So I was looking at the mmochart at www.mmogchart.com/Chart11.html that has the subscriber distribution up to April 2008.  With the way that the chart is going I would make a easy guess that there are roughly over ~3 million Active WoW accounts in the US online.  Right now the US is estimated to have around 303 million people living in it.  Around 3 million for the "most popular" mmorpg would seem realistic but add to even more of the realism that 1/3rd (maybe more, this is lowest guess) of all the people that play WoW have a 2nd account or even a 3rd account.  So that knocks the 3~ to about 2~ if you are counting per person and not just account, in my eyes per person is the figure that matters when it comes to population.  That's not even counting all of the bots that are floating around holding onto massive amounts of gold.  In June 2006 Blizzard did a mass ban of around 30,000 bot/goldfarmer accounts, in 2006 you didnt see as many bots sitting there shouting advertisements for gold selling sites so I would guess that it would jack the number of accounts to 100,000 if you would count all of the high jacked accounts they use to do this.

Final Analysis (for the hell of it)

1. Advertised Active Subscribers - 11 million
2. Projected Active US Subscribers - ~3 million
3. GrandoReaper's Educated Guess of current Active US players - ~1.7 million

~1.7 million players is 15% of the Advertised Active Subscribers

~1.7 million players is 0.5% of estimated US Population

WoW Census www.warcraftrealms.com/census.php has a total of 1.4 million US Server Level 80 Character's (Horde/Alliance Combined)

I dont know about you but I know a lot of people that have 3 characters that are level 80 so you do the math.

Basically what I am getting around to is this isnt really that huge of a number when you look at US MMORPG's.

In 2007 EQ1 with 23 US server's had 145,000 characters that were atleast level 70 www.eqjunkies.com/eqstats/index.htm (at the time max cap was 75, max cap population is 42,000) with a total of 187,000 high level people across all servers.  The ratio of two boxing people in EQ1 at max level compared to WoW isnt nearly as much.

Right now WoW has atleast 150 US server's (I would have counted exact number but had 6 year old screaming in background).  Across all of those servers right now there is 755,000 max level characters.

EQ 23 US servers - 187,000 high level's

WoW ~150 US servers - 755,000 max level's

If WoW only had 23 US server's it would have - 115,000 max level's estimated

Question is : Would EQ1 be considered more populated if it had more player's per server than WoW?  I mean would you want a high populated active raiding server or a game that has a lot of servers with moderate amount of people raiding?

No, and most people don't box in WoW, multiple family members play in households now. EQ1 was ONLY remotely successful due to it being the ONLY game to play. Now WoW is the only game to play, that is if you want to see other players. EQ1 had a zillion faults, I played it. Screwing up the Warrior class as badly as EQ1 did was the #1 mistake. Every single warrior I know which is hundreds, quit for WoW due to the screwing we got in EQ1. I am sick of SOE games wqith their anti-melee bias.

I  TOLD THE TRUTH ABOUT HOW BROKEN WARRIORS WERE AND THEY DARED SANCTION ME?! THE DEVS ARE USELESS AND SHOULD HAVE HIRED OUTSIDE HELP IF THEY CAN'T FIX MELEE, LOOK AT THE  WARRIOR STAND-DOWN! ONLY EQ1 HAD A REVOLT LIKE THAT!

Originally posted by Heltern

No, and most people don't box in WoW, multiple family members play in households now. EQ1 was ONLY remotely successful due to it being the ONLY game to play. Now WoW is the only game to play, that is if you want to see other players. EQ1 had a zillion faults, I played it. Screwing up the Warrior class as badly as EQ1 did was the #1 mistake. Every single warrior I know which is hundreds, quit for WoW due to the screwing we got in EQ1. I am sick of SOE games wqith their anti-melee bias.

I  TOLD THE TRUTH ABOUT HOW BROKEN WARRIORS WERE AND THEY DARED SANCTION ME?! THE DEVS ARE USELESS AND SHOULD HAVE HIRED OUTSIDE HELP IF THEY CAN'T FIX MELEE, LOOK AT THE  WARRIOR STAND-DOWN! ONLY EQ1 HAD A REVOLT LIKE THAT!

Whats so broke about warrior's now?  They got a buttload of awesome disciplines that make them perfect for tanking.  That was pretty much their role to begin with.

Most people only have one account.

OP your using www.warcraftrealms.com/ as the basis of your research so you fail from the get go.  Please understand how the character counts are calculated and you will see just how way off it can be.

I would rather use the fact that WoW and its expansions have not left the top 10 sales charts... hell its rare its not in the top 3 every month for the last 4 years. latest

Official press releases give a break down of subscribers and blizzard explains in easy terms how they define a subscriber.

