There should be a decline,  at least in activity.  There are a few ways to look at it...

1) People left (which is inevitable)

2) People aren't playing as much per day (also inevitable -- school just started as well for their main demographic)

3) BioWare could have some additional downtime (we know they did recently)

4) Everything posted negatively on this site is 100% true and the game is planned to go F2P tomorrow

Truthfully, I'm sure the decline is a little bit of all of those.  Some people left for whatever reason,  the population have evened out quite a bit and less people are logging as many hours, and the additional downtime and hotfixes are decreasing a lot of playtime.

It could be catastrophic,  or really small....  due to not knowing any real numbers on population retention.. theres no telling.

In 6 months no matter how well it does everyone will still say it failed anyways, so what the point?

Originally posted by zymurgeist

What you're looking at is people are playing fewer hours per day. It says nothing about subscription numbers either way.

the stock on ea dropped because one analyst PREDICTED it would be at 28 and revised his estimate of EA at 22

theorycrafting games might be easy but theorycraftin a company as big as EA ?come on people are nervous like rabbit they over ract in stock market since the crash of the market in 2008!i would say ea is gona close the stock would drop half(yep stupid!

Originally posted by Creslin321

Originally posted by Teala

Originally posted by drbaltazar

xfire isnt exaclty the best marker go check twitch,own3d at night always around 50+player streaming !so nope this data has hole issue!too many use alternative to xfire or other tool from their country

You are missing the point.   How is it that two wesbites show the same decline and show the same peaks and valleys?   I find it strange that two websites that are not correlated in anyway, show the same kinds of numbers.

 The peaks and valleys are easily explained by peak user times.  People play games when they are off work and before bed :).  This will be the same with any graph.

But yeah, I think that server population definitely is declining.

All MMO's decline some after the first month, it's normal.  It's whether it keeps declining is what should be watched. DId not notice much of decline on my server.

Teala you should also note that right on the SWTOR Arena website under the FAQ it clearly states..

"Can I make guesses on overall subscription count based on these graphs?
No you shouldn't be relying on them to make so guesses. These graph purely relies on instantaneous server population values provided by Bioware, nothing more."

So using them to try and predict any type of population setup is not a good ideal. Just as they state right on there website and with a link right under the graphs.

For all we know bioware could easily change the values for the stats shown at any time. They have already stated on the forums they have tweaked the server caps and the values reported by the server load screen.

Originally posted by drbaltazar

the stock on ea dropped because one analyst PREDICTED it would be at 28 and revised his estimate of EA at 22

theorycrafting games might be easy but theorycraftin a company as big as EA ?come on people are nervous like rabbit they over ract in stock market since the crash of the market in 2008!i would say ea is gona close the stock would drop half(yep stupid!

The sell out of EA on thursday caught some people off-guard but the adjustment was made on friday.

There is a saying 'Market can handle bad news, it doesn't handle bad surprizes'.

There were no bad surprizes regarding EA so the sell-out was a dumb financial move that a lot of people profited from (including myself).

Originally posted by Teala

Originally posted by Nazgol

Wow people are now making up graphs on the fly. This is really sad.

I am not making thse up on the fly.

These are from legitimate wesbites.  SWTORArena.com and xfire.  Taken directly from those websites.  Nothing was made up.

looks made up to me.

Originally posted by sirphobos

Originally posted by zymurgeist

What you're looking at is people are playing fewer hours per day. It says nothing about subscription numbers either way.

 

So thats two people who don't think there is any correlation there at all.    (I love SWTOR forums these days - Drink it in!)

Originally posted by Takiton

Originally posted by sirphobos

Originally posted by zymurgeist

What you're looking at is people are playing fewer hours per day. It says nothing about subscription numbers either way.

 

So thats two people who don't think there is any correlation there at all.    (I love SWTOR forums these days - Drink it in!)

To go off-topic, am I the only one that browse the SWTOR forums for entertainment while at work?

Only when compiling though, it takes 20mins. :(

You are probably right in that the overall active population in the servers has gone down. However, that does not directly indicate the same decline in subscriptions. The fact is people had much more time to play during the holidays. Now, concurrent population on servers normalizes with people working and whatnot.

If you can show how concurrent server population is related to subscriber numbers, then you'd have a better case. For example, you could use Blizzard's numbers and show how a decline in subscribers (as reported by Blizzard) directly correlates to a decline in concurrent players online. Show us the relationship between the two, and then show us those graphs you posted. Only then will you have a more solid case. 

These graphs do show information and a trend. SWTOR's initial launch was around a time where lots and lots of players had lots of time to play. It's a abnormal period of time and play and when everything steadies out I'm sure the graphs will be much lower still.

The population will reflect the game itself.

Also something to point out about the graphs on SWTORArena is that if you look at all the graphs overall you will notice the drop from 5 to 3 on the graphs all occur around the same time. This is also around the same time they made a post on the forums saying they where working on tweaking the server caps for the servers.

