As you know if you have been reading my posts, I represent gamerDNA.com and we use Xfire to track what people are playing in games via an Xfire API. Thus we have learned a thing or two about this and I thought I would share this knowledge since there seems to be a lot of people with their panties in a knot over this chart on the Xfire website:

I don't know what is in the Xfire secret sauce in this chart but I can tell you this based on using their API:

• XFire minutes played are wildly inaccurate. They count every second your client is open as playtime. So if the XFire graph that everyone is counting that. It's meaningless. Once according to Xfire, I played over 57 hours in one day...
• If "Xfire users playing per day" is based on sessions. That means its going to count every time someone starts up the client. A bit better perhaps, unless there are a lot of crashes. In which case seeing less session starts could actually be a good thing.

Since all we see on the Xfire page for Warhammer is a chart with no explanation, we really can't make any assumptions about the success or failure of the game. Tea leaves would yield just as accurate a measurement.

Though I am sure this post is not going to stop the "sky is falling" mayhem around here, I hope it has been educational for those who care. As a person who has been watching and writing about games for a long time, I don't see anything to be alarmed about here. Just the normal fall off after a launch soon to be followed by a slow and steady build-up over time if the game is a winner. WoW only had 500K subscribers after it's first month and, believe I was there from day on on Archimonde, it was nowhere near as trouble free as WAR and just as many people stopped playing in the first few weeks.

P.S. If you haven't heard of Xfire that just means you probably have not played many PC FPS games. Xfire is an IM that tells you what and where your friends are playing. In an MMORPG this is less of a problem as you know who's on as soon as you login. In the FPS world your friends or clan members could be on any one of thousands of servers out there. Xfire neatly solves this problem. That's why they have 11 million members.

Originally posted by Roxianna  

I don't know what is in the Xfire secret sauce in this chart but I can tell you this based on using their API:

• XFire minutes played are wildly inaccurate. They count every second your client is open as playtime. So if the XFire graph that everyone is counting that. It's meaningless. Once according to Xfire, I played over 57 hours in one day...
• If "Xfire users playing per day" is based on sessions. That means its going to count every time someone starts up the client. A bit better perhaps, unless there are a lot of crashes. In which case seeing less session starts could actually be a good thing.

1- Irrelevant unless you want to evaluate how much time people spend per day in War, we use it for trends to see if a game is doing well or not.

I don't understand what you mean with the 57 hours in one day, how could you get that?

2- Once again irrelevant unless theres a new bug that makes it crash and people log on more than usual because of it. It doesn't count per session anyway otherwise you would see some weird illogical population fluctuation one in a while. I've checked it everyday since launch and its been steady except for 2 days where XFire had issues

Heres what we can determine as fact from your graphic

1- Warhammer is losing subs, more people are quitting than buying the game

2- Its doing a lot better than AoC was during its first month (it dropped to 30% while War dropped to 60% of its peak)

Originally posted by Roxianna

As you know if you have been reading my posts, I represent gamerDNA.com and we use Xfire to track what people are playing in games via an Xfire API. Thus we have learned a thing or two about this and I thought I would share this knowledge since there seems to be a lot of people with their panties in a knot over this chart on the Xfire website:

I don't know what is in the Xfire secret sauce in this chart but I can tell you this based on using their API:

• XFire minutes played are wildly inaccurate. They count every second your client is open as playtime. So if the XFire graph that everyone is counting that. It's meaningless. Once according to Xfire, I played over 57 hours in one day...
• If "Xfire users playing per day" is based on sessions. That means its going to count every time someone starts up the client. A bit better perhaps, unless there are a lot of crashes. In which case seeing less session starts could actually be a good thing.

Since all we see on the Xfire page for Warhammer is a chart with no explanation, we really can't make any assumptions about the success or failure of the game. Tea leaves would yield just as accurate a measurement.

