Wow also had a huge drop, bigger than SWTOR. I don't know if there is a reason. Tera went up, which is normal yesterday being launch, Aion went down but not so much as SWTOR, distance between SWTOR and Aion has been halved in a couple of months, now it's 1.100 players.

We really just have no way of knowing how many subscribers the game has. We can take Bioware at their word when they say they haven't lost any subscribers or we can make our assumptions that they're lying. To be honest, I think Bioware has integrity. But at the same time, I play the game.... and on my server which is low population.... no planet ever reaches 20 on the Republic side. It's possible everyone migrated to other servers. I'm just not sure.

Originally posted by Jakard

We really just have no way of knowing how many subscribers the game has. We can take Bioware at their word when they say they haven't lost any subscribers or we can make our assumptions that they're lying. To be honest, I think Bioware has integrity. But at the same time, I play the game.... and on my server which is low population.... no planet ever reaches 20 on the Republic side. It's possible everyone migrated to other servers. I'm just not sure.

Bioware actually doesn't exist anymore. It's a "Label" for games to sell them now for EA. Most of the staff for Bioware, similar to Mythic, have been canibalized for other projects. Most of the work for EA is outsourced to Indian & Asian companies. Only a TINY portion of each team for a project are still housed in EA staffed offices. MOST of the "heavy lifting" programically are done overseas now for pennies on the dollar :(.

I read the PCGamer article a bout "Bioware saying they hadn't lost any subscibers" and there was no quote from the lead designer person they interviewed that said that. The designer talked about server populations etc. and what could be sone.

I believe that the statement - no loss of subs - is down to what JR said in early March when he re-affirmed that the game had 1.7M the same as what was said a month earlier. Still in the free month + 3 month window when that was said that of course.

As to subs being greater than players ordinarily yes but given the number of free trials ... who knows.

Originally posted by superniceguy

 

#870 Star Wars Galaxies 10h

 

;_;

Originally posted by RefMinor

Originally posted by zymurgeist

Oh, a continuation of a useless thread claiming the useless data from a useless application has meaning. How useless. Seriously is there anything left to be said?

 

Yes, what a useless comment.

Hey Ref, did you like GW2? I was looking for your opinion on it. All I saw was something about Salem 

Originally posted by zymurgeist

Oh, a continuation of a useless thread claiming the useless data from a useless application has meaning. How useless. Seriously is there anything left to be said?

Yes: that is your useless opinion :)

Originally posted by ktanner3

Xfire rankings

#3 World of Warcraft : 60410 h

#7 Star Wars The Old Republic: : 12600h

#13 Aion: 6851h

#20 Eve Online: 4102h

#22 Guild Wars: 3751h

#46 Rift: 1687h

#48 Star Trek Online: 1662h

#61 TERA: 1276h

#66 DCUO: 1182h

 

 

5/4/2012

#3 WOW                45585h

#8 TOR                  9079h

#13 Aion                5589h

#20 TERA              3490h

#22 EVE                 3291h

#24 Guild Wars      3003h

#29 LOTRO            2278h

Originally posted by ktanner3

5/4/2012

#3 WOW                45585h

#8 TOR                  9079h

#13 Aion                5589h

#20 TERO              3490h

#22 EVE                 3291h

#24 Guild Wars      3003h

#29 LOTRO            2278h

 

 

 

Wow Guild Wars 1 still has 1/3 the activity of SWTOR.

I was just on farming some Z-keys. I knew a lot still played it but damn...

I really want to help Zymurgeist understand what we have so I looked back at his first post:

27th December:  Self selected polling methods are irrelevant. Random polls, which xfire is not, are sometimes useful but not always. After all Dewey deated Truman right?

And in case you missed the answer I provided a while back I will repeat it briefly. People do choose to use XFire but we are not looking at "XFire users" but at "XFire users who play SWTOR". Whether those XFire users decide buy/play SWTOR is best described as random. Think of it like medical research. You might have to have cancer to join the new drug trial - that doesn't make the research irrelevant; within the group of patients some get the new drug some don't. And yes XFire may be biased towards young/old, male/female - whatever -  but that is why we assume it has a margin of error. Even if it was a self-selected sample however all you end up doing is discussing how good/bad the data is. And the bottomline is: the data isn't out of the ballpark.

According to those numbers,for whatever value you give them, it looks like the WoW people are going back home from other games and betas for now.

