mean anything.How the hell do you think they do polls for elections and things like that do you thing they go around and ask everyone in the country how they're going to vote, of course they don't do that they ask a small number of people often less than 0.01% of the population what there going to do and estimate the results from that small cross section of people and do you know what they get pretty damn close to the results 9 time out of 10.

Xfire works pretty much the same way as the polls it may not be a exact science but it can be used to see general trends in games.

 

XFire doesn't mean shit. Why? Cause XFire users are highly biased in their use of XFire ie you can start it, and stop it whenever you want, you can only let it collect that data you want it to collect. The poll example you throw around would be equally useless if they only asked, lets say farmers, or fishermen. They don't represent the majority of the population and any poll based on them is inherently flawed.

XFire doesn't work in the same way as polls do, and ain't an exact science and can't be used to see general trends in gaming habits. Only numbers that matter is the numbers the developers and publishers sit on. Rest is spectulation and the numbers can be turned either way when they are that inaccurate.

Polls are seldom accurate anyway. Only politicians, and people with an political agenda care about the polls when they argue about it on all those debate programs. The every day man or woman don't care jack about the polls and answer bullshit when asked just to fuck with the poll takers. I know I do the rare times I get contacted by those jackasses

OP is a bloody troll though with his flamebait thread. As the saying goes, especially in forums, link/picture or it didn't happen.

Wrong X-fire is accurate
 

Wow, your argument is well formulated and backed by reason, logic and facts.

That was sarcasm by the way.

      I guess what I find odd is that when I buy a game that has a monthly fee I usually do a little research before I buy......Apparently alot of people just go blindly buying games then if they dont like it they dont subscribe.......Id just as soon save the 50 bucks and not buy the game in that case......As for one million subs, maybe someday but right now I have my doubts.........I was thinking maybe half of that is more accurate.

Originally posted by slask777

XFire doesn't mean shit. Why? Cause XFire users are highly biased in their use of XFire ie you can start it, and stop it whenever you want, you can only let it collect that data you want it to collect.

Irrelevant to polling, you can answer those anytime you want as well and you don't have to answer questions you don't want to

The poll example you throw around would be equally useless if they only asked, lets say farmers, or fishermen. They don't represent the majority of the population and any poll based on them is inherently flawed.

That is the only real flaw of Xfire, it is mostly comprised of Hardcore gamers and guilds. But those are not really any different than the average gamer. They play and quit games for the same reasons as everyone else.

Your Farmer and Fishermen analogy is not accurate... I'd say its more like only polling people between 20-35 years old for an election. It's not a perfect sample but all it does is make the error margin higher

Polls are seldom accurate anyway. Only politicians, and people with an political agenda care about the polls when they argue about it on all those debate programs.

seldom accurate? You obviously never took a Statistics class because they are always within range if you follow the rules and are smart enough to interpret them. The problem is that most people aren't smart enough to do that, its not an insult but a simple fact I learned from that class. Which, btw, had a 69% failure rate in college, more than 2/3 of people who take it fail and the average grade is 51%. Most people in my class were taking it for the 2-3rd time :)

Originally posted by slask777

Originally posted by TheBrewer

Originally posted by slask777

Originally posted by Newhopes

Originally posted by Valentina

X-Fire numbers don't mean shit, What like 1/5th of the population might even use that? I don't know anyone who uses X-Fire.

 

I always laugh at people who say xfire doesn't mean anything.How the hell do you think they do polls for elections and things like that do you thing they go around and ask everyone in the country how they're going to vote, of course they don't do that they ask a small number of people often less than 0.01% of the population what there going to do and estimate the results from that small cross section of people and do you know what they get pretty damn close to the results 9 time out of 10.

Xfire works pretty much the same way as the polls it may not be a exact science but it can be used to see general trends in games.

 

XFire doesn't mean shit. Why? Cause XFire users are highly biased in their use of XFire ie you can start it, and stop it whenever you want, you can only let it collect that data you want it to collect. The poll example you throw around would be equally useless if they only asked, lets say farmers, or fishermen. They don't represent the majority of the population and any poll based on them is inherently flawed.

XFire doesn't work in the same way as polls do, and ain't an exact science and can't be used to see general trends in gaming habits. Only numbers that matter is the numbers the developers and publishers sit on. Rest is spectulation and the numbers can be turned either way when they are that inaccurate.

Polls are seldom accurate anyway. Only politicians, and people with an political agenda care about the polls when they argue about it on all those debate programs. The every day man or woman don't care jack about the polls and answer bullshit when asked just to fuck with the poll takers. I know I do the rare times I get contacted by those jackasses

OP is a bloody troll though with his flamebait thread. As the saying goes, especially in forums, link/picture or it didn't happen.

Wrong X-fire is accurate
 

 

Wow, your argument is well formulated and backed by reason, logic and facts.

That was sarcasm by the way.

Sometimes explaining something for the 100th time is an exercise in futility.

Originally posted by b4t3m4n

And here is a little taste of reality...

