Originally posted by tiefighter25

You could guess ToR's population from ToRstatus. This doesn't give population numbers, but shows an aglamation of the server load reports.

It seems server load has about doubled.

TORStatus is a poor indicator as it just has these undefined tiers.

It will show Super Heavy if you have Heavy_Max_Value + 1 all the way to Full_min_value - 1.  It's impossible to tell where in that range you are.  It's also impossible to tell if BW has recently changed how they define each status descriptor.

XFire atleast shows the trends of people using XFire down to the individual and hours played. 

Originally posted by FrodoFragins

Originally posted by tiefighter25

You could guess ToR's population from ToRstatus. This doesn't give population numbers, but shows an aglamation of the server load reports.

It seems server load has about doubled.

TORStatus is a poor indicator as it just has these undefined tiers.

 

It will show Super Heavy if you have Heavy_Max_Value + 1 all the way to Full_min_value - 1.  It's impossible to tell where in that range you are.  It's also impossible to tell if BW has recently changed how they define each status descriptor.

 

XFire atleast shows the trends of people using XFire down to the individual and hours played. 

Oh I agree. I was just giving OP another option (albeit a worse option).

As you point out individual server caps are not static and are adjusted periodacally by Bioware.

An example being Jung MA prior to FTP only having a few hundred players and being consistently listed as "Standard".

EA has to a large degree succeded in disguising its alarmingly low subscriber base.

do we really need to know?

as long as there are still people around on the 24 servers left, who cares?

worked for SWG for 9 years

Originally posted by FromHell

do we really need to know?

as long as there are still people around on the 24 servers left, who cares?

worked for SWG for 9 years

 

Not to drone on, but after the secondd server merger there were 20 servers remaining.

3 of those are on the wrong coast in Australia and are nearly dead even after the advent of FTP.

3 are German, 3 are French. 8 are in the US, including Jung Ma.

It does matter because without a large enough playerbase, no matter the payment model, there is not a large enough revenue stream to warrant new content creation and release.

whatever population bump they may have gotten will be gone in 2 or 3 weeks, doesn't matter.

Originally posted by kanezfan

whatever population bump they may have gotten will be gone in 2 or 3 weeks, doesn't matter.

Thanks for that scientific update backed up with facts!

Originally posted by tiefighter25

Originally posted by FromHell

do we really need to know?

as long as there are still people around on the 24 servers left, who cares?

worked for SWG for 9 years

 

Not to drone on, but after the secondd server merger there were 20 servers remaining.

3 of those are on the wrong coast in Australia and are nearly dead even after the advent of FTP.

3 are German, 3 are French. 8 are in the US, including Jung Ma.

It does matter because without a large enough playerbase, no matter the payment model, there is not a large enough revenue stream to warrant new content creation and release.

except you are not really addressing the "magic" of f2p. f2p is not about player numbers alone. It's about the amount of money that a small number of players are willing to spend on a game.

let's face it, there are f2p players who will never spend a dime. There are probably quite a few of those. But there are players who have the resources to spend quite a few dollars on a game. And after a (relatively) recent article that did some sleuthing and found out that a decent amount of players who opposed cash shops actually spent quite a lot of money on cash shopsl, it seems to me that as long as any game company can get a portion of their playerbase to spend freely then it doesn't matter how many servers they have or how packed they are.

Just so long as that small number spend.

Originally posted by WhiteLantern

How much do we, as a community, really care about the population of this game? Or any game for that matter. What end are you seeking with starting what will be another flame-filled troll-fest.

 

I'm not trying to harp on you Yamota, but I don't get the infatuation people have with sub numbers. Especially sub numbers of games they don't like.

You don´t think there is a correlation between subscribers and # of devs, # of QA testers?  SWTOR has about 6 months to prove it can be profitable as F2P or there is going to be a massive talent loss.

Originally posted by Sovrath

Originally posted by tiefighter25

Originally posted by FromHell

do we really need to know?

as long as there are still people around on the 24 servers left, who cares?

worked for SWG for 9 years

 

Not to drone on, but after the secondd server merger there were 20 servers remaining.

3 of those are on the wrong coast in Australia and are nearly dead even after the advent of FTP.

3 are German, 3 are French. 8 are in the US, including Jung Ma.

It does matter because without a large enough playerbase, no matter the payment model, there is not a large enough revenue stream to warrant new content creation and release.

except you are not really addressing the "magic" of f2p. f2p is not about player numbers alone. It's about the amount of money that a small number of players are willing to spend on a game.

let's face it, there are f2p players who will never spend a dime. There are probably quite a few of those. But there are players who have the resources to spend quite a few dollars on a game. And after a (relatively) recent article that did some sleuthing and found out that a decent amount of players who opposed cash shops actually spent quite a lot of money on cash shopsl, it seems to me that as long as any game company can get a portion of their playerbase to spend freely then it doesn't matter how many servers they have or how packed they are.

Just so long as that small number spend.

 

Oh I agree. In fact I believe EA is counting on the subscribers to be those obsesive/impulse buyers. I was just stating that the overall playerbase is shrinking, including those subscribers.

