Originally posted by Narshe

Originally posted by strategy

 

So how come it exaclty shows what MJ wants to confirm.

70% retention since the billing began: see the Xfire graph on Oct 19th and the the following week.

Now the interesting part is THIS IS confirmed (again - as in all those other earlier cases - remember AoC subs at 420K in June while Xfire showed aprox the same equivalent).

Why do you think www.xfire.com shows these stats btw ??? :))

 

 

I have a question.. isn't it possible that even though these people have stopped playing as much as they used to, that they could have infact kept their subscriptions? You know.. like they went back to their previous MMO but kept their WAR subscriptions when they wanted to jump in for a scenario or something? I know quite a few people who are currently playing both WoW (or another MMO) and WAR and don't mind paying for both..

I don't know too much about xfire, I've never used it and only a few people in my guild of 80+ use it. That chart makes things look bad, but it also looks like WAR is still the second most played MMO..

This is very plausible, yes. People don't play or far less and still have a subscription running. Good post.
 

It happens to me all the time, for about one or maximum two months. After that I make a choice. It's all about the general feel you have.

Also in older MMO's I think a decent % of players still have subs but don't play very much. I think about Eve and LOTRO and Wow of course. But I think that only applies to the guys who pay with the credit cards. The people who use prepaid cards just run out of time and don't activate IF they think of it.

These stats are ALL about general trends.

I want WAR to have 250-350K subs. Really I do ! (the only thing I didn't like was the PvP control but if they could fix that I would come back).

But what I can NOT stand is this constant "cheating" on false figures. It reminds me way too much of AoC and their lying and not telling the truth. Things lke "active users" and "only 3% less players (but only in relation to ... yesterday)".

Now it's this 70% rule again. Over what period ? One week, two weeks ?

The same with those famous server caps. Caps were raised but WHEN and with HOW much? Never a decent answer. Always turning around. Therefore the only stats we have I trust and Amazon doesn't lie and why should 7000 XFire users be any different than other War players. The sample is much too big to be ignored.

Those who STILL believe this game has 800 K users spread over 113 servers: raise their hands. Ok now we know who still believes in Santa.

So blizz talk retention too:  ""To date 46 percent of players who listed Warhammer as their reason for cancellation have reactivated their subscriptions to World of Warcraft."

bet that made MJ froth at the mouth.

www.edge-online.com/news/blizzard-unfazed-conan-warhammer

Originally posted by strategy

Originally posted by Narshe

Originally posted by strategy

So how come it exaclty shows what MJ wants to confirm.

70% retention since the billing began: see the Xfire graph on Oct 19th and the the following week.

Now the interesting part is THIS IS confirmed (again - as in all those other earlier cases - remember AoC subs at 420K in June while Xfire showed aprox the same equivalent).

Why do you think www.xfire.com shows these stats btw ??? :)) 

I have a question.. isn't it possible that even though these people have stopped playing as much as they used to, that they could have infact kept their subscriptions? You know.. like they went back to their previous MMO but kept their WAR subscriptions when they wanted to jump in for a scenario or something? I know quite a few people who are currently playing both WoW (or another MMO) and WAR and don't mind paying for both..

I don't know too much about xfire, I've never used it and only a few people in my guild of 80+ use it. That chart makes things look bad, but it also looks like WAR is still the second most played MMO..

This is very plausible, yes. People don't play or far less and still have a subscription running. Good post.
 

It happens to me all the time, for about one or maximum two months. After that I make a choice. It's all about the general feel you have.

Also in older MMO's I think a decent % of players still have subs but don't play very much. I think about Eve and LOTRO and Wow of course. But I think that only applies to the guys who pay with the credit cards. The people who use prepaid cards just run out of time and don't activate IF they think of it.

These stats are ALL about general trends.

I want WAR to have 250-350K subs. Really I do ! (the only thing I didn't like was the PvP control but if they could fix that I would come back).

But what I can NOT stand is this constant "cheating" on false figures. It reminds me way too much of AoC and their lying and not telling the truth. Things lke "active users" and "only 3% less players (but only in relation to ... yesterday)".

Now it's this 70% rule again. Over what period ? One week, two weeks ?

The same with those famous server caps. Caps were raised but WHEN and with HOW much? Never a decent answer. Always turning around. Therefore the only stats we have I trust and Amazon doesn't lie and why should 7000 XFire users be any different than other War players. The sample is much too big to be ignored.

