Can give a crap about what charts are out there, the day this happened, i pposted my opinion they changed it on the swtor.com forums. Feel free to search for the thread... I got laughed off the internet that day.... but its true...
can't say with 100% though they are doing it to fool anyone, as with any game release, numbers will drop
Lastly, burden of proof... I only see conjecture to them changing the rating.
Offer an alternative, this is statistics, not a court of law.
rofl, what?
Okay, my alternative is that things are as they appear to be until proof has been provided to show otherwise. ... ?
-Or-
If it is indeed altered then we need to stfu about these graphs because they are a lie. So either SWTOR had a small growth or the graphs are a lie and prove/disprove nothing. You can't have it both ways.
Also I fail to comprehend the notion that burden of proof only applies to a court of law. Although I am very familiar with people trying to dodge it, they're usually wrong and consumed by 'hating' but don't want to admit it.
Edit: Oh oh oh! Don't think I didn't notice how you edited my quote to distort for you own purposes .
P.S. I'm noticing all the 'usual hater suspects' poppin in to say hi yet again. *waves*
We really need separate forums for every newly launched game. There can be the anti-<MMO> one and there can be the 'what general discussion should be' one. All the lamenting can happen together where each can find solace in like minded can't-move-on-ers leaving the rest of us to actually move forward and discuss meaningful and relevant topics.
If the server status was changed or even if it varies from server to server than all of these graphs that have been trotted out since the game came out are completely invalid and innacurate.
If it hasn't been changed, then there was a brief population surge.
I bet you do great on comtrail theories too. No offence, but when looking at the monthly there is no major increase or decrease on fen 4,which sort of removes the foundation of your conspiracy. The problem is arising in your line drawing because 1 you have the launch outlier where we had more just try it outs and the only known capacity change. As stated many times xfire is useless, especially in tracking casual mmo's. Without hard data you are just spinning wild fantasies.
Even the mmo junkies or torstats data is flawed and can't be used to track server populations.
I actually saw noticed then back when it happened and thought it was...odd. I even posted a thread on here about it way back then.
Honestly, I'm not a big conspiracy person...but the pieces kind of add up on this one. The sudden unexpected "surge" on the graphs, the unplanned 6-8 hour weekend downtime, the timing of the press conference, the resignation of the CFO...
All I'm saying is that it makes you wonder. It's one thing to be a conspiracy nut and see plots everywhere...it's another to see a tons of evidence and just dismiss it as coincidence.
Any rational person should at least be suspicious of this.
I actually saw noticed then back when it happened and thought it was...odd. I even posted a thread on here about it way back then.
Honestly, I'm not a big conspiracy person...but the pieces kind of add up on this one. The sudden unexpected "surge" on the graphs, the unplanned 6-8 hour weekend downtime, the timing of the press conference, the resignation of the CFO...
All I'm saying is that it makes you wonder. It's one thing to be a conspiracy nut and see plots everywhere...it's another to see a tons of evidence and just dismiss it as coincidence.
Any rational person should at least be suspicious of this.
I consider myself pretty rational and hate joning MMO fan clubs and i don't see anything suspicious here.
I actually saw noticed then back when it happened and thought it was...odd. I even posted a thread on here about it way back then.
Honestly, I'm not a big conspiracy person...but the pieces kind of add up on this one. The sudden unexpected "surge" on the graphs, the unplanned 6-8 hour weekend downtime, the timing of the press conference, the resignation of the CFO...
All I'm saying is that it makes you wonder. It's one thing to be a conspiracy nut and see plots everywhere...it's another to see a tons of evidence and just dismiss it as coincidence.
Any rational person should at least be suspicious of this.
I consider myself pretty rational and hate joning MMO fan clubs and i don't see anything suspicious here.
Couldn't really be more obvious in my eyes. They will do everything they can to make it seem like they are losing less players than they are. If this wasn't the most important thing in their eyes they would already be merging servers allowing the people who actually enjoy playing to get a better experience and prevent em from quitting by playing on dead servers. They know many stock analysts have been checking server status to find indications how this game is fairing. There are very few ways to guess player counts in MMO games, server status being one.
