Originally posted by Ravenspen

Week 7 is slightly lower, I think I actually claimed a declining trend overall in the peaks (sunday).  I certainly wasn't trying to hide that with my quick mspaint lines, which do show a downward trend on Sunday peak traffic.  Week 5 is slightly higher.  The quick line I drew is pretty close to a best line fit.  You'd have to run the numbers to know how large of an outlier week 5 is verus week 7 and there aren't enough data points for a good one.  You're probably correct about the 10% average drop from week 4 to week 7 being caused by the end of a billing cycle.

There's a slight decrease in the size of the peaks

The weekly pattern and minimum patterns are near perfectly stable, certainly not the sharp drop the first 3 weeks like we've come to expect  from any new MMO.

The problem with these is they don't actually indicate subscription.  What they do show to a certain degree is concurrent players, though even that isn't accurate.  The only point I'm trying to make is there's no evidence of load rating changes on or about the 4th and that a catastrophic drop indicated by some doesn't seem to be going on.

Personally I think they have another month or two to fix some major problems or it might start falling again faster, but at the moment the population seems to have stabilized by most accounts. 

 

Personally, not even looking at the graphs and going off experience in other games, my guild, my friends list and being on the heaviest EU server, I've never witnessed such a sharp decline in population after the first month in any other game, despite playing most newly released mmos over the last 8 years from beta.

Originally posted by jacklo

Personally, not even looking at the graphs and going off experience in other games, my guild, my friends list and being on the heaviest EU server, I've never witnessed such a sharp decline in population after the first month in any other game, despite playing most newly released mmos over the last 8 years from beta.

 

I have to agree with this sentiment although frankly I do find this surprising because people can say what they want but AoC was one of the worst launches I have sever seen. Yet for whatever reason, even that game didn't have near the dropoff I have seen in this one on my servers. Maybe I was just luckier in my server choices. Who knows...

Problems aside I'm actually a bit stunned myself that things have gone this way...this quickly...

Originally posted by jacklo

Originally posted by Ravenspen

Week 7 is slightly lower, I think I actually claimed a declining trend overall in the peaks (sunday).  I certainly wasn't trying to hide that with my quick mspaint lines, which do show a downward trend on Sunday peak traffic.  Week 5 is slightly higher.  The quick line I drew is pretty close to a best line fit.  You'd have to run the numbers to know how large of an outlier week 5 is verus week 7 and there aren't enough data points for a good one.  You're probably correct about the 10% average drop from week 4 to week 7 being caused by the end of a billing cycle.

There's a slight decrease in the size of the peaks

The weekly pattern and minimum patterns are near perfectly stable, certainly not the sharp drop the first 3 weeks like we've come to expect  from any new MMO.

The problem with these is they don't actually indicate subscription.  What they do show to a certain degree is concurrent players, though even that isn't accurate.  The only point I'm trying to make is there's no evidence of load rating changes on or about the 4th and that a catastrophic drop indicated by some doesn't seem to be going on.

Personally I think they have another month or two to fix some major problems or it might start falling again faster, but at the moment the population seems to have stabilized by most accounts. 

 

Personally, not even looking at the graphs and going off experience in other games, my guild, my friends list and being on the heaviest EU server, I've never witnessed such a sharp decline in population after the first month in any other game, despite playing most newly released mmos over the last 8 years from beta.

 

You know, something I didn't mention for fear of ridicule...

I have been following the official SWTOR server stats from their own site and noticed that things changed somewhat from the norm at exactly the same time subs were due. I already mentioned it in a previous post... I think they played with server stats again at that time.

I had been seeing only a couple of servers heavy at what should be peak times, with most light and a sprinkling of standard. Then all of a sudden there were 25 heavy servers with most servers standard and a few light, right at the time of sub renewal.

It doesn't show that in the graphs (maybe the resolution is too small) so I'm at a loss to explain it, but I feel there's more going on here than meets the eye.

Quick break for dinner.  Hutt ball is great fun, but after 3 matches dinner sounds good.  Why do they make us play vs Republic in huttball.  It's the little things that I think will be the downfall of SWTOR. 

Anyways I was thinking, and week 7 isn't actually a subscription point.  It was however the first semi open beta weekend for Tera, not a particularly good sign all things considering.

Fleet pop on my server just now was about what it normally is on a week night ~ 100 with 50-75 in the three leveling zones I went through. 

Right at launch both areas had more people, but it's been about the same on my server for a while now with small increases.  Those could be due to people moving to higher pop servers from low pop servers though.  It's too hard to get a good picture with the metrics we have. 