 

http://www.xfire.com/games/who/Warhammer_Online_Age_of_Reckoning/

Huahuahua - lol, very good! Thank goodness we have Xfire for a bit of statistical comparison.

Originally posted by Myrdek

Originally posted by slask777

XFire doesn't mean shit. Why? Cause XFire users are highly biased in their use of XFire ie you can start it, and stop it whenever you want, you can only let it collect that data you want it to collect.

Irrelevant to polling, you can answer those anytime you want as well and you don't have to answer questions you don't want to

The poll example you throw around would be equally useless if they only asked, lets say farmers, or fishermen. They don't represent the majority of the population and any poll based on them is inherently flawed.

That is the only real flaw of Xfire, it is mostly comprised of Hardcore gamers and guilds. But those are not really any different than the average gamer. They play and quit games for the same reasons as everyone else.

Your Farmer and Fishermen analogy is not accurate... I'd say its more like only polling people between 20-35 years old for an election. It's not a perfect sample but all it does is make the error margin higher

Polls are seldom accurate anyway. Only politicians, and people with an political agenda care about the polls when they argue about it on all those debate programs.

seldom accurate? You obviously never took a Statistics class because they are always within range if you follow the rules and are smart enough to interpret them. The problem is that most people aren't smart enough to do that, its not an insult but a simple fact I learned from that class. Which, btw, had a 69% failure rate in college, more than 2/3 of people who take it fail and the average grade is 51%. Most people in my class were taking it for the 2-3rd time :)

 

If polls where as accurate as you claim them to be, the political climate in my country would've been quite different. Academics I long time ago learned to take with a grain of salt. They bury themselfes in their books and often forget there is a real world out there. Don't take anything a teacher tells you for granted. They can be wrong as well, so can research done on the matter be. Real world examples and experience have shown us this a thousand times over and over again. Polls are a poor guildeline to anything as they are highly inaccurate, and so is XFire. It just take 1 jackass to to make the poll show wrong values. For example, how many out of 10 000 people do you think is screwing with the poll takers? I know I would be one of them.

I think my farmer and fisherman example is a great example for this, as they are a special interest group, just as XFire users are. Anyway, what the hell am I doing awake at this hour??? I need to get to bed damn it. Time does fly when you're at the computer.

Originally posted by slask777 

If polls where as accurate as you claim them to be, the political climate in my country would've been quite different. Academics I long time ago learned to take with a grain of salt. They bury themselfes in their books and often forget there is a real world out there. Don't take anything a teacher tells you for granted. They can be wrong as well, so can research done on the matter be. Real world examples and experience have shown us this a thousand times over and over again. Polls are a poor guildeline to anything as they are highly inaccurate, and so is XFire. It just take 1 jackass to to make the poll show wrong values. For example, how many out of 10 000 people do you think is screwing with the poll takers? I know I would be one of them.

I think my farmer and fisherman example is a great example for this, as they are a special interest group, just as XFire users are. Anyway, what the hell am I doing awake at this hour??? I need to get to bed damn it. Time does fly when you're at the computer.

Here is real world experience

stolenthunder.blogspot.com/2004/09/poll-accuracy-national.html

Political polls often only take 1-5k people out of 350 millions, its a seriously tiny sample and has a pretty big error margin. That said, they are still very accurate if done right and I have just given you proof

1 jackass to screw up polls? You don't seem to realise that there are around 50 formulas (that i learned) used in statistics to "weed out" those people

XFire cannot be lied to, its a program that does everything automatically. It's not a bunch of people writing down what they played and how many hours, its a computer with no emotions doing it.

Warhammer had 13k people out of a max of 750k accounts logged on at its peak. Thats a freaking huge sample and if it would be a perfect sample, it would have a 0.5% error margin

The only real problem we have is that it only shows a graph of the number of hours, not the amount of users. You'd have to write the number of people everyday yourself to truly be accurate

If polls are not accurate then why does every politician, company (games companies too) do it? Do you really think they'd waste money doing them if they weren't useful? Why was it a mandatory class when I was studying computer programming in college?

yes, when Warhammer gets up to 1 or 1.5 million subscribers, I will get back into this game and if it doesn't reach that then this game is simply a waste of time

Originally posted by Xenosaiyan

yes, when Warhammer gets up to 1 or 1.5 million subscribers, I will get back into this game and if it doesn't reach that then this game is simply a waste of time

No western MMO to date has EVER achieved that many subs in under 60 days

750K subscribers no one has ever reached that either but there's more and more mmoers these days

Originally posted by Xenosaiyan

750K subscribers no one has ever reached that either but there's more and more mmoers these days

more and more mmoers spread over more and more games -- your point sir ?

Originally posted by Xenosaiyan

750K subscribers no one has ever reached that either but there's more and more mmoers these days

750k accounts created actually. Which , by now probably will at least be 750k sold, however that still doesn't mean there's 750k subs, it's actually very unlikely unless they got somewhere near or over a million sold by now. (considering players who cancel)