Couldn't really be more obvious in my eyes. They will do everything they can to make it seem like they are losing less players than they are. If this wasn't the most important thing in their eyes they would already be merging servers allowing the people who actually enjoy playing to get a better experience and prevent em from quitting by playing on dead servers. They know many stock analysts have been checking server status to find indications how this game is fairing. There are very few ways to guess player counts in MMO games, server status being one.
Yeah and if anyone thinks that EA isn't devious enough or whatever to do something like this, remember what they are doing with the Bioware brand. They bought Bioware and proceeded to relabel all of their crappy studios as the Bioware brand in order to deceive customers into thinking that they are getting a quality product. They even renamed one of their SOCIAL GAMING dev studios to "Bioware."
I mean if you are currently loving the game and playing it as much as you can. Sure it might matter...
If you have left the game (like I did) then why would it matter?
If they are trying to misrepresent the amount of subscribers.. eventually there will be far worse consequences than having to merge servers.
Yet even IF that was the case.. unless you own stock who cares?
I don't believe a team that has made some obvious "newbie" developmental mistakes... found a way to increase server capactiy.. that other more competent companies have not. So no when they have an employee make a statement like that I don't believe it... it was a lie.
Do I think they mislead investors about their subscriber numbers during the conference call? yes.
Do they change load rating to misrepresent active subscribers? I'm not really sure.
But... so what?
If you aren't playing... move on and look forward to another game that you might want to play.
If you are playing... well don't be suprised if there are server mergers. However, if you are finding groups or in an active guild... I'm not sure you really care... unless the game starts to change in ways you don't like.
I mean if you are currently loving the game and playing it as much as you can. Sure it might matter...
If you have left the game (like I did) then why would it matter?
If they are trying to misrepresent the amount of subscribers.. eventually there will be far worse consequences than having to merge servers.
Yet even IF that was the case.. unless you own stock who cares?
I don't believe a team that has made some obvious "newbie" developmental mistake... found a way to increase server capactiy.. that other more competent companies have not. So no when they have an employee make a statement like that I don't believe it... it was a lie.
Do I think they mislead investors about their subscriber numbers during the conference call? yes.
Do they change load rating to misrepresent active subscribers? I'm not really sure.
But... so what?
If you aren't playing... move on and look forward to another game that you might want to play.
If you are playing... well don't be suprised if there are server mergers. However, if you are finding groups or in an active guild... I'm not sure you really care... unless the game starts to change in ways you don't like.
/shrug
Stop making sense on mmorpg.com forums. You don't belong here.
Heh. It's funny how some of the same people who disbelieved that BW had changed the population cap in the 1st weeks therefore causing a sharp drop in those server status graphs, are now all too eager to believe a player cap change when the situation showed an increase. Man, some people are REALLY obvious in their anti BW/TOR sentiment -_-
Oh, to add some more in the mix, don't forget that the status ranges are different for various servers depending on the cap that isn't the same for each server. With the avid attention to details (however selective perception based they may be), most people should've been aware of this already, but just sayin >.>
Scratch another player off the board, I ended my sub yesterday, had enough of the bullcrap with the game and the amount of cheaters in pvp. I bet by mid April it'll have less than half the playerbase it had back in December.
Couldn't really be more obvious in my eyes. They will do everything they can to make it seem like they are losing less players than they are. If this wasn't the most important thing in their eyes they would already be merging servers allowing the people who actually enjoy playing to get a better experience and prevent em from quitting by playing on dead servers. They know many stock analysts have been checking server status to find indications how this game is fairing. There are very few ways to guess player counts in MMO games, server status being one.
Yeah and if anyone thinks that EA isn't devious enough or whatever to do something like this, remember what they are doing with the Bioware brand. They bought Bioware and proceeded to relabel all of their crappy studios as the Bioware brand in order to deceive customers into thinking that they are getting a quality product. They even renamed one of their SOCIAL GAMING dev studios to "Bioware."
There may be a little truth in that or a lot. EA is very well known for dubious activities, just Google Electronic Arts lawsuits.
Poor Bioware, but damnit why did they sell out to EA? I'm seeing constant hate spewed to Bioware over the game's problems but the Bioware we all know does not exist any longer, it's gone and is only being used by name by EA because of Bioware's reputation. Everyone keeps asking why Bioware why but it's gone as we knew it and not coming back. If anyone wants to blame anything on the old Bioware then blame them for selling out to EA.