It would be foolish to base anything off the server status, all we can say for sure is that there are alot of people currently playing the game and that it's not the runaway success that Bioware was hoping for. 

I was in the DCUO, WAR, Vangard, and AoC launches so I know what fast drops feel like.  This feels alot more like LoTRO's slow steady decline to an eventual stable point.

The diffrence is there's alot of basic things to be fixed in SWTOR and star wars geeks are dedicated but not masochists, at some point someone will tempt them away with a bright shiny. 

Something like pizza, ooh pizza the sweet cheesy bread of the gods.

Originally posted by Ravenspen

Quick break for dinner.  Hutt ball is great fun, but after 3 matches dinner sounds good.  Why do they make us play vs Republic in huttball.  It's the little things that I think will be the downfall of SWTOR. 

Anyways I was thinking, and week 7 isn't actually a subscription point.  It was however the first semi open beta weekend for Tera, not a particularly good sign all things considering.

Fleet pop on my server just now was about what it normally is on a week night ~ 100 with 50-75 in the three leveling zones I went through. 

Right at launch both areas had more people, but it's been about the same on my server for a while now with small increases.  Those could be due to people moving to higher pop servers from low pop servers though.  It's too hard to get a good picture with the metrics we have. 

It would be foolish to base anything off the server status, all we can say for sure is that there are alot of people currently playing the game and that it's not the runaway success that Bioware was hoping for. 

I was in the DCUO, WAR, Vangard, and AoC launches so I know what fast drops feel like.  This feels alot more like LoTRO's slow steady decline to an eventual stable point.

The diffrence is there's alot of basic things to be fixed in SWTOR and star wars geeks are dedicated but not masochists, at some point someone will tempt them away with a bright shiny. 

Something like pizza, ooh pizza the sweet cheesy bread of the gods.

I'm pretty sure it was a sub point. 19th-20th I think is when my sub was due and I had early start, although the game wasn't officially released until 20th December.

Originally posted by Kimmyboy

Originally posted by MosesZD

Originally posted by FrostWyrm

Well, every game gets a large spike of subs its first month. Those are the first-triers. The drop-off after the first month is also normal. Then the numbers stabilize, again totally normal.  The black lines are just there to manupulate the viewer into thinking people are fleeing a sinking ship.

That's not what it shows.  And you're wrong about the black-line.  The black line is a trend line.  But lets get away from the perfercly represented trend lines in OPs graph.  

 

Loof for yourself. 

 

This is TOR Status.  The link is to the POPULATION TREND for North America:  http://www.torstatus.net/shards/us/trends

Yellow line -  bad news when increasing.  That's the percentage of server-time the servers are "light."   This has been increasing, week after week.   Denials to the contrary.  

Green line -- bad news when decreasing.  That's the percentage of server-time the servers are 'heavy."  This has been decreasing week-after week.

Red line - Bad news when decreasing.   That's the percentage of server time the servers are full.   As you can see, we're at the ZERO BOUNDARY.   It can't get any worse than it is in this category. 

 

Manipulation Spike -- You can see what BioWare did easiest on the 4th of February.   You'll see the ever decreasing reported server load surge massively.  DESPITE the continuous drops in retail sales.   The declining trend has continued.  

 

Now, you may talk about BioWare increasing server cap to reduce wait time.  This is true.  It happened.  But it was  during EGA.  Once we got past EGA and into post-Christmas, they didn't do that because they wanted to force traffic to the emptier servers.

 

You can run these graphs for every server.  They're the same.   The only issue I have with what's going on now is that the servers are so underpopulated that minor changes in population make huge swings due to so many of the populations being right at reporting boundaries between 'light and standard' and 'standard and heavy.'

  

  

The manipulation spike of 03/04 Feb in your general link is even more impressive when you watch each and every individual server on that night.

http://www.torstatus.net/colonel-tobin/history/7d#!/darth-malak/trends/30d

http://www.torstatus.net/colonel-tobin/history/7d#!/corellian-run/trends/30d

http://www.torstatus.net/colonel-tobin/history/7d#!/kellers-void/trends/30d

http://www.torstatus.net/colonel-tobin/history/7d#!/krath/trends/30d

http://www.torstatus.net/colonel-tobin/history/7d#!/shadowtown/trends/30d

http://www.torstatus.net/colonel-tobin/history/7d#!/the-crucible-pits/trends/30d

http://www.torstatus.net/colonel-tobin/history/7d#!/wound-in-the-force/trends/30d

 

Do the check yourselves on all those 200+ servers...

