Originally posted by Sukiyaki

Originally posted by Clocksimus

This thread should have waited until it drops back below WoW.  It will do so in a few days and most likely stay below WoW  thereafter.  That of course is just my educated guess on the future of GW2. Servers are "stabilizing" or without the hype spin, less people are smashing the servers with requests.  Xfire hours dropping at a steady rate.  The number of admittingly unhappy fans of the game has dramaticly increased since launch.  The game that can do no wrong as now pissed off more than a few people. 

GW2 will end up like D3. Though it will not sell 10 million copies that quickly, it will be popular and then people get bored and notice it's a hollow shell that is still nothing more than a gear grind  repeating the same content over and over.  Nothing is going to kill GW2, not even MoP.  GW2 has already killed itself.  It just doesn't know it yet.

Peak:

Average playtime of a GW2 xfire user: 7.5 hours a day

Now:

Average playtime of a GW2 xfire user: 3.9 hours a day

Average playtime of a WoW xfire user: 3.6 hours a day.

Average playtime of WoW, Aion, TERA, Rift, SWTOR, EvE, LotR xfire user: 4.0

The game has settled over the past month. Thats not a "spin" thats objective fact.

You must have meant "ignorant denial" not "educated guess".

The  peak was on launch where people skipped work/sleep/bathing/taking care of their chidlren to play the game for arguably an excessive amount of time. This was also at the end of summer, before school and was also on a weekend.  That is why GW2 never got back to its peak at lauch considering the timing.

It is now  a weekend and GW2 has not even seen an increase in players on a friday night -http://beta.xfire.com/games/gw2

LoL a game with a 'stable' playerbase has seen an increase as it always does every weekend-http://beta.xfire.com/games/lol

The rate of which players are leaving would have stopped and leveled out this coming week or next if not for the launch of MoP which will hurt GW2.  I also strongly believe that if any other AAA MMO was close to launch even less people would be interested in investing more time  on GW2.  GW2 is the current MMO because "there is nothing else to play". All of course just my opinion on the matter.

The trend is clearly downwards. You can always try to justify it with other game releases, but that does not change the fact. The same also applies to most previous releases. The beauty of GW2 is that you can really come and go as you please after the initial purchase. This makes it easier to jump in and out to go and have a look at the grass on the other side of the fence.

I never really put too much faith on the X-fire numbers nor does the overall number of players mean that much to me. If you are having fun, why would you care if others aren't? Naturally, if all your friends are quitting, it might affect your enjoyment of the game as well.