Supposedly they can add or remobe server on the fly .ya it can scale up or down.so you cant judge the light etc stuff.there could be 1000 on the server or 25000 .eventually game maker will show actual number of player .successfull game should.
It's not like we're all hear talkin' bout how swtor has 20million subs and is the best game ever. They're gonna do w/e they gotta do to get the best possible numbers, or I should say, they ARE doing whatever they have to do to keep that stock price up. So all the clowns hiding under rocks for the past 5 decades WAKE THE FUCK UP lol. Even if a company is doing well they're trying to scam numbers.
Heh. It's funny how some of the same people who disbelieved that BW had changed the population cap in the 1st weeks therefore causing a sharp drop in those server status graphs, are now all too eager to believe a player cap change when the situation showed an increase. Man, some people are REALLY obvious in their anti BW/TOR sentiment -_-
You know, I noticed this too. Some people really try to have it both ways and it doesn't work like that. (on both sides of the argument no less)
Between that and the complete disregard for the logical explanation of an activity surge (these infinitely flawed graphs only show activity, not subscriptions) it shows how transparent some people are.
I don't know whether they did or did not change the rating but one thing is very certain(and has been for a while now) there are too many people on these forums so closely vested in the failure of SWTOR(and MMOs in general) that they disregard logic and embrace conjecture that further's their own wants.
We really need separate forums for every newly launched game. There can be the anti-<MMO> one and there can be the 'what general discussion should be' one. All the lamenting can happen together where each can find solace in like minded can't-move-on-ers leaving the rest of us to actually move forward and discuss meaningful and relevant topics.
See how the two lines show a similar rate of descent. But there is a sudden rise in end january / start february.
Did they change the rating? So for instance a "Light" server would be a "Standard" server, and so on?
Don't have data of that period on xFire to compare with. Would be interesting if anyone had.
I actually use a different source for server load. It indicated the change was on February 4th. The downward curve immediately continued. I haven't gotten around to normalizing it yet, but I'm thinking that, effectively, the server-load status in the 'heavy' status category would be down to about 3% of server time.
I just haven't done the math because I wanted three weeks of trend before I tried to plot the rate of decline and get a better sample of the changes they made.
It's not rocket science. The game is losing subs all the time. They do the best to hide it until they have to take action and start merging the servers.
Happens to all new MMOs a couple months after launch. SWTOR is not special in that sense.
In fact, SWTOR is not special as an MMORPG in any sense.
The problem is that it's a BioWare game. And if you've ever been around that fanbase when they foul-up...
I hope you have a thick skin and asbestos pants....
The server I'm on seems to be very stable with population, the guild I'm a part of is still going very strong. We had to split the guild in to 3 on the republic side as we had too many members playing. On the empire side we have 2 guilds both full.
A few have left at the end of the first month but we still get more joining.
I was talking to eb games here in australia, they been importing the US box before our launch date was announced and they can't keep up with the demand here.
Well, every game gets a large spike of subs its first month. Those are the first-triers. The drop-off after the first month is also normal. Then the numbers stabilize, again totally normal. The black lines are just there to manupulate the viewer into thinking people are fleeing a sinking ship.
That's not what it shows. And you're wrong about the black-line. The black line is a trend line. But lets get away from the perfercly represented trend lines in OPs graph.
Yellow line - bad news when increasing. That's the percentage of server-time the servers are "light." This has been increasing, week after week. Denials to the contrary.
Green line -- bad news when decreasing. That's the percentage of server-time the servers are 'heavy." This has been decreasing week-after week.
Red line - Bad news when decreasing. That's the percentage of server time the servers are full. As you can see, we're at the ZERO BOUNDARY. It can't get any worse than it is in this category.
Manipulation Spike -- You can see what BioWare did easiest on the 4th of February. You'll see the ever decreasing reported server load surge massively. DESPITE the continuous drops in retail sales. The declining trend has continued.
Now, you may talk about BioWare increasing server cap to reduce wait time. This is true. It happened. But it was during EGA. Once we got past EGA and into post-Christmas, they didn't do that because they wanted to force traffic to the emptier servers.
