Originally posted by azurrei

It has already been established that server status is based on number of active accounts, not people actually playing at any given moment.

Therefore, full servers mean nothing other than john gamer logs in once a week to see if the game has magically become more interesting.  The game has promise, but it is a long ways off from being fixed.

from my experiences, for doing Server Transfers at least, its based on whos playing

when I transferred to Stormbluff Isle, it was always full -- every morning and evening

until Sunday morning around 5am (when I was able to transfer)

after 7 am Sunday it was full again because I had friends that tried to transfer but couldnt  (until the following weekend)

Originally posted by botrytis

Originally posted by azurrei

Originally posted by Catibrie
Servers are still heavy or full. No low population on any server. I am still loving the game and dont see me leaving any time soon. Lots to do end game and by far one of the best MMOs ever to come out. Its in my top 4, EQ1, WoW, DAoC and GW2. 

It has already been established that server status is based on number of active accounts, not people actually playing at any given moment.

Therefore, full servers mean nothing other than john gamer logs in once a week to see if the game has magically become more interesting.  The game has promise, but it is a long ways off from being fixed.

No - if that is the case then the server populations would not go up and down during the day and they do. If they were only based on the accounts - they WOULD NEVER BOUNCE UP AND DOWN!!

lol, believe what you want - if that were the case you could transfer to any server in the middle of the night and that is never the case.  Perhaps they have changed it to base population + currently logged in, but they are most definitely keeping people from freely transferring to any server they want to avoid overpopulation...unless every server is full of bots, which would not be surprising.

I have to try it again, I played during headstart, and I found it very bland and boring, I have never been a big quest person, and it seems like they are shoved down your throat and its like a all quest, all the time thing...So hopefully just the overcrowding of headstart hurt the emersion or feeling of the game. 

PRobably give it another go soon.

Originally posted by azurrei

Originally posted by botrytis

Originally posted by azurrei

Originally posted by Catibrie
Servers are still heavy or full. No low population on any server. I am still loving the game and dont see me leaving any time soon. Lots to do end game and by far one of the best MMOs ever to come out. Its in my top 4, EQ1, WoW, DAoC and GW2. 

It has already been established that server status is based on number of active accounts, not people actually playing at any given moment.

Therefore, full servers mean nothing other than john gamer logs in once a week to see if the game has magically become more interesting.  The game has promise, but it is a long ways off from being fixed.

No - if that is the case then the server populations would not go up and down during the day and they do. If they were only based on the accounts - they WOULD NEVER BOUNCE UP AND DOWN!!

lol, believe what you want - if that were the case you could transfer to any server in the middle of the night and that is never the case.  Perhaps they have changed it to base population + currently logged in, but they are most definitely keeping people from freely transferring to any server they want to avoid overpopulation...unless every server is full of bots, which would not be surprising.

You speak with such certainty, obviously you read something distributed from Anet on how server population works.  You mind linking it?

Surely you wouldnt just make stuff up like this.....who does that?

Originally posted by mikahr

Originally posted by Gaia_Hunter

You keep confusing the subject.

No one is saying GW2 should be number 1  or number 10 in XFire.

People are (I am) saying XFire isn't a random sample of GW2 population.

You are saying XFire is random sample of XFire users across games.

For each individual gaming population it doesn't matter that XFire has the same chance of being installed by hardcores in every game.

 

An example:

You go to party A internal elections.

And you are asked 2 questions:

1) Who is going to win the general elections, Party A or Party B?

2) Who is going to win Party A nomination, candidate X or candidate y?

You can claim the population answering question number 2 is a random population.

You can't claim that the same population answering question number 1 is a random population.

And basically XFire is a random population when answering the question "Which online PC game is most popular" but it isn't a random population when answering the "What has been the evolution of playing habits and the population size of X game population".

The proper and valid tools depends of what we are trying to do, it isn't one size fits all.

 

Uh, not really.

People dont join XFire to only play GW2. Anyone that has XFire can play any game.

To prove its not random you would have to prove that people that play GW2 joined XFire and play exlusively GW2.

And it has been proven that numbers cannot be correlated among different games, that means your A question cannot be aswered through XFire anyway (meaning if game A has x XFire users and known total number of players is known you cannot correlate total number of players game B has based on y XFire users).

What you can do with XFire is look at individual trend of number of users for a single game individually as its nicely represented by spikes when certain major events occur (expansion, content patch, "free weekend" etc), and ONLY by number of different users, NOT hours played.

If you play GW2 do you have a random chance of being selected by XFire?

And there is no proof of anything since data is so scarce.