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Originally posted by RefMinor

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Originally posted by BadSpock

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Originally posted by MMOExposed

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Wow GW2 had a population drop in beta?

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We are really going to have a conversation about population in a game's beta?
Really?

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It is good thing to keep it on the graph to show the flat earthers that XFire does mirror trends, beta weekend finishes population drops to 0. Some of them are quite stubborn because they cannot string thoughts together so well.

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Originally posted by lizardbones


Calculate any actual numbers from XFire without assuming some additional numbers. You can't. There is no way to get from XFire's numbers to an actual subscriber count, actual hours played by the player base or any other actual number. You can't even say that the total number of players dropped by a certain percentage. The closest you can get is "Less" or "More" or "No Change".

It's just a poor quality tool to use the way many people on these forums use it.

 

Were not looking for actual numbers, were looking for trends

Originally posted by lizardbones

 

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Calculate any actual numbers from XFire without assuming some additional numbers. You can't. There is no way to get from XFire's numbers to an actual subscriber count, actual hours played by the player base or any other actual number. You can't even say that the total number of players dropped by a certain percentage. The closest you can get is "Less" or "More" or "No Change".

It's just a poor quality tool to use the way many people on these forums use it.

 

100% wrong and you keep ignoring all the posts that show you otherwise lizardbones; dross frankly.

The XFire player numbers being tracked could be used to do what you say without assuming any additional number. You use the official numbers given out by EA e.g. 1M on 23rd December, 1.7M twice, average player hours on different occasions. No assumed numbers necessary.

The hard bit - if you do make any projections - would be deciding how accurate the projection was.

Now you may want the total hours played yesterday to the exact second but observers of this thread just go with the trend but I haven't seen anyone of late try to use the numbers in the way you suggest. Sorry to pull you up on that point but we have gone beyond that - if there still were I would be at your side telling them why they shouldn't.

Next week we may get more data - depends what EA say.

Maybe EA say 450k and it turns out that XFire is a superb tool at this point in time! Maybe they say 600k - so we have a large margin of error but not that bad. Maybe they say 1.7M in which case we all scratch our heads and look to see exactly what EA said! How many trials?

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Originally posted by gervaise1

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Originally posted by lizardbones
 



Calculate any actual numbers from XFire without assuming some additional numbers. You can't. There is no way to get from XFire's numbers to an actual subscriber count, actual hours played by the player base or any other actual number. You can't even say that the total number of players dropped by a certain percentage. The closest you can get is "Less" or "More" or "No Change".

It's just a poor quality tool to use the way many people on these forums use it.

 

---

100% wrong and you keep ignoring all the posts that show you otherwise lizardbones; dross frankly.
The XFire player numbers being tracked could be used to do what you say without assuming any additional number. You use the official numbers given out by EA e.g. 1M on 23rd December, 1.7M twice, average player hours on different occasions. No assumed numbers necessary.
The hard bit - if you do make any projections - would be deciding how accurate the projection was.
Now you may want the total hours played yesterday to the exact second but observers of this thread just go with the trend but I haven't seen anyone of late try to use the numbers in the way you suggest. (Sorry to pull you up on that point.) 
Next week we may get more data - depends what EA say.
Maybe EA say 450k and it turns out that XFire is a superb tool at this point in time! Maybe they say 600k - so we have a large margin of error but not that bad. Maybe they say 1.7M in which case we all scratch our heads and look to see exactly what EA said! How many trials?

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Originally posted by Blackwater56

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Originally posted by lizardbones


Calculate any actual numbers from XFire without assuming some additional numbers. You can't. There is no way to get from XFire's numbers to an actual subscriber count, actual hours played by the player base or any other actual number. You can't even say that the total number of players dropped by a certain percentage. The closest you can get is "Less" or "More" or "No Change".

It's just a poor quality tool to use the way many people on these forums use it.

 

---

Were not looking for actual numbers, were looking for trends

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Originally posted by lizardbones

 

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Originally posted by gervaise1

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Originally posted by lizardbones
 



Calculate any actual numbers from XFire without assuming some additional numbers. You can't. There is no way to get from XFire's numbers to an actual subscriber count, actual hours played by the player base or any other actual number. You can't even say that the total number of players dropped by a certain percentage. The closest you can get is "Less" or "More" or "No Change".

It's just a poor quality tool to use the way many people on these forums use it.