You can run these graphs for every server. They're the same. The only issue I have with what's going on now is that the servers are so underpopulated that minor changes in population make huge swings due to so many of the populations being right at reporting boundaries between 'light and standard' and 'standard and heavy.'
I don't know whether they did or did not change the rating but one thing is very certain(and has been for a while now) there are too many people on these forums so closely vested in the failure of SWTOR(and MMOs in general) that they disregard logic and embrace conjecture that further's their own wants.
You have those with every new mmo. For a multitude of reasons. Isn't anything new or different going on here outside this newer fascination to bring graphs and numbercrunching to back whatever statement they want to infer regardless the person's position. I mean it has always been floating around but it does seem to be turning into the new "gotcha" mechanic.
You think this bad? Wait until GW2 comes out because unless they hit it out of the park then these boards are going to be flooded to no end.
Actually, probably still will no matter what.
I have no idea if these calculations on either side are correct or completely full of it. The only thing I ever do is relate what I see on my servers.
Personally, I doubt BW is doing much different from any other mmo company. Which in some ways means some of this banter is a non issue but in other ways is rather disappointing.
All depends on your overall view I suppose and experiences in game.
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.
If they changed the server load, it was to increase population required for heavy and very heavy and not the other way around.
The Harbringer is standard atm, there are constantly 80+ on the sith starter planet, and 100+ right now on the 2nd planet. There are 300~ in the imp fleet, and this server is currently only at standard. Empire is said to be about even population wise with Republic on this server also.
Population isn't even close to dying on this server or on Dark Reaper. While not nearly as popular, I see the same thing. I have a 50 sent (republic ) and population in the fleet has actually increased over the past month since when i first quit the game (Back now cuz WoW is just in a horrible state).
So on two different servers, both standard normally now (Harbringer gets heavy every now and then), population is very consistent. Seems like this points to Bioware upping the requirement for Full / Very Heavy and that would make sense since they said the improved server load recently.
I know you guys are gonna hate on this game no matter what so dont mind me though.
You understand that The Harbringer is the #3 server on the US side? That its growth is due to POPULATION FLIGHT from other servers.
But, if you add up all the 'growth' servers and subtract all the 'decline servers' you get a significant net decline. On a weekly basis, jsut for the US servers, you typically get 10-to-20 servers with an increase in playtime/growth. You get between 60 and 100 with a decrease/decline. The total increases less decreases is a net decrease/decline.
And while these are not direct subscriber numbers, they are a very good predictor of future subscription levels, player interest and likely churn rates. Now, add in the abysmal sales we've seen the past few weeks... They're no where neer the needed numbers to keep up with churn... This game is not projecting out as a success.
Which is why the rats are leaving the ship. EA/BioWare hasn't lost $2.77 billion in the past four years for no reason. It's because people are getting sick and tired of their bad games. Of which, as far as I can see, the general MMO population seems to think this is one... Even as those who like it refuse to see the handwriting on the wall.
Maybe in a year, and after some heads roll for this dog, they'll get this back on course. I'm not hopeful, though I'd love to see it. But, in the end, we'll see.
And, as for me, I'm waiting for the March 31st and June 30th numbers. I'll be able to squeeze out the NA/EURO and then the Asian churn rates once I get them. And figure, at that point, just how small this game will get.
Here's a silly question. Can anyone verify that the servers were down on February 3ed. If you can please link some sort of evidence.
I just spent about 20 minutes searching with date filters and looking through the graphs and the Saturday outage was January 28th, there was much flem and vigor over it and bioware swore not to do it again. That was to fix a crittical issue that caused the game to freeze and stutter, one I suffered from myself
There is no patch notes on February 3ed or there abouts about a outage and nothing to indicate the server went down that saturday from a forum chatter perspective that I can find.
If you look at the weekly graphs you'll notice it spikes every sunday, the spike on the 5th was slightly higher than on previous weeks, but nothing to write home about.
You really can't base server population off of these graphs. They show Server Status and they could hide anything from a growing population to a shrinking population without ever gaining or loosing so many people as for them to show up on the graph. All you can say is that's intresting. What we see from the weekly graph is a near perfectly stable and predictible pattern with spikes every Sunday on the Sunday. There's a slight decrease in the size of the peaks and a slight anomaly on the day in question, but a change in the server load ratings would have shown up in the daily peaks and the min peaks, and those are near flat.