Though I am sure this post is not going to stop the "sky is falling" mayhem around here, I hope it has been educational for those who care. As a person who has been watching and writing about games for a long time, I don't see anything to be alarmed about here. Just the normal fall off after a launch soon to be followed by a slow and steady build-up over time if the game is a winner. WoW only had 500K subscribers after it's first month and, believe I was there from day on on Archimonde, it was nowhere near as trouble free as WAR and just as many people stopped playing in the first few weeks.

P.S. If you haven't heard of Xfire that just means you probably have not played many PC FPS games. Xfire is an IM that tells you what and where your friends are playing. In an MMORPG this is less of a problem as you know who's on as soon as you login. In the FPS world your friends or clan members could be on any one of thousands of servers out there. Xfire neatly solves this problem. That's why they have 11 million members.

 

Is this an advanced way of saying that the negative trend is good?? Also do you see that number 8800, which is players per day. That number was >15500 the first couple of weeks, meaning the number of people that use Xfire and still play WAR have decreased like -45%. I hardly think the code of Xfire statistics can screw up something as easy as if a player logged in or not and what we see is not healthy in any way.

More importantly, ingame is dead. Why do I have to listen to all these people saying everything is rosy and population is soooo goood, when I hardly see people on my medium/low server. Look we gamers need to bring this forth instead of hiding the fact. I want to play WAR but not alone, so Mythic please take action and fix us up.

Imo the biggest problem with Xfire is that it is measuring a quantity that is of no concern to anybody - time played.

I spend 2 or even 3 times less time on WAR than I ever did on WoW but I'm not considering unsubscribing by far.

Imo this is the prime reason there were too many servers at the release - devs based their server needs on WoW hr/day played average while WAR is a game that demands significantly less of your time.

I never play WAR for more than 2 hours straight - the experience is too intense for me. In those 2 hours I do as many radically different things I would do in a week in Wow. This leaves me satisfied and with enough time to read a book or go out. In fact I'd pay double the current subscription for entertainment of this quality.

The only relevant quantity is the number of subs. The rest is dross.

/edit

"relevant" instead of "valid" in the last paragraph - duh.

Originally posted by markoraos

Imo the biggest problem with Xfire is that it is measuring a quantity that is of no concern to anybody - time played.

I spend 2 or even 3 times less time on WAR than I ever did on WoW but I'm not considering unsubscribing by far.

Imo this is the prime reason there were too many servers at the release - devs based their server needs on WoW hr/day played average while WAR is a game that demands significantly less of your time.

I never play WAR for more than 2 hours straight - the experience is too intense for me. In those 2 hours I do as many radically different things I would do in a week in Wow. This leaves me satisfied and with enough time to read a book or go out. In fact I'd pay double the current subscription for entertainment of this quality.

The only valid quantity is the number of subs. The rest is dross.

You really do have a good poin.  When I was leveling my warrior in WoW I would spend every waking minute playing him.  Not even because it was fun, just because i wanted to get to level cap.

WAR i can sit down play for a bit and log off feeling like i did something, and had fun while doing it.  I think the problem with this websites community is that people feel like they need to spend years doing something to acheive it.  But in achuality you don't. 

Go pick up a guitar, play for an hour, bet you will get 10x better than you were before.

Next day do it again, you will be 10x better than you were that day too.  Untill you get to a learning platu were you only slowly get better because the amount to learn is very little compared tow hen you started.

Originally posted by markoraos

Imo the biggest problem with Xfire is that it is measuring a quantity that is of no concern to anybody - time played.

I spend 2 or even 3 times less time on WAR than I ever did on WoW but I'm not considering unsubscribing by far.

Imo this is the prime reason there were too many servers at the release - devs based their server needs on WoW hr/day played average while WAR is a game that demands significantly less of your time.

I never play WAR for more than 2 hours straight - the experience is too intense for me. In those 2 hours I do as many radically different things I would do in a week in Wow. This leaves me satisfied and with enough time to read a book or go out. In fact I'd pay double the current subscription for entertainment of this quality.

The only relevant quantity is the number of subs. The rest is dross.

