Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Seems like the game has peaked on XFire - Part 2
This discussion has been closed.
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Comments
Actually some of my buddies that still play WoW have remarked that it has gotten noticeably quieter on our server(its a RP server, usually with a very stable population), not to the point that you have trouble finding groups or anything but simply a bit less people around. Im not saying they are even loosing subs since thats not what xfire tracks anyway(it tracks activity), but on the other hand i have no trouble believing in a drop of players in the western market for WoW. I mean most of WoWs subs have been in the eastern market anyway for years(which isn't tracked by xfire at all), who is to say that WoW didn't loose a million players here and gained a million in asia?
I mean with all these new MMOs and betas here like Tera, GW2 and yes even SWTOR ... surely atleast some have come from WoW? Certainly not millions, but a couple 100k i could believe, add another couple 100k who simply burned out or stopped MMOs altogether over the last years ...
Asia is still growing ofc, you have to keep in mind that in china for example the userbase for computers is still growing rapidly. There are still hundreds of millions of people in asia without internet, a number probably shrinking by thousands every day. Add to that WoW being an old game running decent on crappy hardware and i can see its appeal there. Thinking about it there is no way WoW is stable here and in the east, makes no sense at all since they are completely different markets with different audiences. I would go so far to say im certain that WoW is shrinking in the west and growing in the east.
From what I've read, a trend gives you directional information, but doesn't measure the degree to which the data is changing. Both a 45% decrease and an 85% decrease are a downward trend. The angle of the line is different, but the information it's supposed to give you is the same. What you should do is take the trend, and then do further information gathering* to determine what the data means now and what it'll mean in the future.
[mod edit]
There's no need to comment on your own level of learning or intelligence either. Nobody will believe you and you can't prove it, so what's the point? Assuming you have whatever level of education you say you do, it won't help you make your point***.
* We can't do this. We can't get any further information out of XFire on the people contributing to the numbers and we're certainly not going to get more information out of the developers themselves. What we have is general trends telling us, "More Players" or "Less Players" and that's really about it.
[mod edit]
** edit **
My love of MMORPG.com's post editor is definitely trending down. More research has indicated that the level of dislike is in a steep decline. It's not looking good.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
lol GW2 just owned all of them:
http://i47.tinypic.com/10wtmy0.png
An honest review of SW:TOR 6/10 (Danny Wojcicki)
Now....thats NOT a surprise
The curve should be no surprise. I was doing a bit of reading and got into some old stuff.
From Ralph Koster's blog:
http://www.raphkoster.com/2007/06/15/how-open-big-virtual-worlds-grow/
He shows you the MMO curve. What's amazing is how FAST SWTOR's curve went down. Koster's curve, back in 2007, didn't predict major crashes like SWTOR, Warhammer and AoC.
Of course, in 2007 MMOs were being developed as games by gaming companies run mostly by gamers with the hopes they'd make money, but mostly be great games. Now they're being driven by MBAs and investors to cash-in...
You guys are way over-thinking this.
XFire doesn't have to be very accurate to tell us what we already know as evidenced by 15 other sources. If you're trying to use XFire to predict TOR subcribers within +/- 10,000.... you're wasting your time. If you're using it as another piece of evidence TOR has taken a massive suscriber hit since lauch... it works just fine.
*1387 for 6/9 - another all-time low for a Saturday.
Another week:
http://i50.tinypic.com/esn3w8.png
An honest review of SW:TOR 6/10 (Danny Wojcicki)
Wow. Just wow. Just for the heck of it... The Secret World when it finally releases would be nice. It's, in it's underlying structure, single-player oriented as an MMO and I'd like to see if it does the same curve or if it performs more like a traditional MMO.
@sandbox - The discussion on intelligence was mod edited, so I'm going to skip it.
If the individual data points are not confirmed to be accurate, the only information left is the direction of the trend; up or down. The angle of the line has just as much misinformation as the individual data points.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Sounds ridiculous to me, I have been working with software development for nearly 30 years and are senior since way back, should I be ashamed of that or is it a violation against the rules here to mention the background for my reasoning in a matter regarding math and interpretation of graphs in this thread with the topics of xfire graphs and numbers?
Ouch. That curve says it all. Exponential drop levelling to the plateau of die-hard fanboys, then the trickle decline as even those give up on the game.
There should be an uptick in activity during/following the server merges - but ouch, that tail end of a poisson distribution curve is "MMO death" given graphical form.
A week or so after the server merges, people will start to realise the same old problems are still there in SWTOR and the mass exodus will continue.
Aye, will be interesting to see if server merges will help or will it just stop bleeding for a while.
I don't see you explaining it... I know a lot about XFIRE. First, they have 21+ million installs and a million daily users. That means, as a sample size, they are WELL IN EXCESS OF a the sample size needed for a 99% certainty with a 1% error margin on every day's sample to a games' popularity and, therefore, underlying population. So any data point is almost certainly representative, never mind the cumulative chance of being correct that becomes so large, so fast it's not even worth discussion. Even if all you took in college was stats for liberal arts majors, this sample-population issue should be entirely clear.
I also know a lot about how people play and when they quit. Unlike most gamers, my wife is a scientist and I am a professional in a profession that deals with this kind of information on a daily basis, which gives me both the technical skills and the access to the literature on subscriptions, MMO subscription dynamics, etc. needed to understand what's going on.
XFIRE is a remarkably robust predictor of future subsciption levels. But it doesn't do everything perfectly because it aggregates the data. I say this because most people don't understand that as an MMO ages, it attracts different populations that have substantially different player-life-time curves.