The more likely reason is that they'd already bled the early adopters who didn't care for it and they kicked off an advertising campaign the week before. This meant their loss rate was lower than it had been the first 3 weeks and they had a slight up tick in new subscribers.
Sorry, but that makes far more sense at least to me than some grand theory about commiting fraud to make a short term marketing statment look good when the timing of the outage your proposing they cooked the books durring can't be positivly acertained.
Until you can show that the servers were actually down the night of the 3ed (4th for patch notes dating) there's not much to talk about.
Comments
Can give a crap about what charts are out there, the day this happened, i pposted my opinion they changed it on the swtor.com forums. Feel free to search for the thread... I got laughed off the internet that day.... but its true...
can't say with 100% though they are doing it to fool anyone, as with any game release, numbers will drop
Regards,
Nobotters - A better gaming experience
rofl, what?
Okay, my alternative is that things are as they appear to be until proof has been provided to show otherwise. ... ?
-Or-
If it is indeed altered then we need to stfu about these graphs because they are a lie. So either SWTOR had a small growth or the graphs are a lie and prove/disprove nothing. You can't have it both ways.
Also I fail to comprehend the notion that burden of proof only applies to a court of law. Although I am very familiar with people trying to dodge it, they're usually wrong and consumed by 'hating' but don't want to admit it.
Edit: Oh oh oh! Don't think I didn't notice how you edited my quote to distort for you own purposes .
P.S. I'm noticing all the 'usual hater suspects' poppin in to say hi yet again. *waves*
We really need separate forums for every newly launched game. There can be the anti-<MMO> one and there can be the 'what general discussion should be' one. All the lamenting can happen together where each can find solace in like minded can't-move-on-ers leaving the rest of us to actually move forward and discuss meaningful and relevant topics.
If the server status was changed or even if it varies from server to server than all of these graphs that have been trotted out since the game came out are completely invalid and innacurate.
If it hasn't been changed, then there was a brief population surge.
Shadow's Hand Guild
Open recruitment for
The Secret World - Dragons
Planetside 2 - Terran Republic
Tera - Dragonfall Server
http://www.shadowshand.com
Even the mmo junkies or torstats data is flawed and can't be used to track server populations.
I actually saw noticed then back when it happened and thought it was...odd. I even posted a thread on here about it way back then.
Honestly, I'm not a big conspiracy person...but the pieces kind of add up on this one. The sudden unexpected "surge" on the graphs, the unplanned 6-8 hour weekend downtime, the timing of the press conference, the resignation of the CFO...
All I'm saying is that it makes you wonder. It's one thing to be a conspiracy nut and see plots everywhere...it's another to see a tons of evidence and just dismiss it as coincidence.
Any rational person should at least be suspicious of this.
Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?
I consider myself pretty rational and hate joning MMO fan clubs and i don't see anything suspicious here.
You sir, are a very unsuspecting fellow
.
Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?
Couldn't really be more obvious in my eyes. They will do everything they can to make it seem like they are losing less players than they are. If this wasn't the most important thing in their eyes they would already be merging servers allowing the people who actually enjoy playing to get a better experience and prevent em from quitting by playing on dead servers. They know many stock analysts have been checking server status to find indications how this game is fairing. There are very few ways to guess player counts in MMO games, server status being one.
Yeah and if anyone thinks that EA isn't devious enough or whatever to do something like this, remember what they are doing with the Bioware brand. They bought Bioware and proceeded to relabel all of their crappy studios as the Bioware brand in order to deceive customers into thinking that they are getting a quality product. They even renamed one of their SOCIAL GAMING dev studios to "Bioware."
Are you team Azeroth, team Tyria, or team Jacob?
Does it really matter if they did?
I mean if you are currently loving the game and playing it as much as you can. Sure it might matter...
If you have left the game (like I did) then why would it matter?
If they are trying to misrepresent the amount of subscribers.. eventually there will be far worse consequences than having to merge servers.
Yet even IF that was the case.. unless you own stock who cares?
I don't believe a team that has made some obvious "newbie" developmental mistakes... found a way to increase server capactiy.. that other more competent companies have not. So no when they have an employee make a statement like that I don't believe it... it was a lie.
