Originally posted by LondonMagus

Try actually reading what people write before hurling insults at them, I didn't say that Nielsen wasn't acceptable, rather that it is obviously managed with far more respect for statistical principles than all the hysteria about Xfire on these forums.

The reason I posted earlier on this thread that there was already a better one that argued the points in much more detail was that both myself & others have already written huge walls of text explaining all the arguments there. 

Exactly how much patience are we supposed to have?

Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize other threads were required reading to comment on a response to one of my posts. 

Originally posted by madstoog

 Whats all this xfire shit on this website?

Never used xfire, never will, don't give shit about it but so many people seem to ass rape it as using it as some kind of proof for low population on games? 

 

 

Only Azrile (WoW fanboi = Any other game hateboi) and a few others who think WoW needs even more people give a sht about Xfire.

WAR is in the top 10 games on xfire and is the second most played MMO there -- umm, thats bad ? 

Originally posted by Tyvolus1

WAR is in the top 10 games on xfire and is the second most played MMO there -- umm, thats bad ? 

No that isn't bad.  What is bad is that it is going down each week.  Most new games with any hype shoot up to a high lvl at launch then fall down to some number as players stay or leave depending on how well liked the game is.   The fear with War is that it will fall to nothing or to the point where the game is a failure.  However currently it is doing very well and if it stayed where it is it would be a hit :)

 I find this amusing, these debates on x-fire users and blah blah blah, but im not here to debate anything other then a simple project I tried after seeing many off these threads. 

Heres what I did

I created charaters on half the servers (Made an order then a destro) and I asked about X-Fire until I got the firt 100 responses. (took 2 days but I got em)

The question I asked was how many people used X-Fire at the start but have turned it off. 

The first question I asked them was if they turned it off within the first few days that number was 

11-100

The amount that said they used it within the first month and urned it off were

27-100

Now granted, these numbers are random but so is X-Fire. But out of 100 X-Fire users that still play. 38 turn off X-Fire to play. Does not take a genious to figurre it out but thats 38 pct. So in turn if this figure is relevant, because its a random figure like X-Fire or Neilson,.

So what as the total number quit? Just add 38 pct of the X-Fires now, and you'll get the real people that have X-Fire. Still a drop. But its not as extreme as the X-Fire gods claim, well, the people relying on X-Fire

Just a simple test. A random 100 people. According to X-Fire fans, this should be just as relevant

Originally posted by Man1ac

lol what's up with you guys? Xfire is a good program to chat and know what games our mates are playing. The xfire figures are obviously unreliable as not every gamer uses xfire, using xfires figures to prove a population on a particular game is low is pretty daft but you can't turn around and call xfire crap.

Oh crap not another xfire post.

Not to call you out on anything Man1ac, just going to use your post because of your xfire sig.

That is 99.9% the reason why gamers use xfire right there. The chat isn't particularly great as Ventrilo and Teamspeak do it better.

People use it so they can show off that they logged 8231758912370 hours on some random ass MMO.

I used xfire back in 1999 or so, but that was only for about 3 months to show off some counterstrike hours.

To use it for a basis on how many people are playing a game, is ridiculous and I laugh every time I see it. If I wan't to chat I will use ventrilo like everyone else. I don't really care to make myself look like a bigger nerd by sharing with the general public I logged 97 hours a week in random MMO#123.

Been playing MMOs for a long time and I don't use x-fire.  Neither do the other 60+ people in my guild.  We all use vent tho.  Never liked anything unecessary that consumed resources.

Originally posted by Gregtheexcon

 I find this amusing, these debates on x-fire users and blah blah blah, but im not here to debate anything other then a simple project I tried after seeing many off these threads. 

Heres what I did

I created charaters on half the servers (Made an order then a destro) and I asked about X-Fire until I got the firt 100 responses. (took 2 days but I got em)

The question I asked was how many people used X-Fire at the start but have turned it off. 

The first question I asked them was if they turned it off within the first few days that number was 

11-100

The amount that said they used it within the first month and urned it off were

27-100

Now granted, these numbers are random but so is X-Fire. But out of 100 X-Fire users that still play. 38 turn off X-Fire to play. Does not take a genious to figurre it out but thats 38 pct. So in turn if this figure is relevant, because its a random figure like X-Fire or Neilson,.