Originally posted by Swanea

Originally posted by kanezfan

whatever population bump they may have gotten will be gone in 2 or 3 weeks, doesn't matter.

Thanks for that scientific update backed up with facts!

Wheras kanezfan was probably alluding to is that a lot of games have seen a swift but ephemeral surge in popuation following a FTP transition.

I believe Swanea was stating that the future was unwritten,

I trully hope Swanea wasn't suggesting that kanezfan's argument was invalid because he didn't hop into a time machine and return to the forum to back up his argument with scientific facts. (I guess kanezfan was supposed to raid the NASA MMORPG lab 2 weeks in the future and return to the present with them?)

Originally posted by Yamota

Originally posted by Cecropia

Originally posted by WhiteLantern

How much do we, as a community, really care about the population of this game? Or any game for that matter. What end are you seeking with starting what will be another flame-filled troll-fest.

 

I'm not trying to harp on you Yamota, but I don't get the infatuation people have with sub numbers. Especially sub numbers of games they don't like.

Same reason people care about viewership for television shows. If the numbers start dipping too low, there's the possibility your favorite show will drop drastically in quality or cease to exist altogether. 

Nowadays in mmos, you also run the risk of the game switching to "F2P". A lot of people do not embrace such a metamorphosis. It can be a real game killer for many who were consistently and happily supporting their game.

Yep. I am very much against going F2P and if we can see more games not gaining from it, CoX was one that even shut down and other games like AoC got an initial surge but is now back to pre F2P populations, then maybe it is not the great thing we are being told it is and fewer games will adopt it.

So even if I dont care about SW:TOR per se, I hope this F2P thing fails which will lead to fewer games adopting it.

I'm going to go ahead and discuss the undiscussable numbers.  Going from Sunday to Sunday (as most games peak in the week on Sunday) it went from 5325 hours on the 11th to 11925 on the 18th.  So it went up by about 105% or so (slightly more than doubled).  Given the self selcted nature of x-fire it can be argued that there is something inherently different between those that use x-fire and those that don't, and that those differences may make one group more or less likely to play a given game.  Given the large sample size (2700+ is a very large sample size for most quantitative research) it is less likely that those players that use x-fire are significantly different than those who don't.  I can't imagine that EA is overly happy with only doubling their numbers.  I mean 12k hours played is about 10% of its peak a couple weeks after launch.  I have to think they anticipated a larger percentage of the fanbase returning, though maybe not given the server status when I logged in to almost ll the servers being full yesterday.

Originally posted by tiefighter25

Originally posted by FrodoFragins

Originally posted by tiefighter25

You could guess ToR's population from ToRstatus. This doesn't give population numbers, but shows an aglamation of the server load reports.

It seems server load has about doubled.

TORStatus is a poor indicator as it just has these undefined tiers.

 

It will show Super Heavy if you have Heavy_Max_Value + 1 all the way to Full_min_value - 1.  It's impossible to tell where in that range you are.  It's also impossible to tell if BW has recently changed how they define each status descriptor.

 

XFire atleast shows the trends of people using XFire down to the individual and hours played. 

Oh I agree. I was just giving OP another option (albeit a worse option).

As you point out individual server caps are not static and are adjusted periodacally by Bioware.

An example being Jung MA prior to FTP only having a few hundred players and being consistently listed as "Standard".

EA has to a large degree succeded in disguising its alarmingly low subscriber base.

Actually if that site shows a doubling of the population it ties in quite nicely with the xfire numbers indicating the same thing. Though it could be a coincidence I suppose.

Originally posted by Swanea

Originally posted by kanezfan

whatever population bump they may have gotten will be gone in 2 or 3 weeks, doesn't matter.

Thanks for that scientific update backed up with facts!

Do you really expect all the new players to stay? There's a reason the game is going f2p that soon...

Originally posted by lizardbones

 

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Originally posted by Cecropia

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Originally posted by WhiteLantern How much do we, as a community, really care about the population of this game? Or any game for that matter. What end are you seeking with starting what will be another flame-filled troll-fest.   I'm not trying to harp on you Yamota, but I don't get the infatuation people have with sub numbers. Especially sub numbers of games they don't like.

---

Same reason people care about viewership for television shows. If the numbers start dipping too low, there's the possibility your favorite show will drop drastically in quality or cease to exist altogether. 

 

Nowadays in mmos, you also run the risk of the game switching to "F2P". A lot of people do not embrace such a metamorphosis. It can be a real game killer for many who were consistently and happily supporting their game.

---

It doesn't really matter how interested anyone is in the player numbers. There is no way to get the player numbers unless the developer provides them. That's it. That's why it always devolves into an argument...people are arguing what they believe, not what's actually happening.

** edit **
If player numbers are known to be unknown, then the player population trends are inaccurate at best. From there, the argument becomes how inaccurate the trends are, which is again, people arguing what they believe, not what's actually happening. MMORPG.com has nixed certain threads, and the discussion on player numbers has nearly died, moving on to things that actually matter. I for one think they made exactly the right decision.

 

This is a tautological argument that is problematic.  There are ways to examine trends, they just show nearly every mmo decreasing over time after an enitial rush and the fans dislike this and talking about this.  Xfire is an excellent trend tool it is for games I love and games I hate it is much less "biased" than those who would shut down the disucssion that comes from them.