 

Yes, each and every individual server saw that odd "bump" in the exact same timing, which means the servers are NOT individually changed but in GROUP (meaning with a script)  (as some said) and ... had NOT any adaptation in either way BEFORE that date, because the graph was CONSISTENT for all servers up to 03/04 Feb.

 

 

I saw some reactions above about people even defending this or hiding behind the fact that EA/Bioware could do what they want with their servers.

 

 

I am appalled: THIS ATTITUDE was LYING to their players, LYING to their stock holders (remember the stock holders meeting 2 days earlier) and LYING to everyone else who CARES about this industry.

 

They simply wanted to mislead the people by stopping the downward trends anyone could see by changing the server data (first concerns were the stock holders of course).

 

If you would DEFEND this kind of attitude of falsifying data and cheating by huge publishers on their own player base and investers, I think you should do a reality check about your standings.

 

I am convinced the resignation of EA's Director Brown on the 07th of Feb was directly related to this . One of being ashamed for trying to cheat on their own gaming public.

 

There simply is no excuse.

Because if BioWare adjusted there server caps, they did it for the geeks that watch these statistics like they were printed on the back of baseball cards, not because it could improve performance for players. If the population is declining, it might make sense to adjust the caps...after all, they did just get past the biggest launch for an MMO in history.

I'm not sure if that was posted here on the forums here before but I just randomly tried to look at the server status page and merely switch the languages on the top from english to german. You should think that all that happens is the words being translated but the server loads staying the same. WRONG. Here are the pictures that I took just now:

german language server load
english language server load

Originally posted by Kimmyboy

I am appalled: THIS ATTITUDE was LYING to their players, LYING to their stock holders (remember the stock holders meeting 2 days earlier) and LYING to everyone else who CARES about this industry.

They simply wanted to mislead the people by stopping the downward trends anyone could see by changing the server data (first concerns were the stock holders of course).

If you would DEFEND this kind of attitude of falsifying data and cheating by huge publishers on their own player base and investers, I think you should do a reality check about your standings.

I am convinced the resignation of EA's Director Brown on the 07th of Feb was directly related to this . One of being ashamed for trying to cheat on their own gaming public.

There simply is no excuse.

I'm bored

This is boring.

You're boring..

C'mon...lets go do something fun.

Originally posted by FrostWyrm

Originally posted by Metentso

Look at this image:

 

See how the two lines show a similar rate of descent. But there is a sudden rise in end january / start february.

Did they change the rating? So for instance a "Light" server would be a "Standard" server, and so on?

Don't have data of that period on xFire to compare with. Would be interesting if anyone had.

The black lines are terribly misleading in this chart, quite likely on purpose. If you remove the black lines and see the chart for what it actually is, you'll see the chart spikes pretty regularly between 300 and 450 from mid January to mid February.

 The worst part about being stupid is not knowing you're stupid.

While we can't be sure if they changed the amount of players that defines heavy, light or full we can safely say a server merge would be the best option at some point in the near future.

US servers:

Also if you note on the European servers it is notable that there is an extremely large spike at the same point as on OPs graph.

European servers:

Originally posted by Saydien

I'm not sure if that was posted here on the forums here before but I just randomly tried to look at the server status page and merely switch the languages on the top from english to german. You should think that all that happens is the words being translated but the server loads staying the same. WRONG. Here are the pictures that I took just now:

german language server load
english language server load

I just tried it myself and couldn't duplicate. 

Originally posted by Kimmyboy

BTW: EA Financial Director Brown who made those statements about the "majority of 1.7 M" already paid at the press conference on Feb 1st ... resigned a few days later on Feb 7th ...

Well now i am absolutely convinced, first the financial director, then the lead writer, and finally three lead developers all leaving. Spells trouble at the very least. They might have to go F2P like STO did. I think it's kind of funny but sad really, not only will this be vindication for those of us who have recognized the unsustainability of the subscription only model and those of us who recognized the sheer number of problems for this title on release.

on a lighter note....

end game content

Originally posted by LoneMonk

 The worst part about being stupid is not knowing you're stupid.

Even worse is trying to fix stupid... and yet I never learn.

Originally posted by Bunks

Looks to me they have already changed their focus from fixing the game to fixing the image.

http://www.swtor.com/media/trailers/look-old-republic

 

Sad really

There comes a point when PR begins to insult people. This reminds me so much of SOE's PR behavior after they implemented the NGE on Star Wars Galaxies.