So what as the total number quit? Just add 38 pct of the X-Fires now, and you'll get the real people that have X-Fire. Still a drop. But its not as extreme as the X-Fire gods claim, well, the people relying on X-Fire

Just a simple test. A random 100 people. According to X-Fire fans, this should be just as relevant

Nice bit of research, thanks for taking the time to do it :) This rather proves that the rather "simplist" view that just because the Xfire number have dropped, the player base must have dropped by the same amount.

Originally posted by Gregtheexcon

 I find this amusing, these debates on x-fire users and blah blah blah, but im not here to debate anything other then a simple project I tried after seeing many off these threads. 

Heres what I did

I created charaters on half the servers (Made an order then a destro) and I asked about X-Fire until I got the firt 100 responses. (took 2 days but I got em)

The question I asked was how many people used X-Fire at the start but have turned it off. 

The first question I asked them was if they turned it off within the first few days that number was 

11-100

The amount that said they used it within the first month and urned it off were

27-100

Now granted, these numbers are random but so is X-Fire. But out of 100 X-Fire users that still play. 38 turn off X-Fire to play. Does not take a genious to figurre it out but thats 38 pct. So in turn if this figure is relevant, because its a random figure like X-Fire or Neilson,.

So what as the total number quit? Just add 38 pct of the X-Fires now, and you'll get the real people that have X-Fire. Still a drop. But its not as extreme as the X-Fire gods claim, well, the people relying on X-Fire

Just a simple test. A random 100 people. According to X-Fire fans, this should be just as relevant

Sorry your results really don't make much sense unless you are only talking to people what have just tried xfire and don't really use it.  The second issue is you don't have anything here that talks to the significance of your data.  ie you broadcast and said anyone use xfire.  There are probably a lot of people who have used xfire.  Tried it didn't much care for it and got rid of it.  These people don't really account for a lot of time usage.  Also there is constant churn in xfire I'm sure just like anything else although xfire being around for awhile the churn is most likely pretty stable.  And lastly what you didn't ask was how many people installed xfire and started using it newly after starting war.

The underlining assumption with xfire stats is that xfire community is reasonable stable.  ie there is a core of people using it pretty consistently, there are a group of new people and a group of people quiting xfire and the two balance out.  So at any time the number of people quiting xfire and the number of people who start using xfire are the same.  If this wasn't the case then xfire would be declining or increasing. 

Clearly xfire growth or contraction will be layered on top of xfire stats for any game.  However, it is relatively easy to see that xfire is pretty stable as you look at other stable games and see if there is an inexplicable up or down trend.  Good case in point would be wow.  You don't see any trends like this which implies that xfire is consistent.  So when you see a large game like war going down the inescapable conclusion is that the number of people playing war with xfire are decreasing.  If we assume xfire usage is consistent, then it can only mean that the number of war players are decreasing.  Finally in so far as xfire users represent a reasonable profile of all war users then within some small ratio of error the entire population follows what the population of xfire users are doing.

So your data collection is flawed and therefore your conclusions are wrong.  You only looked at half of the date you should have collected to have a meaningful result.

X-Fire is just something for haters to cling onto to keep the nonsense flowing.

X-Fire is used not used exclusively by MMO players, and for good reason.

Originally posted by madstoog

 Whats all this xfire shit on this website?

Never used xfire, never will, don't give shit about it but so many people seem to ass rape it as using it as some kind of proof for low population on games? 

 

 

See most that use it have been around for a very long time and KNOW what it is. And so what you dont use it. Did you even READ your own post? You dont care about it and LMAO have no clue as to who or how many use it yet you ask about it?

The pretty little words give your age away.

Originally posted by Gregtheexcon

 I find this amusing, these debates on x-fire users and blah blah blah, but im not here to debate anything other then a simple project I tried after seeing many off these threads. 

Heres what I did

I created charaters on half the servers (Made an order then a destro) and I asked about X-Fire until I got the firt 100 responses. (took 2 days but I got em)

The question I asked was how many people used X-Fire at the start but have turned it off. 