Originally posted by tiefighter25

 

Oh I agree. In fact I believe EA is counting on the subscribers to be those obsesive/impulse buyers. I was just stating that the overall playerbase is shrinking, including those subscribers.

That could be the case, especially with this game. this game is "about" the story. Now, I just dont buy the "oh it's a single player game" argument that some use because I am the quintessetial soloer. You will never find me logging in and looking for a group. But i grouped quite a bit in SWToR. It was pretty easy.

But to the point, once the story is over there's not a lot to do unless one is interested in repeatable content.

Originally posted by niceguy3978

Originally posted by Yamota

Originally posted by Cecropia

Originally posted by WhiteLantern

How much do we, as a community, really care about the population of this game? Or any game for that matter. What end are you seeking with starting what will be another flame-filled troll-fest.

 

I'm not trying to harp on you Yamota, but I don't get the infatuation people have with sub numbers. Especially sub numbers of games they don't like.

Same reason people care about viewership for television shows. If the numbers start dipping too low, there's the possibility your favorite show will drop drastically in quality or cease to exist altogether. 

Nowadays in mmos, you also run the risk of the game switching to "F2P". A lot of people do not embrace such a metamorphosis. It can be a real game killer for many who were consistently and happily supporting their game.

Yep. I am very much against going F2P and if we can see more games not gaining from it, CoX was one that even shut down and other games like AoC got an initial surge but is now back to pre F2P populations, then maybe it is not the great thing we are being told it is and fewer games will adopt it.

So even if I dont care about SW:TOR per se, I hope this F2P thing fails which will lead to fewer games adopting it.

I'm going to go ahead and discuss the undiscussable numbers.  Going from Sunday to Sunday (as most games peak in the week on Sunday) it went from 5325 hours on the 11th to 11925 on the 18th.  So it went up by about 105% or so (slightly more than doubled).  Given the self selcted nature of x-fire it can be argued that there is something inherently different between those that use x-fire and those that don't, and that those differences may make one group more or less likely to play a given game.  Given the large sample size (2700+ is a very large sample size for most quantitative research) it is less likely that those players that use x-fire are significantly different than those who don't.  I can't imagine that EA is overly happy with only doubling their numbers.  I mean 12k hours played is about 10% of its peak a couple weeks after launch.  I have to think they anticipated a larger percentage of the fanbase returning, though maybe not given the server status when I logged in to almost ll the servers being full yesterday.

Actually I think EA will be fine with the surge. The surge is actually just about what they predicted it would be. The surge stretched their servers to max load during peak hours, with the majority of European and US servers hitting FULL. (Insert Mega-Server joke here)

Why would they not really want more FTPers? Because that is not really the point. The main point of the FTP conversion (besides hiding subscription numbers 4 times a year) is to allow the hardcoe subscribers spend money in the cash shop.

EA isn't really serious about exploring a Freemium system along the lines of LOTRO, at this time at any rate. The motivations for the LOTRO and SWTOR switch to Freemium are different. LOTRO saught to maximize revenue, supplementing their subscription revenues. SWTOR is, to use a crass term, just a money grab. LOTRO realized, and continued to develop content to sell to theor expanding ftp playerbase. SWTOR is looking to spend as little as possible on content creation. (They already went far overbudget in initial development.) SWTOR is just allowing subscribers to spend (hopefully) lots of money in the cash shop on top of their subscription without the introduction of new content. Basicaly allowing their current subscribers to spend money on vanity items as opposed to new content. Bioware will continue to mete out their stored up content from the spring, just enough to keep their hardcore subscribers subbed. In the meantime they will continue to promote alt creation via the Legacy system (Which they stated is their best feature) and hope people spend money decking out their main, then their second, etc. Their is a reason that the charcter limit per server was raised from 8 to 12.

Developing new vanity gear is inexpensive. Especially when they have a back-catalog of unreleased gear from Beta, and people are already spending money on reskinned current gear.

LOTRO and SWTOR use similar terminologies, but in actuality, use different models.

Originally posted by snapfusion
Ahh it seems like yesterday Funcom was going on about how AOC F2P numbers are soaring and the cash is now flying in.  Didnt work out so well now did it.  Seems people left for the same reasons when it was a sub.   But Nahh that will never happen with TOR now will it.

Game havent changed

Reasons people left havent changed

What exactly can you conclude from this?

Like all new toys, its interesting for day or two or a week.

But since they didnt find it necessary to fix their game...but arguably mad it worse (wow few new dailies, raid and some more recolored gear...yawn) and absolutely no story content now OR on horizon...yah.

Player numbers have increased that was inevitable, and could say that positively even without looking at any stats

People will come back to try and and level through another character (but impossible atm as can not create or buy another char slot unless already got toons started), some will check it out for morbid curiosity whether brand new or see the F2P joke, and other genuinely checking the game out.

I wonder if actual sub numbers have increased? Sub numbers may have even dropped if people dropped the sub to play as F2P.

Now to sit back and watch the numbers drop again week by week. This time next year it will be so dead.