/edit

"relevant" instead of "valid" in the last paragraph - duh.

You are wrong, it also shows 'unique players played' per day.  Warhammer started out around 16,000 players and is down to around 8,000 players.  The chart showed here is minutes played, which isn't nearly as 'important', but xfire does also give player numbers.   Now that we've cleared up the 'players' thing.. lets go back to the 'minutes played'... while it is not as important.. it IS important when comparing the trends within a game.  The first week, players played a lot of minutes.   4 weeks later, not only were there 45% less players playing, but the ones that were playing were playing less minutes.

It things were going well for Warhammer, MJ would be spouting 'subscription' numbers and game sales left and right.   Instead what he is giving is deceptive 'customer registers' and bogus resub numbers.

You need help. 

And who the hell uses x-fire.  Gamespy and steam is what the majority use. Sure x-fire has a small following but seriously x-fire isnt a requirement or some benefit in this genre.

If you realy want to see how usefull x-fire numbers are  ask on here, Waralliance and vnboards if anyone uses x-fire.  And youll see how small of a percentage use that program.

Originally posted by onlinenow225

Originally posted by markoraos

Imo the biggest problem with Xfire is that it is measuring a quantity that is of no concern to anybody - time played.

I spend 2 or even 3 times less time on WAR than I ever did on WoW but I'm not considering unsubscribing by far.

Imo this is the prime reason there were too many servers at the release - devs based their server needs on WoW hr/day played average while WAR is a game that demands significantly less of your time.

I never play WAR for more than 2 hours straight - the experience is too intense for me. In those 2 hours I do as many radically different things I would do in a week in Wow. This leaves me satisfied and with enough time to read a book or go out. In fact I'd pay double the current subscription for entertainment of this quality.

The only valid quantity is the number of subs. The rest is dross.

 

You really do have a good poin.  When I was leveling my warrior in WoW I would spend every waking minute playing him.  Not even because it was fun, just because i wanted to get to level cap.

WAR i can sit down play for a bit and log off feeling like i did something, and had fun while doing it.  I think the problem with this websites community is that people feel like they need to spend years doing something to acheive it.  But in achuality you don't. 

Go pick up a guitar, play for an hour, bet you will get 10x better than you were before.

Next day do it again, you will be 10x better than you were that day too.  Untill you get to a learning platu were you only slowly get better because the amount to learn is very little compared tow hen you started.

 

this is true most ppl on this site dis games look at WoW people complain about that like no tomorrow.

Well imo the Yanks use Gamespy and the Euro's use Xfire, I am a Euro and hate Gamespy but i have stopped using Xfire as much only because i can not be arsed to talk to people while playing atm.

I bought WAR and got my email today telling me that my subs are due and I have just deleted from my PC, I thought the game was as exciting as a dose of crabs, just another one for the MMO bin, next...

Please be aware the term Yank & Euro are not meant in a derogative term, but for my example only to point out in my mancunain slang before I start getting ban the Britt and all that fooking bollllllocks...

Originally posted by EvolvedMonky

You need help. 

And who the hell uses x-fire.  Gamespy and steam is what the majority use. Sure x-fire has a small following but seriously x-fire isnt a requirement or some benefit in this genre.

If you realy want to see how usefull x-fire numbers are  ask on here, Waralliance and vnboards if anyone uses x-fire.  And youll see how small of a percentage use that program.

Cann't these pretty simple things be thougth out before even pushing the submit button?

The negative trend is not explained by that not everyone playing WAR use Xfire. That is not even remotely close to even matter.

Originally posted by Orphes

Originally posted by EvolvedMonky

You need help. 

And who the hell uses x-fire.  Gamespy and steam is what the majority use. Sure x-fire has a small following but seriously x-fire isnt a requirement or some benefit in this genre.

If you realy want to see how usefull x-fire numbers are  ask on here, Waralliance and vnboards if anyone uses x-fire.  And youll see how small of a percentage use that program.

 

Cann't these pretty simple things be thougth out before even pushing the submit button?