The first question I asked them was if they turned it off within the first few days that number was 

11-100

The amount that said they used it within the first month and urned it off were

27-100

Now granted, these numbers are random but so is X-Fire. But out of 100 X-Fire users that still play. 38 turn off X-Fire to play. Does not take a genious to figurre it out but thats 38 pct. So in turn if this figure is relevant, because its a random figure like X-Fire or Neilson,.

So what as the total number quit? Just add 38 pct of the X-Fires now, and you'll get the real people that have X-Fire. Still a drop. But its not as extreme as the X-Fire gods claim, well, the people relying on X-Fire

Just a simple test. A random 100 people. According to X-Fire fans, this should be just as relevant

People made the same assumptions about players turning it off in Age of Conan.  Just like they said "I don't use it, no one in my guild uses it, xfire isn't used by just MMO players" and any hundred other excuses.  While I am not completely sold on xfire and I'm pretty confident it isn't anywhere as close to a survey that was run like a college project. 

Despite all the talk about how a proper sample set should be taken and many other reasonings that all seem very valid in theory, xfire -for whatever reason- seems to be trending pretty accurately.  Anyone can see how accurate it was with Conan and it seems to be showing the same thing with Warhammer.  I bet xfire shows a big drop mid november and then a rise sometime after patch 1.1.

Can you look at xfire and see just how many people are playing or have left?  I doubt it.  Can you look at xfire along with sales charts, server mergers, huge changes in the state of the game address and other factors to see that the game was losing people?  I think so.

Sure there are plenty of reasons why xfire might be wrong or not conducted in a perfectly scientific method, but that is just as much speculation as saying it is perfectly accurate. 

A game that sells 1.2 to 1.5 million copies did not have to many servers at launch.  It just doesn't make sense considering the numbers that Mythic is tossing around.  750k accounts, 800k players? 

I used to disregard xifre as a nonfactor and think it still is in many cases, but seeing its performance with PvP centric MMOs I have given it some second thought.  

Originally posted by Daffid011

Originally posted by Gregtheexcon

I find this amusing, these debates on x-fire users and blah blah blah, but im not here to debate anything other then a simple project I tried after seeing many off these threads. 

Heres what I did

I created charaters on half the servers (Made an order then a destro) and I asked about X-Fire until I got the firt 100 responses. (took 2 days but I got em)

The question I asked was how many people used X-Fire at the start but have turned it off. 

The first question I asked them was if they turned it off within the first few days that number was 

11-100

The amount that said they used it within the first month and urned it off were

27-100

Now granted, these numbers are random but so is X-Fire. But out of 100 X-Fire users that still play. 38 turn off X-Fire to play. Does not take a genious to figurre it out but thats 38 pct. So in turn if this figure is relevant, because its a random figure like X-Fire or Neilson,.

So what as the total number quit? Just add 38 pct of the X-Fires now, and you'll get the real people that have X-Fire. Still a drop. But its not as extreme as the X-Fire gods claim, well, the people relying on X-Fire

Just a simple test. A random 100 people. According to X-Fire fans, this should be just as relevant

People made the same assumptions about players turning it off in Age of Conan.  Just like they said "I don't use it, no one in my guild uses it, xfire isn't used by just MMO players" and any hundred other excuses.  While I am not completely sold on xfire and I'm pretty confident it isn't anywhere as close to a survey that was run like a college project. 

Despite all the talk about how a proper sample set should be taken and many other reasonings that all seem very valid in theory, xfire -for whatever reason- seems to be trending pretty accurately.  Anyone can see how accurate it was with Conan and it seems to be showing the same thing with Warhammer.  I bet xfire shows a big drop mid november and then a rise sometime after patch 1.1.

Can you look at xfire and see just how many people are playing or have left?  I doubt it.  Can you look at xfire along with sales charts, server mergers, huge changes in the state of the game address and other factors to see that the game was losing people?  I think so.

Sure there are plenty of reasons why xfire might be wrong or not conducted in a perfectly scientific method, but that is just as much speculation as saying it is perfectly accurate. 

A game that sells 1.2 to 1.5 million copies did not have to many servers at launch.  It just doesn't make sense considering the numbers that Mythic is tossing around.  750k accounts, 800k players? 

I used to disregard xifre as a nonfactor and think it still is in many cases, but seeing its performance with PvP centric MMOs I have given it some second thought.  