And shareholder meetings, last 1 held this month and WoW still has 11.5million subs worldwide

And here is blizzard definition of a subscriber:

World of Warcraft subscribers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or have an active prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the game and are within their free month of access. Internet Game Room players who have accessed the game over the last thirty days are also counted as subscribers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired prepaid cards. Subscribers in licensees’ territories are defined along the same rules.

Mutliboxers? does it matter? they choose to pay 2 or more subs each month so they are rightly counted twice.

This topic has been done to death.. WoW likey has 11.5million subs worldwide at the moment, there is no current official US or EU sub numbers.. the only FACT we have to go on is that Wotlk sold 2.8million copies on day 1 of release (EU&US only) and wotlk has been in a top 3 sale spot each month since (thats 7 months).. it was #1 last month.

you do realize the the 11 million includes NA EU Korea China and what ever other country wow is available in...not just NA

also china makes up the bulk of the sub base wiht 6 million.

All I'm going to say is Internet Cafe accounts. Just read up on how it works and you will realize that the 11 mill number is very vague at best. You also have to factor in now that Aion is taking a ton of subs away from WOW in China and Korea.

because the US is the only country with computers and the internet?  all points stem from the idea that WOW is only played in the US.

11mil? I wouldn't doubt that number is being inflated somewhat, but odds are its still somewhere near that amount.

1,7 million players in NA, and your point is?

1,7 million players in NA is HUGE, HUGE I tell you !

But seriously, WoW has probably the least multiboxers of all mmorpg's. That is one of the reasons I played the game for so long. I think from the 3 million subs, there are at least 2 - 2,5 million players.

There is just little reason to multibox in WoW.

It may be possible that there are some servers less populated, I havent seen them tho, last time I played, the servers I played on were packed.

About having more people on a server, yah I like that, but gameplay in itself is even more important.

Anyway, I don't play WoW anymore, I play WAR and EvE Online currently.

Originally posted by Majinash

because the US is the only country with computers and the internet?  all points stem from the idea that WOW is only played in the US.

 

11mil? I wouldn't doubt that number is being inflated somewhat, but odds are its still somewhere near that amount.

It is not inflated, they have clear guidelines for their subs, it is 11,5 million.

thats how many active users there really are buddy it isn't inflated and all the statistics are shown in full detail by blizzard. They have no reason to hide how many people play their game. No need to hate and bring about a false claim against a well renown company.

US numbers are probably near 3 million

Blizzard broke down the localizations a year ago

eu.blizzard.com/en/press/080122.html

more than 2 million subscribers in Europe, more than 2.5 million in North America, and approximately 5.5 million in Asia

more recently, Blizzard made this claim

ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/44698/Blizzard-On-Sales-StarCraft-II-Beta-Quality-New-MMO

For the year, the game grew by over 1.8 million subscribers,

which is approximately 18% beyond where it was in December of 2007.

This growth was proportional across all regions, keeping us at a 55-45 split between east and west.

blizzard use those sunscription numbers as a marketing tool. the only defense wow players have when defending wow is " 11 million people cant be wrong".  now that aion china is crushing wow we will finally see the steady decline of subscription numbers and finally move the genre forward. Aion is a much better, more fun and even more polished game than wow is, blizzard cant just throw out another generic expansion and hope to keep subscribers. i see wow as no longer number one mmo by the time aion and star wars the old republic are released.

Originally posted by SaintViktor

All I'm going to say is Internet Cafe accounts. Just read up on how it works and you will realize that the 11 mill number is very vague at best. You also have to factor in now that Aion is taking a ton of subs away from WOW in China and Korea.

You know that if it where true that WoW has been bleeding customers to Aion does it not bring up the question, from what MMO did the 11.5 million subs come then?

Wow broke new ground and had a ready made market from it's RTS games, yes they took some customers from the popular MMO's at the time, but alot of those customers where brand new to the MMO genre, the same is probably going to be true for Aion, yese WoW will lose some players to it but it's misguided of anyone to think it's suddenly going to lose millions to a new MMO.

I'm no WoW fan and have been out of the game for quite some time now, but even I'm not niave enough to believe it's going to suddenly find itself millions of subs down becuase of more competition.

Competition is good and when you get a good game that can grab the attention of alot of subs then it's even better news for WoW players, becuase it means the devs at Blizzard should start working even harder to keep their subs happy.

Originally posted by Heltern

. I am sick of SOE games wqith their anti-melee bias.

 

Yeah EQ2 has such an anti-melee bias, its extreme. Uh no wait,  it doesn't. If anything it has  pro-melee bias.