The negative trend is not explained by that not everyone playing WAR use Xfire. That is not even remotely close to even matter.

ok, fair enough.  So explain to the class what this "negative trend" is that you speak of, and back it up with cold hard facts.  thanks.
 

 The only trend I see is from x-fire gamers in these x-fire posts. There leaving.

No where in the whole x-fire site does it give all players played time (non x-fire users). When people are posting how x-fire numbers are dropping I cry a little inside. What people need to realise is less then 10 pct of the population uses x-fire. And a smaller population comes to this forum. 

People need to wake up when using x-fire or this forum as a judge for the games actual upkeep. 

Of course the numbers will drop after the first month of initial release. It happens in every game. This game was not made for everyone. People had to high of expectations, and that caused em to quit. 

The only draw back I see in this game is that is not getting the credit it deserves for where its at after its first month battling against a tough competetor like WOW, or even some of these f2p games that have been released recently. 

If you wanna post negative numbers on this game, dig up real info. Not X-Fire, not the population status when you log on and see the servers (By my count lots are at least med) 

People are constantly rerolling to find that perfect char.

Originally posted by Gregtheexcon 

No where in the whole x-fire site does it give all players played time (non x-fire users). When people are posting how x-fire numbers are dropping I cry a little inside. What people need to realise is less then 10 pct of the population uses x-fire. And a smaller population comes to this forum. 

And less than 1% of people answer political and commercial polls, yet they are used by almost every company in the world. Where did you learn that you need to have everyone use something for it to be valuable?

People need to wake up when using x-fire or this forum as a judge for the games actual upkeep. 

Of course the numbers will drop after the first month of initial release. It happens in every game. This game was not made for everyone. People had to high of expectations, and that caused em to quit. 

And xfire is showing that drop. Your backtracking on your opinion here

If you wanna post negative numbers on this game, dig up real info. Not X-Fire, not the population status when you log on and see the servers (By my count lots are at least med) 

We don't have the data that Mythic does so how are we supposed to do that exactly? Do you have a magic 8 ball I can borrow? Servers don't list the amount of people and their caps are constantly changed. The best method would be to have a bot on every server that finds out the amount of people online at a certain time each day, and even then it wouldn't include those that hide themselves. 

Originally posted by Myrdek

Originally posted by Gregtheexcon 

No where in the whole x-fire site does it give all players played time (non x-fire users). When people are posting how x-fire numbers are dropping I cry a little inside. What people need to realise is less then 10 pct of the population uses x-fire. And a smaller population comes to this forum. 

And less than 1% of people answer political and commercial polls, yet they are used by almost every company in the world. Where did you learn that you need to have everyone use something for it to be valuable? Well, look at it this way. X-Fire are forum buffs right? People who are always on them. The people who are not dropping off the game, are busy enjoying it. X-Fire is only a small portion of the real games success. Just because forum goers are not into the game, does not mean much . Most people on this forum especially play multiple games. And have back burnered this game till the 1.1 patch. You're failing to see what little relavance this has on the actual games success.

People need to wake up when using x-fire or this forum as a judge for the games actual upkeep. 

Of course the numbers will drop after the first month of initial release. It happens in every game. This game was not made for everyone. People had to high of expectations, and that caused em to quit. 

And xfire is showing that drop. Your backtracking on your opinion here. Once again, X-Fire people are dropping. A.K.A forum guys. They are to busy with forums to be enjoying the game. Thats my op, if you don't like it. Thats your fault.  As far as backtracking, no, I was giving a possibility to why those people quit.

If you wanna post negative numbers on this game, dig up real info. Not X-Fire, not the population status when you log on and see the servers (By my count lots are at least med) 

We don't have the data that Mythic does so how are we supposed to do that exactly? Do you have a magic 8 ball I can borrow? Servers don't list the amount of people and their caps are constantly changed. The best method would be to have a bot on every server that finds out the amount of people online at a certain time each day, and even then it wouldn't include those that hide themselves.  My magic 8-ball is the actual game. Soorry, the game is going strong. If you look at WOW from release they had about as many subs. There was no real competition for them when released.