I had been trying avoid posting further on this 'Train Wreck' of a thread in the hope that it would just go away by itself, but it just seems to get worse.

Sure there are plenty of reasons why xfire might be wrong or not conducted in a perfectly scientific method, but that is just as much speculation as saying it is perfectly accurate. 

Originally posted by plaxidia

Basically these forums have become a flame fest.. Most of the up-and-coming games are.. It seems like a bunch of really bored negative people who just cant find anything constructive to do..

I have been a member of this site for years.. It used to be full of constructive threads and usefull info.. But now I tend to glance at the forums of the game I am currently playing.. Think "Meh" and ignore most topics.  DOnt get me wrong. If someone does not like a game and constructivly posts why its great.. But alot of thes threads arn't even worth my time..  Its sad.

QFT.

Originally posted by ethion

Originally posted by Gregtheexcon

 I find this amusing, these debates on x-fire users and blah blah blah, but im not here to debate anything other then a simple project I tried after seeing many off these threads. 

Heres what I did

I created charaters on half the servers (Made an order then a destro) and I asked about X-Fire until I got the firt 100 responses. (took 2 days but I got em)

The question I asked was how many people used X-Fire at the start but have turned it off. 

The first question I asked them was if they turned it off within the first few days that number was 

11-100

The amount that said they used it within the first month and urned it off were

27-100

Now granted, these numbers are random but so is X-Fire. But out of 100 X-Fire users that still play. 38 turn off X-Fire to play. Does not take a genious to figurre it out but thats 38 pct. So in turn if this figure is relevant, because its a random figure like X-Fire or Neilson,.

So what as the total number quit? Just add 38 pct of the X-Fires now, and you'll get the real people that have X-Fire. Still a drop. But its not as extreme as the X-Fire gods claim, well, the people relying on X-Fire

Just a simple test. A random 100 people. According to X-Fire fans, this should be just as relevant

 

Sorry your results really don't make much sense unless you are only talking to people what have just tried xfire and don't really use it.  The second issue is you don't have anything here that talks to the significance of your data.  ie you broadcast and said anyone use xfire.  There are probably a lot of people who have used xfire.  Tried it didn't much care for it and got rid of it.  These people don't really account for a lot of time usage.  Also there is constant churn in xfire I'm sure just like anything else although xfire being around for awhile the churn is most likely pretty stable.  And lastly what you didn't ask was how many people installed xfire and started using it newly after starting war.

The underlining assumption with xfire stats is that xfire community is reasonable stable.  ie there is a core of people using it pretty consistently, there are a group of new people and a group of people quiting xfire and the two balance out.  So at any time the number of people quiting xfire and the number of people who start using xfire are the same.  If this wasn't the case then xfire would be declining or increasing. 

Clearly xfire growth or contraction will be layered on top of xfire stats for any game.  However, it is relatively easy to see that xfire is pretty stable as you look at other stable games and see if there is an inexplicable up or down trend.  Good case in point would be wow.  You don't see any trends like this which implies that xfire is consistent.  So when you see a large game like war going down the inescapable conclusion is that the number of people playing war with xfire are decreasing.  If we assume xfire usage is consistent, then it can only mean that the number of war players are decreasing.  Finally in so far as xfire users represent a reasonable profile of all war users then within some small ratio of error the entire population follows what the population of xfire users are doing.

So your data collection is flawed and therefore your conclusions are wrong.  You only looked at half of the date you should have collected to have a meaningful result.

Look, did I say this was proffesional? No.

What I did was just went through region chat in tier 1 and 2, and gathered info from the first 100 people that said they are X-Fire users.

Heres the thing, If these were official numbers it would seem almost no one quit who used X-Fire. What X-Fire people are saying here is a trend, a HUGE drop. What my research shows, is that when you take a small portion of a large base, and test at random, you get diffrent results. I could get on at another time and do this, and get diffrent results. Your judging soley on a player base that dosn not make up anything. There just a select few who are dedicated to there game tracker.

The point of my research is, going by a small player base, your X-Fire website, you are judging by a small mass how popular this game is, that my little base of research shows that not everyone of those X-Fire users actually quit, rather turn off there 3rd party programs. Which in turns makes up for a lack of players and time. Now according to the poll I took 38 pct people just don't use it. Even if that number is cut in half, 19 pct is left. 19 pct of 100 is 19 people, 19 pct of 1,000 is 190, 19 pct of 6160 or w/e is close to 1200 players. Thats people who used X-Fire and according to you guys quit.