But one thing is obvious - if a game isn't popular it will probably not register in XFire.

Again if a game flops it is obvious it will register in XFire.

But a game losing players in XFire doesn't have to relate with the game - I gave the example of WoW it lost around 66% of its played hours since last year. It lost half the players since september.

We will see if that correlates.

Originally posted by Nadia

Originally posted by azurrei

It has already been established that server status is based on number of active accounts, not people actually playing at any given moment.

Therefore, full servers mean nothing other than john gamer logs in once a week to see if the game has magically become more interesting.  The game has promise, but it is a long ways off from being fixed.

from my experiences, for doing Server Transfers at least, its based on whos playing

 

when I transferred to Stormbluff Isle, it was always full -- every morning and evening

until Sunday morning around 5am (when I was able to transfer)

after 7 am Sunday it was full again because I had friends that tried to transfer but couldnt  (until the following weekend)

Nadia is correct and Azurrei is wrong. It's clearly based on who is logged in, not on the number of accounts tied to the given server. This is why people looking to transfer to a different server almost always have to wait until off peak hours to do the transfer. (With a non-sub game, this couldn't really be done any other way, as there is no subscription status by which to determine whether an account is active or dormant).

It's bad enough to post inaccuracies, worse to then claim that something is "established" when it clearly is not.

BTW, some might question how a server can be full, based on active players, even outside of prime time, when clearly the number of players on at that time is lower than during prime time. You can't transfer to a server while it's full, but once you are established on your server, you can always log in to that server. During peak prime hours, if capacity is exceeded in a zone, the excess goes to an overflow server. So, yes, you can be full before peak and still be full during peak with twice as many logged in players.

Apparently, the server "caps" are set to minimize the reliance on overflows during the most active hors of the week, while also being mindful of off peak player experience. IMO, they have managed this very well, resisting the urge to add new servers as the playerbase expands, while trying to minimize the amount of overflow server use during peak play times.

Originally posted by azurrei

Originally posted by botrytis

Originally posted by azurrei

Originally posted by Catibrie
Servers are still heavy or full. No low population on any server. I am still loving the game and dont see me leaving any time soon. Lots to do end game and by far one of the best MMOs ever to come out. Its in my top 4, EQ1, WoW, DAoC and GW2. 

It has already been established that server status is based on number of active accounts, not people actually playing at any given moment.

Therefore, full servers mean nothing other than john gamer logs in once a week to see if the game has magically become more interesting.  The game has promise, but it is a long ways off from being fixed.

No - if that is the case then the server populations would not go up and down during the day and they do. If they were only based on the accounts - they WOULD NEVER BOUNCE UP AND DOWN!!

lol, believe what you want - if that were the case you could transfer to any server in the middle of the night and that is never the case.  Perhaps they have changed it to base population + currently logged in, but they are most definitely keeping people from freely transferring to any server they want to avoid overpopulation...unless every server is full of bots, which would not be surprising.

Umm... for most servers, the middle of the night is the only time you can transfer there. See my previous post for the explaination as to why a server can be "full" outside of prime time, while still being able to accomodate all players associated with that server during prime time. 

Originally posted by botrytis

Originally posted by azurrei

Originally posted by Catibrie
Servers are still heavy or full. No low population on any server. I am still loving the game and dont see me leaving any time soon. Lots to do end game and by far one of the best MMOs ever to come out. Its in my top 4, EQ1, WoW, DAoC and GW2. 

It has already been established that server status is based on number of active accounts, not people actually playing at any given moment.

Therefore, full servers mean nothing other than john gamer logs in once a week to see if the game has magically become more interesting.  The game has promise, but it is a long ways off from being fixed.

No - if that is the case then the server populations would not go up and down during the day and they do. If they were only based on the accounts - they WOULD NEVER BOUNCE UP AND DOWN!!

+1 for common sense.

Originally posted by Gaia_Hunter

Originally posted by jpnz

Originally posted by ScaryMonk

Originally posted by jpnz

Originally posted by boxsnd
It amazes me how little about statistics the GW2 fans in this thread know.

Unless my Stat 101 book is suddenly out of date, XFire meets the criteria of a 'random sample' for decline / incline of games.

No selection bias and a sufficient sample size.

Whether the ANALYSIS of the sample is statistically sound or not is another issue.

No, I think the question is whether it provides a statistiacally biased sample.  

Last I checked, Xfire doesn't report one game more favorably over the other.

There is no 'bias' when installing Xfire amongst gamers cause any gamer can install the program.