Do I think they mislead investors about their subscriber numbers during the conference call? yes.
Do they change load rating to misrepresent active subscribers? I'm not really sure.
But... so what?
If you aren't playing... move on and look forward to another game that you might want to play.
If you are playing... well don't be suprised if there are server mergers. However, if you are finding groups or in an active guild... I'm not sure you really care... unless the game starts to change in ways you don't like.
/shrug
Stop making sense on mmorpg.com forums. You don't belong here.
Oh, to add some more in the mix, don't forget that the status ranges are different for various servers depending on the cap that isn't the same for each server. With the avid attention to details (however selective perception based they may be), most people should've been aware of this already, but just sayin >.>Scratch another player off the board, I ended my sub yesterday, had enough of the bullcrap with the game and the amount of cheaters in pvp. I bet by mid April it'll have less than half the playerbase it had back in December.
There may be a little truth in that or a lot. EA is very well known for dubious activities, just Google Electronic Arts lawsuits.
Poor Bioware, but damnit why did they sell out to EA? I'm seeing constant hate spewed to Bioware over the game's problems but the Bioware we all know does not exist any longer, it's gone and is only being used by name by EA because of Bioware's reputation. Everyone keeps asking why Bioware why but it's gone as we knew it and not coming back. If anyone wants to blame anything on the old Bioware then blame them for selling out to EA.
Looks to me they have already changed their focus from fixing the game to fixing the image.
http://www.swtor.com/media/trailers/look-old-republic
Sad really
C'mon, for realz?
It's not like we're all hear talkin' bout how swtor has 20million subs and is the best game ever. They're gonna do w/e they gotta do to get the best possible numbers, or I should say, they ARE doing whatever they have to do to keep that stock price up. So all the clowns hiding under rocks for the past 5 decades WAKE THE FUCK UP lol. Even if a company is doing well they're trying to scam numbers.
You know, I noticed this too. Some people really try to have it both ways and it doesn't work like that. (on both sides of the argument no less)
Between that and the complete disregard for the logical explanation of an activity surge (these infinitely flawed graphs only show activity, not subscriptions) it shows how transparent some people are.
I don't know whether they did or did not change the rating but one thing is very certain(and has been for a while now) there are too many people on these forums so closely vested in the failure of SWTOR(and MMOs in general) that they disregard logic and embrace conjecture that further's their own wants.
We really need separate forums for every newly launched game. There can be the anti-<MMO> one and there can be the 'what general discussion should be' one. All the lamenting can happen together where each can find solace in like minded can't-move-on-ers leaving the rest of us to actually move forward and discuss meaningful and relevant topics.
I actually use a different source for server load. It indicated the change was on February 4th. The downward curve immediately continued. I haven't gotten around to normalizing it yet, but I'm thinking that, effectively, the server-load status in the 'heavy' status category would be down to about 3% of server time.
I just haven't done the math because I wanted three weeks of trend before I tried to plot the rate of decline and get a better sample of the changes they made.
But, yes, they did monkey with the reporting.
The problem is that it's a BioWare game. And if you've ever been around that fanbase when they foul-up...
I hope you have a thick skin and asbestos pants....
The server I'm on seems to be very stable with population, the guild I'm a part of is still going very strong. We had to split the guild in to 3 on the republic side as we had too many members playing. On the empire side we have 2 guilds both full.
A few have left at the end of the first month but we still get more joining.
I was talking to eb games here in australia, they been importing the US box before our launch date was announced and they can't keep up with the demand here.
That's not what it shows. And you're wrong about the black-line. The black line is a trend line. But lets get away from the perfercly represented trend lines in OPs graph.
Loof for yourself.
This is TOR Status. The link is to the POPULATION TREND for North America: http://www.torstatus.net/shards/us/trends
Yellow line - bad news when increasing. That's the percentage of server-time the servers are "light." This has been increasing, week after week. Denials to the contrary.
Green line -- bad news when decreasing. That's the percentage of server-time the servers are 'heavy." This has been decreasing week-after week.
Red line - Bad news when decreasing. That's the percentage of server time the servers are full. As you can see, we're at the ZERO BOUNDARY. It can't get any worse than it is in this category.