Originally posted by GrandoReaper

So I was looking at the mmochart at www.mmogchart.com/Chart11.html that has the subscriber distribution up to April 2008.  With the way that the chart is going I would make a easy guess that there are roughly over ~3 million Active WoW accounts in the US online.  Right now the US is estimated to have around 303 million people living in it.  Around 3 million for the "most popular" mmorpg would seem realistic but add to even more of the realism that 1/3rd (maybe more, this is lowest guess) of all the people that play WoW have a 2nd account or even a 3rd account.  So that knocks the 3~ to about 2~ if you are counting per person and not just account, in my eyes per person is the figure that matters when it comes to population.  That's not even counting all of the bots that are floating around holding onto massive amounts of gold.  In June 2006 Blizzard did a mass ban of around 30,000 bot/goldfarmer accounts, in 2006 you didnt see as many bots sitting there shouting advertisements for gold selling sites so I would guess that it would jack the number of accounts to 100,000 if you would count all of the high jacked accounts they use to do this.

Final Analysis (for the hell of it)

1. Advertised Active Subscribers - 11 million
2. Projected Active US Subscribers - ~3 million
3. GrandoReaper's Educated Guess of current Active US players - ~1.7 million

~1.7 million players is 15% of the Advertised Active Subscribers

~1.7 million players is 0.5% of estimated US Population

WoW Census www.warcraftrealms.com/census.php has a total of 1.4 million US Server Level 80 Character's (Horde/Alliance Combined)

I dont know about you but I know a lot of people that have 3 characters that are level 80 so you do the math.

Basically what I am getting around to is this isnt really that huge of a number when you look at US MMORPG's.

In 2007 EQ1 with 23 US server's had 145,000 characters that were atleast level 70 www.eqjunkies.com/eqstats/index.htm (at the time max cap was 75, max cap population is 42,000) with a total of 187,000 high level people across all servers.  The ratio of two boxing people in EQ1 at max level compared to WoW isnt nearly as much.

Right now WoW has atleast 150 US server's (I would have counted exact number but had 6 year old screaming in background).  Across all of those servers right now there is 755,000 max level characters.

EQ 23 US servers - 187,000 high level's

WoW ~150 US servers - 755,000 max level's

If WoW only had 23 US server's it would have - 115,000 max level's estimated

Question is : Would EQ1 be considered more populated if it had more player's per server than WoW?  I mean would you want a high populated active raiding server or a game that has a lot of servers with moderate amount of people raiding?

I am sorry but the Us is not the center of the world and people from other parts do count also. EQ1 had a lot higher percentage of americans and so does WAR but that doesn't really make them more or less succesful because of that.

Does it really matter to you if you play with a brit, yank or canadian?

Some people do have 2 or even 3 accounts but I doubt that one out of 3 pays 2 subs to the same game.

I really don't see the point with the post, do you say that only americans count or what?

answer this:

Was EQ1 in the top10 best selling pc charts ALL the time since release?

Answer: NO!

Is WoW?

Answer: YES!

You do the math.

I am staggered that the op even posted this as none of the original post makes any sense what so ever?

There are no facts, the understanding that there are actually people that play WoW outside of the US is missing, and even basic mathematics seems to have been thrown out of the window.

In answer to the two major 'points' (for want of a better word);

1 - Blizzard is very clear about it's published subs numbers and always have been, please take some time to read up on how they are calculated and what the breakdowns are.

2 - A game is more populated when it is more populated, that is pretty damned simple. Server populations work differently for every game, some games may have higher server density compared to wow, but as for the overall population, well that speaks for itself.

I was a 3 account multi-boxer in Daoc.

The moment I realized after a few weeks of play that I hadn't even *thought* of getting a second account was a major sigh of relief for me, it felt great. (although admittedly later it came up a few times, mostly when I wanted to check the AH but not stop what I was doing, never did buy a second though.)

um, its safe to say that only 1 out of 5000 is multiboxer in wow, i met maybe 1 or 2 multiboxers  in wow, in over what it was now.. 4 years? , wasnt playing in just 1 realm, and most  multiboxers are shamans doing bgs 24/7, and i do plenty of them.. and no.. there are very few of them

saying that 1/3 of wow subs are multiboxers are nonsense..

usa isnt center of the world.. its hardly 1/10 of the world pop/size.. at best so get real

there is no said internet cafe accounts.. do you imagine every new guy , creates new account lvls to lvl 10 in few hours.. and next day he start over again..

thats not how it works in china.. , clueless

if you actually would play wow, you would see that those numbers are realistic.. with pop in games, and numbers of realms, it cant be compared to any other game.. wow servers probably hold most ppl in mmorpgs, 90% of them are full/closed  and there are hundreds of them..

this wow subs bashing post, is probably worst ever made.. and there been plenty of them

i dont see aion as long term mmo.. how can mmo with what.. 5 zones .. be long term game..

its still very same as wow, while not a bad thing, most of its success in china its, cuz games are free there. you just need to pay for play time, and wow havent released wotlk there so far..

so switching from wow to aion is plain simple, it wont just work anything like that in eu/na , due the fact that we need to pay for game itself, we have wotlk, and by the time aion is getting released, we will be 3 months away from next wow expansion, considering  blizz will stay true this time to their promised expansions once a year..