Originally posted by Metentso

Originally posted by karat76

Don't think Xfire is very valid sampling for game health. In all my years of mmos I have yet to have a guildie or meet anyone who said they used it.

lol this argument never gets old.

Originally posted by Yamota

Originally posted by William12

Originally posted by Yamota

Originally posted by FrodoFragins

Originally posted by Yamota

,,,

There is no design behind random polling either, it is random. XFire is a random selection of SW:TOR gamers which has X-Fire installed so I would say it is like random polling.

Now there could be some bias in this selection of people, but I have not seen any facts supporting this statement. Like XFire is used mainly by FPS gamers, young people, etc. The only known bias I know of is that it is mainly a tool for the western audience so it is very inaccurate at gauging the eastern gaming trends.

XFire isn't a random selection.  XFire attracts a certain type a gamer.  How many casual gamers take the time to get and create an XFire account?  I was aware of it for years and never bothered.  There are still tons of people that don't even know what it is.  I only discovered it because of forum signatures.  Considering how many people don't used forums ...

Yes I keep hearing this but not seen any hard evidence of this. Not saying it is not true but it would be like saying casual gamers would be more likely to use goggle mail over yahoo than say hardcore gamers would. That could be the case but where is the evidence for such a statement?

As for people not knowing what it is, that is irrelevant. Alot of people dont know how polling works and have never been asked in polls, that does not invalidate the polls aslong as the poll sample is large enough and XFire sample is definetely large enough as only a random selection of 1000 is needed to get a maximum error of 5-10%. Assuming no bias in the selection and since no bias has been provent either way, you cannot invalidate the trends which XFire shows about SW:TOR.

I've said it before using Xfire to say a game is going down is like polling 15 republicans and 5 democrats on the job Obama is doing and expect that poll to be what people really think.

Then you are saying that xFire users would be biased against or for SW:TOR. You have no basis for such a statement, unlike your other example where you could reasonably claim that the republicans would be biased against Obama (because he is a democrat).

Why would a majority of SW:TOR xFire users be biased against SW:TOR? xFire is not a competitor to SW:TOR so there is no reason for such bias.

You are claiming statistical significance to XFire numbers that they themselves would and could never claim.

From 70.000 (in Dez/January as far I remember) down to 16.000.......wow

But you know how you notice that a server is declining and doesnt get a lot of new players ?

On the first months on the Auction House you could buy loads of stuff on one of such servers who were high and changed to standard. 

And what happened ?

In the meanwhile you almost cant find stuff for lvl 10-30 .....AH is more or less dead for lower levels.

Originally posted by karat76

Don't think Xfire is very valid sampling for game health. In all my years of mmos I have yet to have a guildie or meet anyone who said they used it.

So you are one of the 25 million that hasn't used it.  

Originally posted by dubyahite
Yamota, it's not random at all.

Random = roll of the dice or flip of the coin

xFire = someone CHOSE to install it. Not even close to random.

Yes people choose to install XFire or not but this thread is not about who uses XFire etc. 

The sample is: "XFire users who choose to (buy and) play SWTOR" 

And this sample is random unless you believe that EA have deliberately gone out of their way to persuade XFire users to buy/not buy SWTOR. Nor is there evidence to suggest that XFire users prefer one type of online game over another.

People have to remember that there will be an error however and larger, probably, than the 2-5% we are used to seeing in polls. What we have observered so far however suggests that the error is not so large as to render XFire 'useless' e.g. the average hours played is in line with what EA have said subscribers play. If XFire users all played 20 hours a day then .....!!! but they don't. And so on.

So this weekend - if EA's marketing campaign has had any impact - there should be an increase in the number of people who "use XFire and play SWTOR". And then a drop off after the free weekend.Now we have no way of knowing how sucessful the free weekend will be but it is reasonable to assume that some people will try SWTOR so it is reasonable to look for a blip in the XFire player numbers.

Test and retest.

Originally posted by karat76

Don't think Xfire is very valid sampling for game health. In all my years of mmos I have yet to have a guildie or meet anyone who said they used it.

Don't think Yahoo is very good for searching the internet. In all my years of using the internet I have yet to have a friend or meet anyone who said they used it.

Originally posted by Crackbone
X-fire has predicted the shrinking player base of many MMOs before TOR, I see no reason why TOR is any different. It's not accurate enough to give you actual subscription numbers, but it is quite accurate in displaying trends.

The trend for TOR is down, and IMO, more so than it should be at this stage in the game's life.

While I have no idea on TORs subscription numbers currently, X-fire combined with a ton in anecdotal evidence should be enough for anyone to see as it stands this game is both having a problem with retention and with a less active player base.

Neither of this things are good.

I completely agree and so would anyone else but the blind fanboys or those without a firm grasp of statistics.