I just checked the site, and it says 22,500 hours right now. If you take that 1200 players who turn it off and play fo 1 hour, 1 hour each thats another 1200 hours. And we all know 1 hour in an mmo by someone who regulary uses X-Fire is low.

So basically what I am saying, you can't judge nothing on a small basis. You guys use X-Fire as a basis, but according to my original findings, 38 pct said they just have it off. Which means almost half the people that quit, didn't really. So...............you don't like it cause it was just a random 100 people. Someone said Neilsons. Samething. Its a small population judging the usage. We haven't hit primetime yet on many servers yet either.

HERE"s the other fact, we all know WAR is not as time consuming as other mmo's. Cause it literally is a casual gamers dream. So not as many people feel the need to sit around for hours on end. Lets not forget auto-log. Whats WOW's autolog timer......10 hours. WAR is like 20 mins. So yeah, afkers arn't filling up the realm.

No matter what you WAR doomsayers think, this game is gonna be fine, your beef with it.......nonsense. Grow-up and find something better to do really. All games take a fall after release, not every game is fopr everyone. WOW has 1 thing WAR does not, and thats a loyal player who spent hours of time in that game. WAR will get up there, don't like that reality, fine leave these boards. But don't come here cluttering it with this garbage in which obviously means nothing to people that play the game.

Originally posted by ethion

Originally posted by Tyvolus1

WAR is in the top 10 games on xfire and is the second most played MMO there -- umm, thats bad ? 

 

No that isn't bad.  What is bad is that it is going down each week.  Most new games with any hype shoot up to a high lvl at launch then fall down to some number as players stay or leave depending on how well liked the game is.   The fear with War is that it will fall to nothing or to the point where the game is a failure.  However currently it is doing very well and if it stayed where it is it would be a hit :)

Going down each week ?  Interesting, since last week it was at #13, then later in the week went to #11 and is now in the top 10 this week.

Originally posted by Tyvolus1

Going down each week ?  Interesting, since last week it was at #13, then later in the week went to #11 and is now in the top 10 this week.

The XFire population of War is indeed going down each week in the last 5 weeks.

The last week was one of the steepest ever. 20% in one week (monday to monday)

Mo 28 Oct 28361 against Mo 03 Nov 22587. (that's 20.4%).

It is the trend that shows you something is terribly wrong. Not some days where there was a server break or a presidential elect (like yesterday). It is a trend showing in a program that constantly shows how much it is being played on a daily basis. Xfire is just that: people playing games with Xfire installed on the background. And a sample of 6000 is incredibly high for the purpose it serves. It's NO social study of what these people will vote, eat, drink or have sex with. It shows which PC games in the WESTERN world are being played most and it shows the trend within the games.

Most sample studies are based on 600 to 900 "votes". Here we speak of something in the order of 6000 to 9000 and without a need to have a soical study like which age group plays War or how many males/females. So the sample IS already predefined (something some in this thread just don't get).

As long as this sample is THAT big and target group IS known (gaming - internet - PC - program installed).

XFire is a perfect tool to watch trends. certainly on a monthly basis - even on a weekly basis.

http://www.xfire.com/games/who/Warhammer_Online_Age_of_Reckoning/

Originally posted by strategy

Originally posted by Tyvolus1

Going down each week ?  Interesting, since last week it was at #13, then later in the week went to #11 and is now in the top 10 this week.

The XFire population of War is indeed going down each week in the last 5 weeks.

The last week was one of the steepest ever. 20% in one week (monday to monday)

Mo 28 Oct 28361 against Mo 03 Nov 22587. (that's 20.4%).

It is the trend that shows you something is terribly wrong. Not some days where there was a server break or a presidential elect (like yesterday). It is a trend showing in a program that constantly shows how much it is being played on a daily basis. Xfire is just that: people playing games with Xfire installed on the background. And a sample of 6000 is incredible high for the purpose it serves. It's NO social study of what these people will vote, eat, drink or have sex with. It shows which PC games in the WESTERN world are being played most and it shows the trend within the games.

http://www.xfire.com/games/who/Warhammer_Online_Age_of_Reckoning/

It's NO social study of what these people will vote, eat, drink or have sex with. It shows which PC games in the 'Xfire Microverse' are being played most and it shows the trend within the games.

