Profile: Jackdog
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• • xfire shows AoC numbers decreasing :(

  • Originally posted by LondonMagus
    

     

    Great post!

    Aside from that in my opinion 'Casual Gamers' are likely to be more rather than less tolerant than the 'Xfire or Hardcore Community' & that I wouldn't read too much into biased posts about 'Low Population' made by people who hate the game, I think I pretty much agree with the rest!

    Just out of curiosity why do you feel as if a casual gamer would be more liley to use XFire.

    I think it would be just the opposite because of a lot of reasons but the easiet to point out is look at Xfire Eve players vs Xfire LoTRO players. Most would agree that LoTRO has at least equal and in most peoples estimates more active subs than EvE yet EvE beats LoTRO on Xfire hours by 30%. LoTRO is by far the more casual of the 2 games.

    Also few really casual players really give a crap on how many hours they play or for that matter have enough machine or bandwidth to take the performance hit that XFire use causes. Not to mention that a lot of casuals have never heard of Xfire.

    As far as the forums go. The official ones I do give a bit more credit to since only active subscribers can post and couple that with FC's over the top moderation practices and you seem to have a pretty dissatisfied community. Even the fanbois posts of "my server has plenty of people" have dropped off and a lot of entire guilds are leaving or having membership declines judging  by their  guild forums and you seem to have a mass migration away from the game in general.

    My guess is that just to keep the players left, FC should be starting to do server merges soon. Playing on low pop servers makes the game look worse than it is and less fun also.

  • Posted: 7/25/08 5:57 AM
    Age of Conan
• • xfire shows AoC numbers decreasing :(

  • Originally posted by beaverz
    

    X fire numbers also show that using them to try to make any sense doesnt make any sense. did that make sense?

    and what is your reasoning by that? They show trends just as political polls or Neilson ratings show trends. I would never try and project actual population figures from them but they do show which direction the population is moving and at what rate.

  • Posted: 7/25/08 5:07 AM
    Age of Conan
• • xfire shows AoC numbers decreasing :(

  • Originally posted by LondonMagus
    

    Originally posted by Jackdog
    

    looks like it is consistently below 20K hours now. 19683 on the 23rd for a 2500 hour loss from the 23rd. Wonder how long it will be before it will be below 10K? Only about a 9% drop from last week though. Guess only the hard core fanbois left playing now, or more fanbois making Xfire accounts because of this thread. take your pick.

    
     

    So when Xfire number for AoC look bad it's because they are supposed to accurately reflect player behaviour, but when they look slightly better it's because either only 'Hard core Fanbois' are left, or AoC players are deliberately creating accounts because of this lame thread.

    With that sort of conspiracy theory logic you could believe in anything. Also, isn't 'Hardcore Fanbois' an oxymoron? I thought the 'Hatebois' believed that all AoC 'Fanbois' were incapable of being 'Hardcore'.

    Look up the word trend, then look up the word analyze. Now put them together in a sentence. When the percentages in a trend start to change anyone who analyzes it looks for the cause. There are possible explanations I can come up with.

    1) more AoC users are using XFire

    2) The people left really like AoC

    3) FC's  management of the game has improved and with each patch the game is getting better

    I have my doubt's about number 3 because with every patch the number of this game (patch) sucks posts on the official board and all the unofficial boards grows. Lots of posts on lack of population also.

     In any game once it reaches a certain point the population tends to level off to where just hard core fans are the majority playing. Box sales have dropped due to word of mouth off now so the input of new players has slacked off. Therefore combining that with a bit of common sense I feel it is safe to say that number 2 is the most reasonable reason . I have always felt that the XFire users were a bit more hard core PvP oriented gamers and therefore would be more likley to hang in there whereas more casual gamers would suffer through a couple of bad patches and bail out and return to their previous game. Just my opinion here but I think the XFire figures have always been on the positive side in comparison to overall population decreases.

    Now the question is how many of the hard core fans bought three month game cards or six month subs on release of the game and therefore feel obligated to play because of money invested and can Funcom keep them happy enough to play beyond that? Box sales alone won't mean crap if they cannot get the average purchaser to play beyond the initial 30 days.

    All in all this has been a fun release to watch. Much better than Vanguard or D&L, because it is still a bit unpredictable and there is a small small chance that FC will pull it's head from it's nether regions and  get it's act together.

     

  • Posted: 7/25/08 4:58 AM
    Age of Conan
• • xfire shows AoC numbers decreasing :(

  • looks like it is consistently below 20K hours now. 19683 on the 23rd for a 2500 hour loss from the 23rd. Wonder how long it will be before it will be below 10K? Only about a 9% drop from last week though. Guess only the hard core fanbois left playing now, or more fanbois making Xfire accounts because of this thread. take your pick.

  • Posted: 7/24/08 4:42 PM
    Age of Conan
• • How many are leaving for WAR?

  • I don't think the lore matters one way or the other either. I t is the game play that is what will count. Will the game be fun and contain things to do enough tomaintain interest. I enjoyed DAoC for 2+ years but honestly RvR raids get old after the first dozen or so times and at least 3/4 of my time was spent in PvE leveling alts up. Look at AoC right now, it has plenty of PvP yet it's subscription numbers are dropping fast. And just having pvP never prevented Shadowbane from being a total turkey now did it? Lineage II has all the PvP you could want, yet it's western players are pretty low.

    Simply looking at one aspect of a game is like looking at a girls ankles to determine if she is hot or not. 

  • Posted: 7/24/08 3:50 AM
    Lord of the Rings Online