Tho, I have to say that, while Xfire does provide a good measure of the general population trend of a game, i'd be more hesitant to predict anything in terms of the number of subs, based on the xfire data at this point in time. It is well-known that most MMOs tend to drop in population during the first couple of months post launch and people tend to play less after the honey-moon effect has worn off.

To which extent the decline in swtor population is due to the expected downtrend all new MMOs exhibit or a genuine and more sever population issue is a bit 'hazy' when judging on xfire data alone. But like you said, combine all the sources of data we have (some more reputable than others), all of which mirror this downtrend i might add and they paint a pretty grim picture indeed.

Originally posted by gervaise1

 Nor is there evidence to suggest that XFire users prefer one type of online game over another.

There is evidence that XFire users prefer one type of online game over another. FPS and RTS gamers have had to install XFire to stay in touch with their friends and find servers. MMO gamers, who have traditionally been bound to one server and had good communication tools in-game, haven't had similar reason to install XFire.

EDIT: Also there's 'evidence' to suggest that people who are new to multiplayer games and have previously played mostly single player games (KOTOR, Mass Effect, Dragon Age) are less likely to have XFire installed than those people who're more used to playing online games. And there's 'evidence' to suggest that fans of previous Bioware games might be playing also new Bioware games /EDIT 

Originally posted by Vrika

Originally posted by gervaise1

 Nor is there evidence to suggest that XFire users prefer one type of online game over another.

There is evidence that XFire users prefer one type of online game over another. FPS and RTS gamers have had to install XFire to stay in touch with their friends and find servers. MMO gamers, who have traditionally been bound to one server and had good communication tools in-game, haven't had similar reason to install XFire.

EDIT: Also there's 'evidence' to suggest that people who are new to multiplayer games and have previously played mostly single player games (KOTOR, Mass Effect, Dragon Age) are less likely to have XFire installed than those people who're more used to playing online games. And there's 'evidence' to suggest that fans of previous Bioware games might be playing also new Bioware games /EDIT 

Also there is "evidence" that people new to multiplayer games have a tendency to install xFire in the early weeks and prgressively uninstall it over the next weeks.

Originally posted by Metentso

Originally posted by Vrika

Originally posted by gervaise1

 Nor is there evidence to suggest that XFire users prefer one type of online game over another.

There is evidence that XFire users prefer one type of online game over another. FPS and RTS gamers have had to install XFire to stay in touch with their friends and find servers. MMO gamers, who have traditionally been bound to one server and had good communication tools in-game, haven't had similar reason to install XFire.

EDIT: Also there's 'evidence' to suggest that people who are new to multiplayer games and have previously played mostly single player games (KOTOR, Mass Effect, Dragon Age) are less likely to have XFire installed than those people who're more used to playing online games. And there's 'evidence' to suggest that fans of previous Bioware games might be playing also new Bioware games /EDIT 

 

Also there is "evidence" that people new to multiplayer games have a tendency to install xFire in the early weeks and prgressively uninstall it over the next weeks.

Maybe, just maybe, the people who use XFire are actually people who like FPS and RTS and twitch style MMOs. These people would normally not change thier preferences and stay with a game that is none of the above, even if they tried it for a while. Maybe thats more likely that the total BS you are spitting there trying your best to be a smart ass and make a point. 

At some point in time you XFire people will just have to admit that you like certain things that others may not like. And that no matter how much you try and tell those people, they are not going to like what you do. So all these numbers you have, giving trends about what you like, just are not going to be useful to trend what the other guy likes. YOU DO NOT HAVE THE SAME TASTE IN GAMES AS THEY DO, GET OVER IT, YOUR LIKES ARE NOT WHAT EVERYONE LIKES, YOUR DISLIKES ARE NOT WHAT EVERYONE DISLIKES. DO YOU GET IT YET? YOUR NUMBERS TELL US WHAT YOU LIKE AND WHAT YOU DO NOT, THEY DO NOT TELL US WHAT EVERYONE LIKES OR DISLIKES.

Just sayin ya' know. It is very well possible that the people who use Xfire use it for a reason, found it for a reason, decided to install it for a reason. And with that there might also be a reason those that dont have it, decided not to go look for it, decided not to install it. Did any of you ever stop to figure out why that was?

Originally posted by Kaocan

Maybe, just maybe, the people who use XFire are actually people who like FPS and RTS and twitch style MMOs. These people would normally not change thier preferences and stay with a game that is none of the above, even if they tried it for a while. Maybe thats more likely that the total BS you are spitting there trying your best to be a smart ass and make a point. 