Manipulation Spike -- You can see what BioWare did easiest on the 4th of February. You'll see the ever decreasing reported server load surge massively. DESPITE the continuous drops in retail sales. The declining trend has continued.
Now, you may talk about BioWare increasing server cap to reduce wait time. This is true. It happened. But it was during EGA. Once we got past EGA and into post-Christmas, they didn't do that because they wanted to force traffic to the emptier servers.
You can run these graphs for every server. They're the same. The only issue I have with what's going on now is that the servers are so underpopulated that minor changes in population make huge swings due to so many of the populations being right at reporting boundaries between 'light and standard' and 'standard and heavy.'
You have those with every new mmo. For a multitude of reasons. Isn't anything new or different going on here outside this newer fascination to bring graphs and numbercrunching to back whatever statement they want to infer regardless the person's position. I mean it has always been floating around but it does seem to be turning into the new "gotcha" mechanic.
You think this bad? Wait until GW2 comes out because unless they hit it out of the park then these boards are going to be flooded to no end.
Actually, probably still will no matter what.
I have no idea if these calculations on either side are correct or completely full of it. The only thing I ever do is relate what I see on my servers.
Personally, I doubt BW is doing much different from any other mmo company. Which in some ways means some of this banter is a non issue but in other ways is rather disappointing.
All depends on your overall view I suppose and experiences in game.
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.
You understand that The Harbringer is the #3 server on the US side? That its growth is due to POPULATION FLIGHT from other servers.
But, if you add up all the 'growth' servers and subtract all the 'decline servers' you get a significant net decline. On a weekly basis, jsut for the US servers, you typically get 10-to-20 servers with an increase in playtime/growth. You get between 60 and 100 with a decrease/decline. The total increases less decreases is a net decrease/decline.
And while these are not direct subscriber numbers, they are a very good predictor of future subscription levels, player interest and likely churn rates. Now, add in the abysmal sales we've seen the past few weeks... They're no where neer the needed numbers to keep up with churn... This game is not projecting out as a success.
Which is why the rats are leaving the ship. EA/BioWare hasn't lost $2.77 billion in the past four years for no reason. It's because people are getting sick and tired of their bad games. Of which, as far as I can see, the general MMO population seems to think this is one... Even as those who like it refuse to see the handwriting on the wall.
Maybe in a year, and after some heads roll for this dog, they'll get this back on course. I'm not hopeful, though I'd love to see it. But, in the end, we'll see.
And, as for me, I'm waiting for the March 31st and June 30th numbers. I'll be able to squeeze out the NA/EURO and then the Asian churn rates once I get them. And figure, at that point, just how small this game will get.
Here's a silly question. Can anyone verify that the servers were down on February 3ed. If you can please link some sort of evidence.
I just spent about 20 minutes searching with date filters and looking through the graphs and the Saturday outage was January 28th, there was much flem and vigor over it and bioware swore not to do it again. That was to fix a crittical issue that caused the game to freeze and stutter, one I suffered from myself
There is no patch notes on February 3ed or there abouts about a outage and nothing to indicate the server went down that saturday from a forum chatter perspective that I can find.
If you look at the weekly graphs you'll notice it spikes every sunday, the spike on the 5th was slightly higher than on previous weeks, but nothing to write home about.
You really can't base server population off of these graphs. They show Server Status and they could hide anything from a growing population to a shrinking population without ever gaining or loosing so many people as for them to show up on the graph. All you can say is that's intresting. What we see from the weekly graph is a near perfectly stable and predictible pattern with spikes every Sunday on the Sunday. There's a slight decrease in the size of the peaks and a slight anomaly on the day in question, but a change in the server load ratings would have shown up in the daily peaks and the min peaks, and those are near flat.
The more likely reason is that they'd already bled the early adopters who didn't care for it and they kicked off an advertising campaign the week before. This meant their loss rate was lower than it had been the first 3 weeks and they had a slight up tick in new subscribers.
Sorry, but that makes far more sense at least to me than some grand theory about commiting fraud to make a short term marketing statment look good when the timing of the outage your proposing they cooked the books durring can't be positivly acertained.
Until you can show that the servers were actually down the night of the 3ed (4th for patch notes dating) there's not much to talk about.