Those who STILL believe this game has 800 K users spread over 113 servers: raise their hands. Ok now we know who still believes in Santa.

LOL, Stop trying to pretend that anyone who thinks Xfire Statistics are nonsense is just trying to defend the game & we all know that you are the one that believes Santa lives in the Lost City of Atlantis rather than at the North Pole.

As I said earlier on this thread. 

Hey don't get me wrong, I am not trying to claim that the game isn't having problems.

I just hate sloppy statistics & the constant quotation of Xfire like it is was supposed to be the gaming equivalent of the 'Dow Jones Index' is just ridiculous. 

It's bizarre that in your latest post you claim to have such a sense of injustice toward anyone using bad statistics, but somehow don't apply the same logic to yourself.

As for reasons why 7000 Xfire users should be any different than other WAR players. The fact that most people think it is a complete waste of time, suggests that people that do use it are hardly going to be a random sample, but why speculate just look at the published demographics of Xfire users!

The comment about certain things 'Only applying to the guys that use Credit Cards' was also amusing, surely that would be most adult game players. Weren't prepaid game cards purely introduced for children, but since a very large percentage of Xfire users are still under 18 that explains your interest.

Unfortunately your fetish for block capitals seems to have emerged again but other than that keep it up, your posts are a constant source of amusement. 

All i know is at my local EB Games there isn t a copy of WAR at all. More are coming in as we speak. When AOC was a month out he couldn t sell the 30 or so copies on the shelf at all. So i would say comparing those 2 WAR is and will be a much larger success.

Originally posted by slask777

Personal posts from the hype machine is never to be taken seriously. Look, the game got problems and Mark is sugarcoating it, same as you guys do. You know it, we know it and he know it. He can't say otherwise though cause how long do you think he keep his job if he go around admitting to those problems. His job is to keep the pr machine going and have good community relations with the general public. It's the same with every mmo out there. As one example, Craig Morrison aka Silirrion, as good as a game director he is, never went out and admitted to the problems Anarchy Online had, neither did Gaute Godager. Craig didn't admit the problems AoC had/have either. It's just the way it is, so never take their hyped post for granted.

I don't hate on the game at all though, it's just the facts staring me in the eyes. Game need a bloody big band-aid to patch it up and somehow manage to lure and tempt ex-war players, such as myself, to resubscribe to the game.

On the 250k subscribers as a goal Mythic had, it's amazing how fast people forget. They aimed at 1 million, and Mark himself said that if WAR didn't reach that goal he feared for the future of mmo's. That man is full of himself and that comment proves it. The mmo genre will outlive both WoW and WAR and if WAR plonks it will leave no marks at all on the mmo market. It's a much bigger deal if WoW falls flat on its face, but the chance of that happening is close to zero. Even that hypothetical event wont change the mmo market much except flooding it with mmo addicts without a game to play. The market will still be there though, players will still play mmo's and developers will still make mmo's.

Did he also say that they needed 500,000 subs to keep the game running.  Anyone remember the 500,000 number?

Originally posted by Soki123

All i know is at my local EB Games there isn t a copy of WAR at all. More are coming in as we speak. When AOC was a month out he couldn t sell the 30 or so copies on the shelf at all. So i would say comparing those 2 WAR is and will be a much larger success.

i went and got fallout 3 the other day from my EB, warhammer was the only game with more copies on the shelf than any other in the store! then again it makes it worse as WAR was designed for the masses.

Last nite half the servers were med/med. Clicked on a low/low server where I had a character and a msg saying warning this is a low pop server go here to transfer blah blah blah.

Games doing fine. 

They made more servers and kept the pop cap low at release so the servers wouldnt get stressed and crash.

Long ques, crashing and laggy servers = bad release.

Now there pulling everyone off the extra servers and will probaly drop em.  Working as intended.

Originally posted by tikovoo

Originally posted by Soki123

All i know is at my local EB Games there isn t a copy of WAR at all. More are coming in as we speak. When AOC was a month out he couldn t sell the 30 or so copies on the shelf at all. So i would say comparing those 2 WAR is and will be a much larger success.

 

i went and got fallout 3 the other day from my EB, warhammer was the only game with more copies on the shelf than any other in the store! then again it makes it worse as WAR was designed for the masses.