Unless we go down the 'But you have to DO STUFF' argument again (thus voiding every survey / poll done ever), it is statisitically a sound sample.

 

You keep confusing the subject.

No one is saying GW2 should be number 1  or number 10 in XFire.

People are (I am) saying XFire isn't a random sample of GW2 population.

You are saying XFire is random sample of XFire users across games.

For each individual gaming population it doesn't matter that XFire has the same chance of being installed by hardcores in every game.

 

An example:

You go to party A internal elections.

And you are asked 2 questions:

1) Who is going to win the general elections, Party A or Party B?

2) Who is going to win Party A nomination, candidate X or candidate y?

You can claim the population answering question number 2 is a random population.

You can't claim that the same population answering question number 1 is a random population.

And basically XFire is a random population when answering the question "Which online PC game is most popular" but it isn't a random population when answering the "What has been the evolution of playing habits and the population size of X game population".

The proper and valid tools depends of what we are trying to do, it isn't one size fits all.

 

Have you ever watched Fox News and seen a viewer poll show 95% against something, then switched to MSNBC to see a viewer poll show 95% in favor of the thing in question? That's because each network attracts different people. XFire can not be a random sampling of all PC gamers, because there is zero information that established XFire as providing a representative sample of PC gamers.

I have nevver run XFire, because I don't want any performnce drain while playing games that tax my system, I have no use for the XFire communications tools and I have no need to display my play habits to the masses. I don't personally know anyone that uses XFire and when the conversation comes up, most give similar reasons for not using it.

If XFire is under-representative of players who wish to maximize performance, have no use for XFire's communication tools and have no desire to display their game play habits to the world, then it's no longer a representative population of gamers.

Something like XFire gains more value if someone games with other people that also use XFire, so there is bound to be sampling bias related to which groups of players tend to gravitate towards and recommend XFire for others. Some non-MMO gaming site forums are repleat with XFire forum sigs, while other sites have few, if any X-Fire sigs in evidence. I have never seen anything but a sparse display of X-Fire sigs on any MMO based gamer forum.

Any survey with self selected participants is valueless at showing anything other than the opinions or habits of that group of people. X-Fire is a self selected group of people and shows nothing other than the habits/trends of X-fire users.

Originally posted by fiontar

Any survey with self selected participants is valueless at showing anything other than the opinions or habits of that group of people. X-Fire is a self selected group of people and shows nothing other than the habits/trends of X-fire users.

Sorry bro, but XFire has been proven that (user) graphs of XFire show nicely spikes when they should and drops when they should, and that it DOES represent gamers (MMO in this case) quite well (was a nice thread in SWTOR forum that someone updated with graphs for several games and it showed everything that it was supposed to show - drop of population, spikes on various events like content patches, free weekends, even weekends...)

OTOH you only have your opninion that you cannot prove why its wrong. Your opinion got invalidated though by mentioning "i dont use XFire or my friends dont use it" because its irrelevant.

There are things you can say with certanity by looking at XFire graphs, and then there are things you cant (but many people do for their own purpose).

I just posted in my Guild of 350 people's forum and got over 100 replies.

Not one of them uses Xfire and neither do I.

Originally posted by Nadia

 

from my experiences, for doing Server Transfers at least, its based on whos playing

 

when I transferred to Stormbluff Isle, it was always full -- every morning and evening

until Sunday morning around 5am (when I was able to transfer)

after 7 am Sunday it was full again because I had friends that tried to transfer but couldnt  (until the following weekend)

This is factually false according to ANet.

CC Eva wrote

Connor, when you see a server FULL means that the people who’ve chosen that server as theirs, or players who have moved to that particular server, have reached the cap, independently of where did they create their accounts.

Originally posted by mikahr

Originally posted by fiontar

Any survey with self selected participants is valueless at showing anything other than the opinions or habits of that group of people. X-Fire is a self selected group of people and shows nothing other than the habits/trends of X-fire users.

Sorry bro, but XFire has been proven that (user) graphs of XFire show nicely spikes when they should and drops when they should, and that it DOES represent gamers (MMO in this case) quite well (was a nice thread in SWTOR forum that someone updated with graphs for several games and it showed everything that it was supposed to show - drop of population, spikes on various events like content patches, free weekends, even weekends...)

OTOH you only have your opninion that you cannot prove why its wrong. Your opinion got invalidated though by mentioning "i dont use XFire or my friends dont use it" because its irrelevant.

There are things you can say with certanity by looking at XFire graphs, and then there are things you cant (but many people do for their own purpose).

But what does a double in XFire players represent in game?

Twice the population? Three times? +20%?