 

From the start WOW subs went up, there was no game like theres. So of course it would only go up. It also took 4 months to break 1 mil subs, with that little competition. The asian market was all over it as well, they had almost 1/2 of there subs at that point. 

This game is going up, not going down

Heres a link for the WOW chart from beginning. Not every company starts off at a mil. 

http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart11.html

XFire users are not forum buffs, their guild players. You said yourself that people on forums don't use Xfire much, and I agree.

Saying people are busy talking on forums instead of playing is an illogical excuse. I'm not bashing your game, I think it has the potential to be the best MMO out there and it has a great core but it doesn't mean you need to ignore the realities of its situation.

You cannot compare the launch of War with that of Wow, first off, Wow launched with only 600k units in store and didn't even think they would sell all those for a long time. Their servers got overwhelmed and they didn't print more boxes for a while until they upgraded their servers and hired more people. Their sales were slow simply because they couldn't keep up.

You also say that there was no competition, but there wasn't even 1/10th of the potential market there is now. I don't remember exactly how long but they didn't launch in the asian market before 4-8 months after launch in the U.S

The simple fact is that Warhammer had a disapointing launch because of a couple of reason. WotLK announced the day before, rushed release to not compete directly with it. They didn't reach their goal

Proof of that is easy to give

1- They sold 1.5 million units to stores but only 750k to consumers in 3 weeks and sales had already dropped tremendously

2- They opened with 3x more servers than they actually needed because they planned for the best case scenario. They didn't come close what they hoped for, especially considering they had almost 1 million people signed up for beta

3- They haven't sold 1 million units yet or they would have announced it, and assuming the same retention rate as DAoC it means they are losing subs, not gaining them

I am not saying that Warhammer is failing or anything like that, I'm just saying that their launch has been disapointing and didn't come close to the hype. It doesn't mean it won't someday, in fact I'm really hoping it does. It's the first MMO released in many years where I know I would get seriously addicted if the game ever reach its potential.

But to achieve that they need subs to pay for the programmers to make good patches and right now its not looking very good. The 1.1 patch might change that though, lets cross our fingers that the WoW expansion sucks and people flock to War instead

I have never been in or have known a guild who uses x-fire.  And im speaking about FPS aswell.  And thats what x-fires main use was for back in the day.

Most gamers I know turn off all programs when they play even if there comp is a beast. Superstition and all that. Except porn and torrents, for some reason there immune to it.

This is the internet now the realm of paranoia. I doubt even 5% of pc gamers use xfire, a program that monitors ur game time and never shows as many server lists as other programs.

And what the hell is the point of this. This is all Failcoms fault. The x-fire statistic  Bs didnt get extreme till that game cursed us all with forum attention whores.

This isnt a discussion but a sad attempt to goad people into giving you attention. You dont listen to anything its just im right blah blah blah. Did your mom not hug you enough or something?  

Go make out with a girl or something or a boy, dog, vegitable whatever floats that boat of urs.

And who the hell is gamerDNA and did you have to add the .com.  Was that your way of getting hits on that site. 

Originally posted by markoraos

Imo the biggest problem with Xfire is that it is measuring a quantity that is of no concern to anybody - time played.

I spend 2 or even 3 times less time on WAR than I ever did on WoW but I'm not considering unsubscribing by far.

Imo this is the prime reason there were too many servers at the release - devs based their server needs on WoW hr/day played average while WAR is a game that demands significantly less of your time.

I never play WAR for more than 2 hours straight - the experience is too intense for me. In those 2 hours I do as many radically different things I would do in a week in Wow. This leaves me satisfied and with enough time to read a book or go out. In fact I'd pay double the current subscription for entertainment of this quality.

The only relevant quantity is the number of subs. The rest is dross.

/edit

"relevant" instead of "valid" in the last paragraph - duh.