Meaningless Personal Experience #1, meet Meaningless Personal Experience #2. Can Xfire and Amazon lists be far behind?

Nice try to spin that one lmao...

New games with server merges are NOT "working as intended"...  Far from it.  I don't think WAR is going to be shut down anytime soon but they clearly anticipated more subscribers than what they actually achieved.

Moving people from server to server is never ideal.

Originally posted by Narshe

Originally posted by strategy

Originally posted by Ixnatifual

You clearly have no idea how polls work. I think you need to look up on how exactly how meaningful polls, like the exit polls for the presidential election, are made, as you are obviously very confused on the subject.

XFire also measures time played (while it's active), and not subscriptions. All we can say by XFire is that "there's fewer people playing WAR while running XFire". Trying to extrapolate specific data like subscriber numbers from this is pure insanity, though I can see it's useful as a weak escape route/smoke screen to use when facts aren't going your way.

 

So how come it exaclty shows what MJ wants to confirm.

70% retention since the billing began: see the Xfire graph on Oct 19th and the the following week.

Now the interesting part is THIS IS confirmed (again - as in all those other earlier cases - remember AoC subs at 420K in June while Xfire showed aprox the same equivalent).

Why do you think www.xfire.com shows these stats btw ??? :))

 

 

I have a question.. isn't it possible that even though these people have stopped playing as much as they used to, that they could have infact kept their subscriptions? You know.. like they went back to their previous MMO but kept their WAR subscriptions when they wanted to jump in for a scenario or something? I know quite a few people who are currently playing both WoW (or another MMO) and WAR and don't mind paying for both..

I don't know too much about xfire, I've never used it and only a few people in my guild of 80+ use it. That chart makes things look bad, but it also looks like WAR is still the second most played MMO..

Yes

I have 2 RL friends who both subbed for 3 months, and no longer play  (1 has gone back to EQ2 (why???) and the other LoTRO).

I will decide if I am gonna sub or not when I read the feedback from patch 1.1 in December....

Originally posted by Thunderous

Nice try to spin that one lmao...

New games with server merges are NOT "working as intended"...  Far from it.  I don't think WAR is going to be shut down anytime soon but they clearly anticipated more subscribers than what they actually achieved.

Moving people from server to server is never ideal.

Says who?

I would rather have a server merge than a bad launch.    And technicaly its not a server merge. But a character transfer service. Theres a difference. Notice how they point out its free right now. Its a common pay service. And you will have to pay for it later on.

Originally posted by Thunderous

Nice try to spin that one lmao...

New games with server merges are NOT "working as intended"...  Far from it.  I don't think WAR is going to be shut down anytime soon but they clearly anticipated more subscribers than what they actually achieved.

Moving people from server to server is never ideal.

What if a game company wanted to do an innovative approach.   Have starting servers where characters stay for N amount of time (say 30 days and/or levels) and then get promoted to a long term server of the user's choice.  I see some advantages.

1)  Since it is for the lower level characters, starting players and trial accounts, the low level areas could be busier than they current way of running games.  2)  Trial accounts would be limited to this area, and not be able to spam your long term servers.

3)  Players could find their friends and coordinate a move to a long term server. I've seen people complain they they picked a server and their friends picked a different one.

I personally do not run xfire (or any other background application I can shut off) while playing WAR.  I want the graphics set high AND want high frame rates.  Xfire cuts into performance....although i don't know to what degree.  As someone else said, XFire stats reflect XFire users.  I would be hesitant to extrapolate that data to a "universal" pronouncement.

That's all I have to say as I must relog into WAR.  It's a whole lot more fun to play the game than to read much of the venom spewed here.  Honestly haters, do you really feel you are changing the world with your rants?

Originally posted by Handa

That's all I have to say as I must relog into WAR.  It's a whole lot more fun to play the game than to read much of the venom spewed here.  Honestly haters, do you really feel you are changing the world with your rants?

People who love the game, play the game.

They do not see these forums.

The vast majority of people that post here merely preach to the choir.

On that account...

Are forums, then, comparable to X-fire in terms of being used to to represent how well the game is doing?

I'm glad at MBJ's statement, good to see it, and you are right...

Time to relog in and get my guild together to go take some objectives from Destruction.

