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2.1 Million Trion accounts created
The following article has been written and submitted to Rift Junkies by Official Forum user Imi, all work and material was done by him in full. If you wish to contact him please send him a PM on the Official Forums.
Trion has remained conspicuously silent about current subscription numbers for Rift, leaving many fans wondering whether the game is thriving or floundering. Individual anecdotes are notoriously unreliable and often boil down to a player having to spent too much time in a queue. Therefore, the reasoning goes, the game is floundering.
However, there is actual population data to be teased out of the game and it universally shows that Trion’s playerbase is gaining steam and growing.
The most obvious example is the realization that Trion recently saw its 2,000,000th account created on May 23rd. Although not officially announced yet by the game company, it is relatively easy to confirm since a player’s account number is included as part of his forum ID. For example, my forum account is “http://forums.riftgame.com/member.php?593887-Imi”, which indicates that I am the 593,887th Trion account and that I joined the forums on 2-1-2011. Using this approach, one can easily find that, as of May 25th, there were at least 2,050,000 accounts.
Further analysis shows that 18,000 to 20,000 new accounts have been created each day over the past week. If this rate continues, we could realistically expect to see Trion’s 3,000,000th account sometime in late July or early August.
Obviously, many new accounts represent trial-only players or spammers who will never purchase a subscription. It is notable, however, that the rate of new accounts being created has doubled since early March (confirmed using the same technique) and seems to be increasing as word of mouth and good reviews about the game continue to spread.
But will these new players flooding into the game stay for the long-term or just drop shortly after their trial? For that, we will have to wait and see if the number of servers that have prime time queues continues to rise. Currently two of the 49 NA servers will spike to “Full”, while 9 others reach “High” during peak times. If these numbers increase, that’s a good sign of overall growth.
Trion, to their credit, is doing their best to keep players interested by remaining responsive to concerns and pumping out new features and endgame content at an alarming rate.
Now that Rift has legitimately weathered the initial lull as the rush of initial 30-day players passed, talk of server merges is slowly becoming a thing of the past. Rift has 99 servers and the player population is still growing rapidly, making comparisons to Age of Conan and Warhammer increasingly detached from reality. It seems more likely now that we will see more servers in Rift’s future rather than fewer.
Currently they now have http://forums.riftgame.com/member.php?2169905-kensiko123
2169905 accounts, wich shows it is indeed growing since this article.
Comments
Considering the amount of free weekends they had and the fact that they now have a free trial (not entirely sure about this one), I'm really not surprised. But thats just accounts. It says literally nothing other than people will try the game for free if they have the chance.
Not going to comment on the figures, guess we'll have to wait for the annual returns for those but......Good for them, the industry needs more success stories.
Eleanor Rigby.
That doesn't show anything whatsoever. It's free to create an account. It's free to play the trial. People can keep creating free accounts as much as they want, creating 1 trial account for every free email account they create on services like gmail or hotmail. I wouldn't be surprised if WoW has a trillion accounts 'created' by now because you can do the exact same thing with their 14-day trial. Until they release actual subscription numbers, information like this is useless and doesn't reflect anything except maybe the success of spreading the word of a free trial.
Only Trion knows and they will never tell us.
All facts I know about those accounts is, that two of them belong to me. One during beta and one trial account. And I never subscribed to Rift.
Not to mention all the gold-sellers around the world jump on free trials for every MMO like flies on [expletive].
Would have thought more wow guys would have tried it but i guess it's true, most wow people are not gamers looking for new stuff and therefore will stay at it til it shuts down
Pi*1337/100 = 42
I think it's more a case of WoW players not wanting to play a re-skinned WoW game.Eleanor Rigby.
It felt more like WoW meets WAR MMO to me; two games instead of just one that I don't want to play again lol
How many months have the game been released, 3 months? It took more than that for AoC and WAR to nosedive in subs and the server merges to start.
The fact is that Rift has lost 50% of players according to Xfire, since Launch and it has just stabilized with the release of the trial. So I would say it is way too soon to say that this game wont follow the same fate as WAR and AoC. After 3 months more we will have more info to tell.
My gaming blog
Technically you can create an account and not use it to play the game...
I personally don't play this game but it is always good to see an MMO do well, esp releasing it under these tough economic times.
Gdemami -
Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
Why wouldnt you? If its similiar to wow and you liked wow you will likely enjoy it too and since you should be trough cataclysm content there is not much to stay in wow. So why not play a similiar game that will provide new content for you?
Pi*1337/100 = 42
I think it's more a case of WoW players not wanting to play a re-skinned WoW game.It felt more like WoW meets WAR MMO to me; two games instead of just one that I don't want to play again lol
I hoped that it would feel like WAR, but unfortunately I didn't get that vibe.
I think it's more a case of WoW players not wanting to play a re-skinned WoW game.Why wouldnt you? If its similiar to wow and you liked wow you will likely enjoy it too and since you should be trough cataclysm content there is not much to stay in wow. So why not play a similiar game that will provide new content for you?
While it's true that you can quickly burn through the Cataclysm content (I haven't), I still don't want to replace WoW with a re-skinned WoW. What I want is something new, a breath of fresh air.Eleanor Rigby.
Well done Trion on a polished and stable game.
What BS. Looking at the server status now, only 1 server is high, the rest are split 50:50 between low and medium... and we all know 'medium' tags means squat.
Compare this to release, where the majority of the servers were on high or full (yes, same time - aussie prime), and well, there's your answer. Well, this combined with the fact that there's now a 1hr+ wait for WF's on my server (was >1 minute during the 1st month), and forming a PUG raid now takes hours (was >30 mins), and towns feel deserted.
And if you have a look on the official forums you will see more threads now than ever asking for server merges.
With all the marketing, heavily reduced price, gold spammers, trials etc etc... you would expect a dramatic increase in 'accounts', but people are kidding themselves if they think 'the population is growing rapidly'.
Sounds like paid advertising to me.
Because we all know people who post on official forums are representative of the player base *rolls eyes*
And we all know that a lot of accounts mean a successful game. *rolls eyes*
Quote where i said that please...
"Because we all know people who post on official forums are representative of the player base *rolls eyes*"
You said it a couple of posts above... unless you have since edited it
Wrong on both counts. Keep trying though, im sure you'll succeed one day.
You implied that either forum posters aren't asking for server merges, or that just because a few are asking for them doesn't mean they are actually needed. I simply said that 2 million accounts doesn't make those forum posters wrong.
Ah, so where else are people meant to ask for server merges?
The claim was "talk of server merges is slowly becoming a thing of the past" , yet, the official forums are full of people pleading for merges - now more than ever.
So where exactly did he go to measure this so called 'absence of server merge talk'. The WOW forums?
Lmao, funny, yet sad.
I often wonder how they can see through all that sand.
I don't believe that is the post I quoted. If you don't realize which one of your posts I quoted and responded too then simply read your posts that happen to be in this quote. Its very simple.