For example, early adopters are the players mostly likely to become hard-core, long-term subscribers. Even players who join just months later, will be very different in their retention curve (it will be shorter and steeper). By the time you start bringing in the 'free trial' players, you're looking at a population that will mostly not commit. Take WoW's free-trial. 90% never buy the game. When these people join, they're not like WoW's early adopters who have (as a total population) played the game for an average of 3 years, 9 months. (By the way, it's the average play-length of the entire population that joined in 2004/2005 as WoW ascended. Of those people, about one-half of quit and one-half still play!!!)
Instead, of the 10% of the trial period people who try the game, 50% quit within 6 months. By the one-year mark (for WoW) the retention rate is 30%. By the end of Year 2, the retention rate is just 10%. That means, for WoW, when someone does the free-trial there is a 1-in-100 chance they'll play for two or more years.
That's a remarkably different curve. Much steeper in it's decline than the early adopter's curve.
And it makes sense. People first trying WoW in 2012 are either very young or new to computer gaming or were low-commitment players who don't stick with any games or were simply not attracted to the game to begin with and the trial didn't change that...
Anyway, the graph is fine. It tells us that people don't like the game. That they're quiiting.
The server mergers tell us the same story.
The bombing retail sales tell us the same story.
The hundreds of threads about dead servers (virtually all immeidatly closed by BioWare mods) tell us the same thing.
The threads that would report daily /who totals told us the same thing.
This game is a commercial flop. It spiked early and fell hard.
Interesting. I like your approach towards the subject, very concrete and analytical and a lot better than what I see of a lot of other posters who inject a hell of a lot gut feeling, conjecture and wild guessing in them based on their subjective viewpoint.
About Xfire, I'd like to add some other points that people should keep in mind too, what I read about or found out in the course of time. Xfire apparently hasn't an equal spread worldwide, meaning that its use in the east, like China and Korea, is far more rare to maybe even to the point of nonexistent than its use in the West. Xfire also seems to suffer an overall declining trend, in that the total number of Xfire users seem to be on an ongoing continuing decrease, thus also for MMO's, that should be taken into account. I think it'd be best to use other activity measuring tools, like Raptr, Steam or WoW census in combination with Xfire, then you'll see how reliable trends are or how large the error margin seems to be.
But for the rest, nice post, liked it, good points in it.
Nobody, well almost nobody, expects exact precise results from Xfire, for all intents and purposes it has been proven decently reliable tool that gives results in general ballpark area.
When all signs point same direction - you can be pretty sure its going it that direction. Xfire is just one of those signs.
Sorry to break it to you but XFire is anything but a random sample, which is needed for your 99% certainty.
I think the XFire numbers are interesting. But XFire caters to a certain type of player/person. XFire numbers aren't worthless, but neither are they very accurate measures of a games users.
Being a not completely random sample and a very accurate measure of a game's users are not mutually exclusive.
In fact, you can have samples that aren't random... but produce very, very, very accurate results.
No statistician would accept them as accurate on their own. They could only end up being deemed accurate if they happen to match up with results they get from more reliable samples. That's the point. XFire could be +- 1% or +- 50% for all we know. It's foolish to assume they are accurate based purely on sample size.
Statistics masters degree here. Xfire is more than just a valid sample - it's a fantastic sample.
Most samples for popular polling agencies (those who poll for american elections etc) go with N=1000 (often with poor sample selection), cosmetics companies and advertising agencies go as low as N=100 quite often.
Television ratings (specifically Nielsen ratings) are based on less than 0.1% of the total number of TV viewers in the US, with a massive N=25,000 - one of the biggest samples in existence, and even that pales compared to Xfire.
Xfire is in the millions, you just don't get that kind of survey size normally, self-selected or not.
As for sample bias, Xfire includes players of hundreds of different games, making it even better to judge both metrics within MMOs, and metrics for MMOs relative to other game types - and self-selection is not a statistical problem, since most surveys are done that way.
Xfire is a dream sample for a statistical study.
I'm pretty sure Nielsen is careful about the socio-economic, racial and other distributions of their households. Their goal is to try to accurately cover all TV watchers. Whether they are really accurate is another issue, but they've got all the advertisers believing their numbers.
XFire takes anyone that runs the app. How many casual gamers know what XFire is, let alone download and run it on their PC? That alone limits their accuracy. XFire doesn't make any claims as to the statistical accuracy of their numbers. I'm not sure why anyone else feels the need.
What you are left with is basically a weathervane. It tells you direction, but has no ability to give you a true intensity.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
I'm changing the chart to only show data from sundays.
It was getting too big and modifying it every day was a bit too much. I have exams till saturday, will have the modifications done next week.
An honest review of SW:TOR 6/10 (Danny Wojcicki)
Yeah. I know that. You know that. Anyone who managed to pass a college stats class knows that. Yet you see the responses. I don't respond because I'm tired of people who know nothing throwing what are pointless and meaningless criticisms against the wall to see what sticks.
For example, for a 100 million gamer population at a 99% confidence level and 1% confidence interval requires a sample size of just 16,638 gamers. Yet these critics will assert, with a straight face, that a sample of a MILLION isn't valid for trend-spotting...
Sigh. This is why we can't have good discussions about such things. People who have no education or experience in something that requires at least a cursory education in these things just constantly derail any such efforts.
This clip, I think, is one of the funniest takes on how I feel about this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDYba0m6ztE 1:00 in really hits it...