Enough is enough and i think yhis is enough, people get serious! Does the % number of population contributes to your happyness? Like What Would we care about Subscribers Drop or Rise... it's like we won't quit just because someone did... You love the game and you will still love, it's "our" own choice, not yours.

Quit whining about the numer of subscribers.

whiners gone ...

Originally posted by EvolvedMonky

Originally posted by Thunderous

Nice try to spin that one lmao...

New games with server merges are NOT "working as intended"...  Far from it.  I don't think WAR is going to be shut down anytime soon but they clearly anticipated more subscribers than what they actually achieved.

Moving people from server to server is never ideal.

 

Says who?

I would rather have a server merge than a bad launch.    And technicaly its not a server merge. But a character transfer service. Theres a difference. Notice how they point out its free right now. Its a common pay service. And you will have to pay for it later on.

This isn't a case of "technically" something that has a false appearance of what it truely is. These are server mergers that give players the choice of where to move and don't shut down the old servers yet.

No company wants to have 20 empty servers that they advise people not to make new characters there and/or move their old characters off.  I also doubt a company wants to announce server mergers only a few weeks after launch, which is why they are dressing it up as free transfers.  It is smart marketing to make it appear to be something other than mergers, but the reality is what just that.  Even though it will be generally viewed as the kiss of death (even as Mythic stated in an interview), it is the right thing to do for the health of the game.  I've been enjoying the game more since the mergers to be honest.

I don't think the game is going to die or anything like that, but I sure don't believe mythic over estimated the number of servers by roughtly 40% considering how they won't shut up about their great sales numbers.

I am putting War on hold until they sort out the server pops but I feel that its easier to merge the servers than it is to deal with the long waits to get on. Our guild were getting wait times of over 2 hours on our server and this made it really impractical to play so we moved servers - now we find ourselves on a low pop server where we cant get any scenarios and the pqs are empty. If they sort out this problem we will all go back because we love the game - In the meantime we have gone back to WoW.

I started my WAR gaming days on the second largest EU server in Order side. Up to a certain point I was experiencing queues and the server was listing both sides as high/high. Then something happened and the queues disappeared and the server listing went from high/high to med/med. There are three possible explanations. I fear that only Mythic knows for sure:

• They didn't know how many people the servers could handle. They saw that the the servers could handle double the load that they had originally anticipated and hence lowered the server cap on all servers.
• They lost almost half their subscription base once the box month was over.
• They knew how many people the servers could handle. However, they kept the server cap artificially low, because a big number of full servers looks good for marketing purposes.

For one reason or the other, the spark was gone on the server I was. It seems that the original server cap was actually the critical size needed for the game to be fun. So the fun was going down the more I levelled and the fewer people I had to play with. It became so stagnant, that I had either two choices:

• Leave the people that I came to know and like for a new server or,
• Leave the game and come back once the server issues were resolve.

My comeback will be after the holiday season, if at all. The game is heavily dependant on a healthy server population. Once they decided on the max amount of people that could play on a server, they were in trouble. The problem is that the original population cap was too small for the game to be fun, which left them with the majority of servers in a non-fun status. Apart from the servers that kept growing once the server cap was doubled, every other server was dying. Slowly but steadily.

Now, server transfers is another cover up for server merges. It seems that Mythic is more interested in the game image than in it's health. There is only one problem that would create issues due to the server merge and that's castle ownership. But castles change hands on an hourly base, so it's not that big of an issue anyway. So, instead of merging two average servers and create one healthy one, they chose to let the players do the merge. The problem is that some of them will choose to leave the game, looking at the mismanagement from this very early in the game's life. From my point of view it seems that the WAR developers are more interested in the marketing image than the game health. And that''s never good news.

Originally posted by Xasapis

I started my WAR gaming days on the second largest EU server in Order side. Up to a certain point I was experiencing queues and the server was listing both sides as high/high. Then something happened and the queues disappeared and the server listing went from high/high to med/med. There are three possible explanations. I fear that only Mythic knows for sure:

• They didn't know how many people the servers could handle. They saw that the the servers could handle double the load that they had originally anticipated and hence lowered the server cap on all servers.
• They lost almost half their subscription base once the box month was over.
• They knew how many people the servers could handle. However, they kept the server cap artificially low, because a big number of full servers looks good for marketing purposes.