 

---

100% wrong and you keep ignoring all the posts that show you otherwise lizardbones; dross frankly.
The XFire player numbers being tracked could be used to do what you say without assuming any additional number. You use the official numbers given out by EA e.g. 1M on 23rd December, 1.7M twice, average player hours on different occasions. No assumed numbers necessary.
The hard bit - if you do make any projections - would be deciding how accurate the projection was.
Now you may want the total hours played yesterday to the exact second but observers of this thread just go with the trend but I haven't seen anyone of late try to use the numbers in the way you suggest. (Sorry to pull you up on that point.) 
Next week we may get more data - depends what EA say.
Maybe EA say 450k and it turns out that XFire is a superb tool at this point in time! Maybe they say 600k - so we have a large margin of error but not that bad. Maybe they say 1.7M in which case we all scratch our heads and look to see exactly what EA said! How many trials?

---

Then do it. Anyone on these forums, do it. I would like to see it done without assuming any numbers. ** edit starting here ** Calculate a margin of error other than "large". You can't do it and neither can anyone else. There's not enough information there to do it.

 

Last time you said this I told you I had already done it and the answer came out at c. 20%. Again you ignored the post. Now on Monday we get more data and we can all have more fun. When EA announce that subs are 3M and rising you can come and say how right you were. 

Edit: And sorry about the we - I mean those people who are not after absolutes, happy now? (Probably not).

And because I obviously need to be super accurate I had better say that what we have is more complicated than "simple" polling but the analogy is 'good enough' for this forum. Just so you know however.  

Originally posted by lizardbones

Calculate any actual numbers from XFire without assuming some additional numbers. You can't. There is no way to get from XFire's numbers to an actual subscriber count, actual hours played by the player base or any other actual number. You can't even say that the total number of players dropped by a certain percentage. The closest you can get is "Less" or "More" or "No Change".

It's just a poor quality tool to use the way many people on these forums use it.

 

Tabula Rasa has 0 subcribers and actual played hours 0.  http://www.xfire.com/games/tr/Tabula_Rasa/

It'll be intresting to see if you can refute that.

Originally posted by lizardbones

Then do it. Anyone on these forums, do it. I would like to see it done without assuming any numbers. ** edit starting here ** Calculate a margin of error other than "large". You can't do it and neither can anyone else. There's not enough information there to do it.

I have to agree that you can't use the SWTOR numbers to calculate a margin of error, it would end up being so large that a random guess would have a bigger chance of getting the number of players correct.

I have been following the xfire numbers for AoC for a couple of years and if you get one anchor point that isn't in the middle of a large change in population, you can use that to get a nice ballpark number. Funcom haven't released any actual number of players since ... forever, and I was more interested in the income, so I just calculated the income pr xfire player.

Anyway, what I discovered was that if you correct the xfire numbers for the number of total xfire players you could predict the income within maybe 20% margin of error for AoC. The xfire numbers after F2P and large changes in the AoC population has made this pretty unreliable.

My conclusion is that even with a really small number of xfire players for AoC I got a pretty reliable number, the same should be true for SWTOR which has a much larger sample. To me it looks like SWTOR has at least 500k players. The maximum I feel is a bit harder to calculate, so I can only guess that is about 1 million players. The number of subscribers can be higher due to longer subscriptions.

I have characters on Shadow Hand which ranks #13 out of 123 North American servers on www.torstatus.net

The first month SWTOR launched, during primetime the Sith Fleet would have 250+ players.  The current Sith Fleet population during primetime is 110+ players which is a loss of 56% of the playerbase.  Rebel Fleet went from 80+ to 30+.  My guild would have 20+ members online and now just me or 1 other person.  ALL FACTS

Based on the above statistics SWTOR would have a subscriber base of roughly 750k.

Yes the naysayers will say, "not all servers will reflect the same statistics."  True, but we can atleast get a close approximation based on a popular server.

I cannot speak to xfire margin of error, etc. as previously mentioned, but the overall trend is a significant decline in subscriptions.  Bioware/EA is completely full of it to say they have retained 1.7 million subscribers.  Story after story on the boards at MMORPG.com and SWTOR.com of complete guilds and servers as ghost towns.

Just my 2 cents, and very worried about SWTOR's future.  Why can't anyone come out with a great sci-fi mmo, we have way too many fantasy based.  jeesh.  peace out.