For example, Funcom said they had a 400% increase with b2p and XFire only registered a 300% increase. Might not seem much but that is 33% difference - and TSW prompts XFire instalation (with the default option being "install XFire", which mean one needs to remove the tick)

Originally posted by jpnz

Originally posted by Nadia

 

from my experiences, for doing Server Transfers at least, its based on whos playing

 

when I transferred to Stormbluff Isle, it was always full -- every morning and evening

until Sunday morning around 5am (when I was able to transfer)

after 7 am Sunday it was full again because I had friends that tried to transfer but couldnt  (until the following weekend)

This is factually false according to ANet.

CC Eva wrote

Connor, when you see a server FULL means that the people who’ve chosen that server as theirs, or players who have moved to that particular server, have reached the cap, independently of where did they create their accounts.

That post shed no light on how they calculate the cap.

Originally posted by Gaia_Hunter

But what does a double in XFire players represent in game?

Twice the population? Three times? +20%?

For example, Funcom said they had a 400% increase with b2p and XFire only registered a 300% increase. Might not seem much but that is 33% difference - and TSW prompts XFire instalation (with the default option being "install XFire", which mean one needs to remove the tick)

As i said, concrete numbers are something XFire cannot show (well it can but highly innacurate).

But XFire did show large spike and you could say just by looking at XFire graph that at that point in time there was some major event without even knowing it was going B2P, and its proof that XFire actually shows general trends for a game and that it does represent valid sample (for that purpose).

And thats a point for those that want to dismiss XFire trends and say its somehow invalid, its pretty certain that if XFire shows drop its losing players and vice versa, you cannot say "it lost 30%" or "it lost 40%".

Originally posted by mikahr

Originally posted by Gaia_Hunter

But what does a double in XFire players represent in game?

Twice the population? Three times? +20%?

For example, Funcom said they had a 400% increase with b2p and XFire only registered a 300% increase. Might not seem much but that is 33% difference - and TSW prompts XFire instalation (with the default option being "install XFire", which mean one needs to remove the tick)

As i said, concrete numbers are something XFire cannot show (well it can but highly innacurate).

But XFire did show large spike and you could say just by looking at XFire graph that at that point in time there was some major event without even knowing it was going B2P, and its proof that XFire actually shows general trends for a game and that it does represent valid sample (for that purpose).

And thats a point for those that want to dismiss XFire trends and say its somehow invalid, its pretty certain that if XFire shows drop its losing players and vice versa, you cannot say "it lost 30%" or "it lost 40%".

People want to use XFire trends as a tool of prediction.

But the XFire trends don't preceed in game trends.

Originally posted by Gaia_Hunter

People want to use XFire trends as a tool of prediction.

But the XFire trends don't preceed in game trends.

 

Of course it doesnt. It cant show future ;P

But it can be used to tell people that claim different, if game as obviously losing/gaining players and they disbelief it you can use XFire graphs to back up your claim.

Concretely for SWTOR population didnt settle till september/october. And in their Q report they reported it settled. But it settled on much lower value than their last reported numbers, and you can quite certanly claim that based on XFire graphs. Yet people said "Theres no proof" etc and XFire thread was closed by then and XFire discussions banned from forums.

Same with GW2, XFire graphs settled and now they officialy confiremd it settled some time ago (and even got growth in last month or so).

Just to proove all those that were saying it was still "losing players at rapid rate", XFire was right and they were wrong (once again), just like with SWTOR before when people claim its not losing players and XFire was right and they were wrong, and just like many games before it, its proven that it does show accurate trends.

People are still talking about Xfire? Sheesh. If you think Xfire is a valid tool to estimate total populations, then you don't understand statistical bias or random samples.

Furthermore, the first big test of GW2 will obviously be the expansion. Retention of players until then is largely irrelevant due to the B2P model. Although my server is always packed with queues for WvW and people looking for dungeons *shrug*.

Originally posted by evilastro

People are still talking about Xfire? Sheesh. If you think Xfire is a valid tool to estimate total populations, then you don't understand statistical bias or random samples.

Furthermore, the first big test of GW2 will obviously be the expansion. Retention of players until then is largely irrelevant due to the B2P model. Although my server is always packed with queues for WvW and people looking for dungeons *shrug*.

When people say "its losing players" and XFIre shows otherwise then XFire is right and they are wrong. When people say "its not losing players" and XFire shows otherwise XFire is right and they are wrong.

And it has been proven in practice, practice beats theory. You can theorise how much you want about it being "wrong" but its proven right every single time.

So yah, XFire is good to discuss.