Originally posted by grapevine

Originally posted by Garvon3

Originally posted by grapevine

No.. drop off after the first month is only normal in overblown shallow WoW clones that fail to live up to the hype their multi million dollar ad campaigns generated.

 

Actually sandbox games generally have a quicker decline, and tank more often.   About the only game to break that trend has been EVE Online, and that wasn't a gradual growth either.  For years (I belive) it decllinded to (and sat at) around 35k active subsciptions, then after a few years shot up to around 300k.   Which is still way less than most themepark MMOs have.

 

Yes, its a shame sandbox games aren't more successful.

DAoC, EQ, UO, AC, SWG, EQ2 all grew over time to EXCEED their initial box sales and gain MORE subscribers.

No big budget WoW clone has done that since. Hell, most themepark MMOs would crap themselves if they had as big a subscription base as Eve. There's a reason Funcom almost went bankrupt after AoC.

DAoC, EQ are 2nd generation MMOs. AC & UO first generation.   Themepark MMOs didn't exist  Also the market was a lot smaller (and I mean A LOT, regarding both the number of games and players).

 technically, daoc is themepark, via its level increase of mobs per zone and farther you go in.  Its not quest driven themepark tho. Just a heads up.

SWG peaked at something like 300k within the first two months, then fell and kept falling until the CU.   Upon which it bounced back for a few months, then was decimated by the NGE.     So it certainly did not see a growth, other for when people came back to check out the CU.  Apart from that its trend was always a decreasing one.

 It started its incline before CU came out tho, thats the point.

EQ2 declined very quickly, with the trend continuing as WoW launched the following month.  EQ2 is also a themepark MMO.

 the op didn't define the type of games his list are.

By pure logical all MMOs have exceed their initial box sales, otherwise they'd never receive new players.  New players in many case are simply representing turnover, not a growth.

Originally posted by itgrowls

Originally posted by Kimmyboy

BTW: EA Financial Director Brown who made those statements about the "majority of 1.7 M" already paid at the press conference on Feb 1st ... resigned a few days later on Feb 7th ...

Well now i am absolutely convinced, first the financial director, then the lead writer, and finally three lead developers all leaving. Spells trouble at the very least. They might have to go F2P like STO did. I think it's kind of funny but sad really, not only will this be vindication for those of us who have recognized the unsustainability of the subscription only model and those of us who recognized the sheer number of problems for this title on release.

on a lighter note....

end game content 

    OMG, can you misrepresent any more than these two posts?  Brown resigned to take on a BETTER job.  Lead writer left to pursue writing actual BOOKS.  The three developers left to create their own company, which is the American Dream after all.  Funny how actual facts make things look so much better than tinfoil hat theories do.

Originally posted by GMan3

Originally posted by itgrowls

Originally posted by Kimmyboy

BTW: EA Financial Director Brown who made those statements about the "majority of 1.7 M" already paid at the press conference on Feb 1st ... resigned a few days later on Feb 7th ...

Well now i am absolutely convinced, first the financial director, then the lead writer, and finally three lead developers all leaving. Spells trouble at the very least. They might have to go F2P like STO did. I think it's kind of funny but sad really, not only will this be vindication for those of us who have recognized the unsustainability of the subscription only model and those of us who recognized the sheer number of problems for this title on release.

on a lighter note....

end game content 

    OMG, can you misrepresent any more than these two posts?  Brown resigned to take on a BETTER job.  Lead writer left to pursue writing actual BOOKS.  The three developers left to create their own company, which is the American Dream after all.  Funny how actual facts make things look so much better than tinfoil hat theories do.

And they all left despite they could be milionaires since SWTOR is doing so well. Respect.

(/sarcasm)

Originally posted by Twisted77
All I know, playing on the 2nd largest North East US PVP server at launch... we're becoming a ghost town. Fleet activity is down 60-70% at peak times. Nitpick my numbers, but I can screen shot around 50 to 60 players at fleet. We all know that's bad. Im still sub's, still playing... not a fanboi nor hater... just being objective. Playing WAR and AoC at release... the pop slide feels about the same. I like data, even without any data, who can look themselves in the mirror and say that the pop is still not falling off rapidly?

The truth is out there. Lots of convincing evidence. Planed downtime of servers, and afterwards a spike in population. Yes they did something with the servers. Becuse they look more full now, but people are still saying exacly what you are.. Offical forums are full of server merger threads. And fanboys telling them they re delusional and need new glasses.. Because their servers sure are full to the brim with people...

Fact though many people have rerolled on higher pop servers.. so the empty once are even more empty now...