The ratio between hours played and number of players in a day is fairly constant.  It doesn't vary much for an individual game and in fact it isn't hugely different between games.  You can do the math a few days and see if varies very little.

Originally posted by EvolvedMonky

You need help. 

And who the hell uses x-fire.  Gamespy and steam is what the majority use. Sure x-fire has a small following but seriously x-fire isnt a requirement or some benefit in this genre.

If you realy want to see how usefull x-fire numbers are  ask on here, Waralliance and vnboards if anyone uses x-fire.  And youll see how small of a percentage use that program.

xfire is far superior to steam and gamespy.  check it out.  Steam is kinda like xfire lite where they also try to sell you games.  Gamespy isn't really even comparable...

www.xfire.com if you want to actually see what it is.  I find it a great tool to keep in touch with friends and we use it instead of setting up a vent server.  It is easier and works better.  And it has a number of other nice features that are good for gamers.

Ill pass ive used it before way back in the day for a mod that had a small community.

It doesnt show as many servers, plus gamespy's refresh was always better. But since most fps come with build in browsers. And when im in a guild they usualy have there own servers, and they post matches on there website.

And for mmogs ive never had a guild ask me to load that just vent. Which i still refused, I know theres some benifits but having a bunch of people screaming isnt going to make me play better.

Originally posted by Myrdek

Originally posted by Gregtheexcon 

No where in the whole x-fire site does it give all players played time (non x-fire users). When people are posting how x-fire numbers are dropping I cry a little inside. What people need to realise is less then 10 pct of the population uses x-fire. And a smaller population comes to this forum. 

And less than 1% of people answer political and commercial polls, yet they are used by almost every company in the world. Where did you learn that you need to have everyone use something for it to be valuable?

People need to wake up when using x-fire or this forum as a judge for the games actual upkeep. 

Of course the numbers will drop after the first month of initial release. It happens in every game. This game was not made for everyone. People had to high of expectations, and that caused em to quit. 

And xfire is showing that drop. Your backtracking on your opinion here

If you wanna post negative numbers on this game, dig up real info. Not X-Fire, not the population status when you log on and see the servers (By my count lots are at least med) 

We don't have the data that Mythic does so how are we supposed to do that exactly? Do you have a magic 8 ball I can borrow? Servers don't list the amount of people and their caps are constantly changed. The best method would be to have a bot on every server that finds out the amount of people online at a certain time each day, and even then it wouldn't include those that hide themselves. 

 

Actually, your political poll analogy is faulty. The companies that do those polls, primarily Gallup and Zogby's, have professionally trained pollsters who know how to do polls. If you went to them with X-fire data, they would laugh. The #1 problem with X-fire, as I have tried to point out for months now, is that while it is a random sample, the randomness of said sample cannot be proven. We have no way to show if the sample is random. There could be one bias after another in the X-fire data and since we cannot prove it, we cannot use it.

Sure we can use it to show trends. For example, I could say "Last week WAR lost 10% of its hours played" or something like that. The problem is you cannot say they left the game, hate the game or the game sucks.  YOU ARE DRAWING CONCLUSIONS UTILIZING FAULTY DATA. The conclusions people are drawing is the problem. Maybe that week the game was down a lot, maybe there were a lot of good football games on, maybe there were massive Internet outages, maybe other games saw major patches, maybe new single player games launched or new X-box games.

If you want to make the data more reliable, then you need to go into X-fire and get a list of everyone who played at least X number of hours last week. The go through and individually look at those same people and see what they did instead. Did the majority of them play a new game or go back to an old game? Did they even login to a game? Then you can make some generalizations but that is it.
 

Also, you cannot use that fact that 30 days is up to prove that X-fire proves something. That is inductive logic and its faulty. Your answer is before you. That  is like saying "X-fire proves something because when WotLK comes out WOW will get an increase in numbers; so therefore, X-fire is the best predictor out there". You cannot do that because your conclusion proves your data and true statiticians will tell you that your data must be the proof.