A bit like looking at a 'Goldfish Bowl' really. 

Originally posted by LondonMagus

Originally posted by strategy

Originally posted by Tyvolus1

Going down each week ?  Interesting, since last week it was at #13, then later in the week went to #11 and is now in the top 10 this week.

The XFire population of War is indeed going down each week in the last 5 weeks.

The last week was one of the steepest ever. 20% in one week (monday to monday)

Mo 28 Oct 28361 against Mo 03 Nov 22587. (that's 20.4%).

It is the trend that shows you something is terribly wrong. Not some days where there was a server break or a presidential elect (like yesterday). It is a trend showing in a program that constantly shows how much it is being played on a daily basis. Xfire is just that: people playing games with Xfire installed on the background. And a sample of 6000 is incredible high for the purpose it serves. It's NO social study of what these people will vote, eat, drink or have sex with. It shows which PC games in the WESTERN world are being played most and it shows the trend within the games.

http://www.xfire.com/games/who/Warhammer_Online_Age_of_Reckoning/

It's NO social study of what these people will vote, eat, drink or have sex with. It shows which PC games in the 'Xfire Microverse' are being played most and it shows the trend within the games.

A bit like looking at a 'Goldfish Bowl' really. 

Well this Xfire microuniverse has a sample of 6000+ !!!!!! War players, which as you would have learned in your study group is 10(!) times the number needed for a sample.

And AS the group is already defined - PC games - internet - installed program. This "microuniverse" has 10 times (!) more people than needed for a study to watch trends based on constant sampling.

When is your THICK head finally going to grasp this fact ?????????

Originally posted by strategy

Originally posted by LondonMagus

Originally posted by strategy

Originally posted by Tyvolus1

Going down each week ?  Interesting, since last week it was at #13, then later in the week went to #11 and is now in the top 10 this week.

The XFire population of War is indeed going down each week in the last 5 weeks.

The last week was one of the steepest ever. 20% in one week (monday to monday)

Mo 28 Oct 28361 against Mo 03 Nov 22587. (that's 20.4%).

It is the trend that shows you something is terribly wrong. Not some days where there was a server break or a presidential elect (like yesterday). It is a trend showing in a program that constantly shows how much it is being played on a daily basis. Xfire is just that: people playing games with Xfire installed on the background. And a sample of 6000 is incredible high for the purpose it serves. It's NO social study of what these people will vote, eat, drink or have sex with. It shows which PC games in the WESTERN world are being played most and it shows the trend within the games.

http://www.xfire.com/games/who/Warhammer_Online_Age_of_Reckoning/

It's NO social study of what these people will vote, eat, drink or have sex with. It shows which PC games in the 'Xfire Microverse' are being played most and it shows the trend within the games.

A bit like looking at a 'Goldfish Bowl' really. 

Well this Xfire microuniverse has a sample of 6000+ !!!!!! War players, which as you would have learned in your study group is 10(!) times the number needed for a sample.

And AS the group is already defined - PC games - internet - installed program. This "microuniverse" has 10 times (!) more people than needed for a study top watch trends based on constant sampling.

When iq your THICK head finally going to grasp this fact ????????? 

I just love it when people with no real understanding of a subject try to use insults to win an argument.

I am not sure what 'study group' you are referring to, I purposefully avoid mentioning my professional background because I do not believe it is valid to try to use "I know better than you" to try to win an argument either, but since you ask I have worked in the field of lifestyle statistics & analysis for almost twenty years & understand fairly well about the hazards of survey bias.

It does not matter that you list 'PC Games - Internet - Installed Program' as it does not define a valid set of criteria for creating a balanced sample of the full MMO population, let alone those that play Warhammer.

It does not matter whether your sample is 6000 or 60000, if it is biased then the results are still unreliable.

It does not matter how many juvenile attempts you make at insulting me, these are the real facts!

It is quite amusing though but assuming you have one, don't give up your day job to become a comic. 

Edit.

P.S. I just realised after checking your profile, I've been working in statistics since before you were born!