For one reason or the other, the spark was gone on the server I was. It seems that the original server cap was actually the critical size needed for the game to be fun. So the fun was going down the more I levelled and the fewer people I had to play with. It became so stagnant, that I had either two choices:

• Leave the people that I came to know and like for a new server or,
• Leave the game and come back once the server issues were resolve.

My comeback will be after the holiday season, if at all. The game is heavily dependant on a healthy server population. Once they decided on the max amount of people that could play on a server, they were in trouble. The problem is that the original population cap was too small for the game to be fun, which left them with the majority of servers in a non-fun status. Apart from the servers that kept growing once the server cap was doubled, every other server was dying. Slowly but steadily.

Now, server transfers is another cover up for server merges. It seems that Mythic is more interested in the game image than in it's health. There is only one problem that would create issues due to the server merge and that's castle ownership. But castles change hands on an hourly base, so it's not that big of an issue anyway. So, instead of merging two average servers and create one healthy one, they chose to let the players do the merge. The problem is that some of them will choose to leave the game, looking at the mismanagement from this very early in the game's life. From my point of view it seems that the WAR developers are more interested in the marketing image than the game health. And that''s never good news.

I would vote for "best post of the week".

But replace Mythic with EA on this one. EA is in need of a succes in the MMO branche these days and they were the ones that needed that minimum 20% piece of the cake in this field before the calender year ends.

Poor MJ is but a punching ball in the middle of a giant "corporate" battle between Activision/Blizzard and EA .... and within EA itself I am sure. The man of Myhtic is merely getting the punches and tries to defend his product in between those fights. I don't think he has the capacity to be on top of this.

This is no longer about having good MMORPG's, this is ALL about market shares and hyping  financial stuff.

EA was set out to have that 20% market share and everything shows. The NEED to publish it months in advance of WotLK (deleting content), the hype of "most pre-ordered EA game yet", the 800K fix, the million set goal.

While no one even notices that EA Spore just outsold War for its 1st fiscal quarter that ended Sep 30. 2.000.000 copies in 3 weeks that game made for EA.

So "it" didnt happen and all the rest is now damage control and certainly some heavy internal EA discussions about saving the "marketing image" at all costs.

Frankly ignoring the thing everyone can see (downward trends both in sales and players and empty servers) shows just how much the "marketing machinery" falters

Apparently EA doesn't have a plan B and now it's up to MJ to save the furniture.

That's why these discussions are important. Gameplay is the least of the worries of EA. Believe me, the only thing that counts are the finances. Blizzard stumbled by accident into that goldmine (I really think they just wanted to make a good game back then for 500K players).

But NOW everyone just wants to have a share of that gold,.... gameplay is not even important (they think...).

Originally posted by Xasapis

I started my WAR gaming days on the second largest EU server in Order side. Up to a certain point I was experiencing queues and the server was listing both sides as high/high. Then something happened and the queues disappeared and the server listing went from high/high to med/med. There are three possible explanations. I fear that only Mythic knows for sure:

• They didn't know how many people the servers could handle. They saw that the the servers could handle double the load that they had originally anticipated and hence lowered the server cap on all servers.
• They lost almost half their subscription base once the box month was over.
• They knew how many people the servers could handle. However, they kept the server cap artificially low, because a big number of full servers looks good for marketing purposes.
• They knew that the starting areas would be very crowded at launch, so putting an artifical limited would helped to ensure that people were not standing on each others feet

For one reason or the other, the spark was gone on the server I was. It seems that the original server cap was actually the critical size needed for the game to be fun. So the fun was going down the more I levelled and the fewer people I had to play with. It became so stagnant, that I had either two choices:

• Leave the people that I came to know and like for a new server or,
• Leave the game and come back once the server issues were resolve.

Now, server transfers is another cover up for server merges. It seems that Mythic is more interested in the game image than in it's health. There is only one problem that would create issues due to the server merge and that's castle ownership.

How you can ignore something like "choice" is beyond me. Maybe I want to choose the server that my character is moved to. That is not the same as server merges. And from a practical point of view, this system - char transfer - is in fact much more self regulating than forcing two servers together. I actually think the way they handled this is quite nice - moving everyone from low pop servers to med pop servers, rather then merging 2 low pop servers to maybe yield another med pop server. There are other possible outcomes and combinations, but overall just allowing char transfers to med pop servers to get more high pop servers seems the most reasonable and logistically most feasible thing to me.