At some point in time you XFire people will just have to admit that you like certain things that others may not like. And that no matter how much you try and tell those people, they are not going to like what you do. So all these numbers you have, giving trends about what you like, just are not going to be useful to trend what the other guy likes. YOU DO NOT HAVE THE SAME TASTE IN GAMES AS THEY DO, GET OVER IT, YOUR LIKES ARE NOT WHAT EVERYONE LIKES, YOUR DISLIKES ARE NOT WHAT EVERYONE DISLIKES. DO YOU GET IT YET? YOUR NUMBERS TELL US WHAT YOU LIKE AND WHAT YOU DO NOT, THEY DO NOT TELL US WHAT EVERYONE LIKES OR DISLIKES.

 

Just sayin ya' know. It is very well possible that the people who use Xfire use it for a reason, found it for a reason, decided to install it for a reason. And with that there might also be a reason those that dont have it, decided not to go look for it, decided not to install it. Did any of you ever stop to figure out why that was?

I certainly doubt people who are into twitch based games are going to like a game like TOR. Those that like to rush to endgame are best playing something else. That should have been obvious the very moment STORY was advertised as the major selling point of the game.

Why don't people use common sense?

We know SWTOR population is declining by the statement of the game having 1.7million subs however amount of time after they announced 2 million sold, we know in the difference of time the game would have sold at least a few hundred thousand more. 

We also know that the server list has gone from mostly heavy to mostly standard. The three servers I made characters on all went from full to standard and the population on each planet dropped over the months and the population on the fleet went from 200ish to 40-80 during peak. So i don't believe Bioware have kept on increasing the server limit after Jan as the population has clearly dropped. There are still probably a lot of people playing, maybe around 1.5 million now but there are far too many servers and they need to start merging them or more people will quit on low populated servers.

Originally posted by Kaocan

Originally posted by Metentso

Originally posted by Vrika

Originally posted by gervaise1

 Nor is there evidence to suggest that XFire users prefer one type of online Mgame over another.

There is evidence that XFire users prefer one type of online game over another. FPS and RTS gamers have had to install XFire to stay in touch with their friends and find servers. MMO gamers, who have traditionally been bound to one server and had good communication tools in-game, haven't had similar reason to install XFire.

EDIT: Also there's 'evidence' to suggest that people who are new to multiplayer games and have previously played mostly single player games (KOTOR, Mass Effect, Dragon Age) are less likely to have XFire installed than those people who're more used to playing online games. And there's 'evidence' to suggest that fans of previous Bioware games might be playing also new Bioware games /EDIT 

 

Also there is "evidence" that people new to multiplayer games have a tendency to install xFire in the early weeks and prgressively uninstall it over the next weeks.

Maybe, just maybe, the people who use XFire are actually people who like FPS and RTS and twitch style MMOs. These people would normally not change thier preferences and stay with a game that is none of the above, even if they tried it for a while. Maybe thats more likely that the total BS you are spitting there trying your best to be a smart ass and make a point. 

At some point in time you XFire people will just have to admit that you like certain things that others may not like. And that no matter how much you try and tell those people, they are not going to like what you do. So all these numbers you have, giving trends about what you like, just are not going to be useful to trend what the other guy likes. YOU DO NOT HAVE THE SAME TASTE IN GAMES AS THEY DO, GET OVER IT, YOUR LIKES ARE NOT WHAT EVERYONE LIKES, YOUR DISLIKES ARE NOT WHAT EVERYONE DISLIKES. DO YOU GET IT YET? YOUR NUMBERS TELL US WHAT YOU LIKE AND WHAT YOU DO NOT, THEY DO NOT TELL US WHAT EVERYONE LIKES OR DISLIKES.

 

Just sayin ya' know. It is very well possible that the people who use Xfire use it for a reason, found it for a reason, decided to install it for a reason. And with that there might also be a reason those that dont have it, decided not to go look for it, decided not to install it. Did any of you ever stop to figure out why that was?

Merging servers will definitely need to be done at some point for at least some servers, all MMO lose subs after the initial launch "honeymoon" & SWTOR is no different, the weekend Pass & Friend Trials - along with a big advertising campaign should up the ante a bit but may not put boots on the ground on the servers most needing fresh blood.

The past week on my server has seen the first real decline in numbers, I think the players hit 50 faster & in larger numbers than BioWare had planned for & the future focus will need to put a much bigger emphasis on creating stuff for the maxed players to do, harder difficulty raids are 1 part of that but they will need to step up to the plate & pump out a pretty large amount of content in the game's 1st year to have a chance of remaining successful, 2012 is going to be a fearsomely competitive year for MMO's & a bunch of high-profile titles are on the way:

GW2

TSW

TERA

Firefall

Project Copernicus (MMO in same setting as Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvTTnYyz8JI&feature=player_embedded

& that's just the ones that spring to mind.

Originally posted by Vrika

Originally posted by gervaise1

 Nor is there evidence to suggest that XFire users prefer one type of online game over another.