So that could easily explain the so called drop in population around them times. It appears as a drop but in reality it could have easily been a server cap increase across the boards on the servers.

Originally posted by jpnz

Originally posted by Takiton

Originally posted by sirphobos

Originally posted by zymurgeist

What you're looking at is people are playing fewer hours per day. It says nothing about subscription numbers either way.

 

So thats two people who don't think there is any correlation there at all.    (I love SWTOR forums these days - Drink it in!)

To go off-topic, am I the only one that browse the SWTOR forums for entertainment while at work?

Only when compiling though, it takes 20mins. :(

Nah I do, it's funny to see the same couple of people post so much negativity about a game they do not play. Does the game have issues? Yes, most games do when they are launched *glares at WOW's loot bug*. But to get so worked up over something  and post day in and out about doom and gloom must really make them a sad panda.

The decrease in activity has continued after people went back to school/work. If that was the only reason it should have leveled out.

wow so many people had to come and defend their precious SWTOR.  I find it interesting how the graphs are alike and of course there is a decrease in population since the free month is up.  It didn't meet people's expectations.

Originally posted by Thomas2006

Also something to point out about the graphs on SWTORArena is that if you look at all the graphs overall you will notice the drop from 5 to 3 on the graphs all occur around the same time. This is also around the same time they made a post on the forums saying they where working on tweaking the server caps for the servers.

So that could easily explain the so called drop in population around them times. It appears as a drop but in reality it could have easily been a server cap increase across the boards on the servers.

Uh.. raising the cap and allowing more players onto a server wouldn't affect the population statistics of the server.

I'd say it's a pretty funny coincidence they're almost identical, considering how XFire measures it's own userbase, while Swtorarena measures Bioware's own server-load system.

What does that tell us, other than the userbase shrinking? Absolutely nothing.

Originally posted by jpnz

Originally posted by Takiton

Originally posted by sirphobos

Originally posted by zymurgeist

What you're looking at is people are playing fewer hours per day. It says nothing about subscription numbers either way.

 

So thats two people who don't think there is any correlation there at all.    (I love SWTOR forums these days - Drink it in!)

To go off-topic, am I the only one that browse the SWTOR forums for entertainment while at work?

Only when compiling though, it takes 20mins. :(

100% with you.  The worse it gets; the crazier the logic.  It's kinda like those insane newspapers at grocery stores... you just gotta read the headline no matter how wild it gets.  I love SWTOR fans!

Originally posted by Nazgol

Originally posted by jpnz

Originally posted by Takiton

Originally posted by sirphobos

Originally posted by zymurgeist

What you're looking at is people are playing fewer hours per day. It says nothing about subscription numbers either way.

 

So thats two people who don't think there is any correlation there at all.    (I love SWTOR forums these days - Drink it in!)

To go off-topic, am I the only one that browse the SWTOR forums for entertainment while at work?

Only when compiling though, it takes 20mins. :(

Nah I do, it's funny to see the same couple of people post so much negativity about a game they do not play. Does the game have issues? Yes, most games do when they are launched *glares at WOW's loot bug*. But to get so worked up over something  and post day in and out about doom and gloom must really make them a sad panda.

Yeah, then again, I am almost convinced that some analyst is looking at this forum as a 'MMO health' for companies.

That's the only thing I can think of, on what happened on thursday with EA Stock.

Cause seriously, wtf were people smoking that day? I could not get to the phone fast enough as I couldn't believe what the computer was showing me.

Yeah the market is volitile and fundamentally irrational but it was like watching people throw money away.

Originally posted by Nazgol

Originally posted by jpnz

Originally posted by Takiton

Originally posted by sirphobos

Originally posted by zymurgeist

What you're looking at is people are playing fewer hours per day. It says nothing about subscription numbers either way.

 

So thats two people who don't think there is any correlation there at all.    (I love SWTOR forums these days - Drink it in!)

To go off-topic, am I the only one that browse the SWTOR forums for entertainment while at work?

Only when compiling though, it takes 20mins. :(

Nah I do, it's funny to see the same couple of people post so much negativity about a game they do not play. Does the game have issues? Yes, most games do when they are launched *glares at WOW's loot bug*. But to get so worked up over something  and post day in and out about doom and gloom must really make them a sad panda.

And what if we do play?

I love posters like you that try and bring up past MMO's bugs and say "Well on launch they had this problem, so give SWTOR a break." Absolutely not. SWTOR has to compete with WoW, and other MMO's, how they are now. World of Warcraft 2012 vs. SWTOR 2012. With every day the standard rises higher and if development companies don't step up to the plate then the game just isn't acceptable.

If you're trying to justify SWTOR's bugs in 2012 because WoW had gamebreaking bugs in 2004, I really don't know how to respond to that.