There is evidence that XFire users prefer one type of online game over another. FPS and RTS gamers have had to install XFire to stay in touch with their friends and find servers. MMO gamers, who have traditionally been bound to one server and had good communication tools in-game, haven't had similar reason to install XFire.

EDIT: Also there's 'evidence' to suggest that people who are new to multiplayer games and have previously played mostly single player games (KOTOR, Mass Effect, Dragon Age) are less likely to have XFire installed than those people who're more used to playing online games. And there's 'evidence' to suggest that fans of previous Bioware games might be playing also new Bioware games /EDIT 

I could point to XFires current /recent 'top' games e.g. WoW and LoL, other mmos along with those that 'charted' highly (Rift, WAR, AoC etc. ). Maybe XFire is really an mmo tracker! Suggesting mmos have/have had good ingame tools speaks volumes however.

I could ask for a link to the evidence about the makeup of the current XFire users population - but we know there are no studies; not the 'what XFire was developed for population but the current population'. But this isn't about XFire. 

HOWEVER you can call the sample self-selected by all means. Which would make it - a sample with an unknown margin of error. 

Either way all we haveis a sample of XFire users who play SWTOR. Tracking them suggests certain things about SWTOR with an unknown margin of error. The key question, covered pages back is: is the margin of error 'good enough' - and so far it has 'matched' what we know e.g. during EGA. Now if XFire users had increased when EA said that follow on subs had gone down serious questions would be the order of the day.

We should still challenge what we see however: there is a free weekend - will XFire reflect this? And next week sees another sub-renewal point, the end of 60 day timecards etc.

But I think I might just go and play that well known mmo, or is it FPS, called Minecraft. Ranked 5 on XFire today is it?

Two days having an increase from same day in previous week, after months of constant decrease. If it wasn't that xFire "doesn't mean shit", I'd say it has a relation to the free trial.

The disposition of xfire users towards certain genres do not matter, since we do not compare SWTOR to Call of Duty series numbers or anything like that, we are comparing it to the other MMOs which are tracked by xfire. Infact we are not even talking about the xfire population as such, we are only talking about the rather small subset of it that bought and installed SWTOR.

A continuing decline on ANY kind of statistic is bad in the absence of others showing a different trend. Even with faulty data(non changing source) there shouldn't be a steady decline. The poll mentioned above about asking 5 democrats and 15 rebublicans about Obama is an excellent example, yes it would be skewed and show a wrong result in the context of general population, but if repeated daily it wouldn't show a downward trend. Infact it would be less likely to show a downward trend as it would require one of the democrats to "switch sides"(provided the result was black and white for republic vs democrats votes) which likely would require a current negative event associated with obama.

Arguing wether a poll of xfire population is within 5% or within 50% of general population is meaningless until the xfire population of SWTOR has stabilized. Because whatever the delta is between general population and xfire users, it should be constant(if they prefer FPS it will be skewed, but its unlikely that more and more xfire users would begin to prefer FPS every day, unless SWTOR converted them somehow, and well that would be even worse for the game/genre). And a constant can not change the outcome of a downward or upward trend.

Saying the decline xfire shows is not really happening is essentially saying that the gap between general populace and xfire is growing rapidly every day, and that makes little sense.

Originally posted by Metentso

DAY

DATE

# PLAYERS

% PREV WEEK

% MAXIMUM

NOTES

Thursday	01/03/12	4493	-12,69%	-61,92%	real
Friday	02/03/12	4584	-10,63%	-61,15%	real
Saturday	03/03/12	4757	-10,02%	-59,69%	real
Sunday	04/03/12	5071	-7,97%	-57,03%	real
Monday	05/03/12	4582	-19,42%	-61,17%	real
Tuesday	06/03/12	4371	-9,37%	-62,96%	real
Wednesday	07/03/12	4398	-6,62%	-62,73%	real
Thursday	08/03/12	4272	-4,92%	-63,80%	real
Friday	09/03/12	4216	-8,03%	-64,27%	real
Saturday	10/03/12	4487	-5,68%	-61,97%	real
Sunday	11/03/12	4652	-8,26%	-60,58%	real
Monday	12/03/12	4384	-4,32%	-62,85%	real
Tuesday	13/03/12	4170	-4,60%	-64,66%	real
Wednesday	14/03/12	4299	-2,25%	-63,57%	real
Thursday	15/03/12	4444	4,03%	-62,34%	start free trials
Friday	16/03/12	4667	10,70%	-60,45%	real

 

Two days having an increase from same day in previous week, after months of constant decrease. If it wasn't that xFire "doesn't mean shit", I'd say it has a relation to the free trial.

Another 10% increase from last saturday.

Isn't it amazing how variations in the general population are reflected in xFire despite the fact that xFire does not represent in any way the general population?