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4 x as many Xfire users playing GW2 than WOW.
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Why?
The number of active players can't be calculated from XFire numbers. If you can't calculate the number of active players, you can't compare the active players in one game to the active players in another game. The number of people included in the poll doesn't change this.
There are 4x as many XFire users playing GW2 as are playing WoW is a factual statement. You can't draw any accurate conclusions from this though. It doesn't mean there are 4x as many active GW2 players as there are active WoW players. That statement isn't even qualified to take into consideration Chinese WoW players. Even if the population Chinese WoW players has halved in the past month, there are still 3 million of them - three times as many players as there have been GW2 purchases. That doesn't even include any European or American WoW players.
** edit **
Fun Fact: Studies have shown that what you wear affects how smart you let yourself be. People wearing lab coats, like Scientists do better on IQ tests.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
That means that there are at least 36 million people who bought the game!
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
I personally don't know anyone who is currently using it or has used it in the past. Would be interesting to see the demographics of those who actually use it.
"The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in."
Indeed. Knowing what people who play X-Fire play only tells you what people who play X-Fire play. The people there are not representative of the MMO gamer population at large. As such the data you get from it is pretty much worthless.
All this talk about Xfire and numbers, the only numbers I see as of this post is that:
13,667 Xfire users play Guild Wars 2: http://beta.xfire.com/games/gw2
and
5,454 Xfire users play World of Warcraft: http://beta.xfire.com/games/wow
The rest of the e-peen flexing I could not careless about, all that matters is what I game enjoy playing and right now that is Guild Wars 2. How it compares to World of Warcraft in terms of the number of players does not factor in my enjoyment. Though what does is the quality of players and in my opinion Xfire e-peen posts is something that lines up with fanboys, haters, trolls, etcetera in other words a whole lot of nothing.
Edit: Links should be working now.
Because flying a Minmatar ship is like going down a flight of stairs on an office chair while firing an Uzi.
I'll use real numbers - not sure what toliet you pulled yours out of you cannot even get the correct number of servers.
http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/status as of 18:57 GMT (Peak)
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/status as of 19:02 GMT (Off peak)
Because the biggest launch other than GW2 in recent times, TOR, wasn't able to do it. That's why. It's comparative reasoning by what information is there. Don't mistake that I'm saying I think GW2 is going to be "more successful" than WoW or "kill WoW" or an stupid assumption like that. I'm going by the fact that in tracking system where WoW has been top of the MMO mountain, GW2 is now eclipsing it.
I think you misunderstood why I brought scientific study into the conversation. I wasn't trying to estimate any number other than what is on xfire's site. Posters here were commenting that xfire wasn't relevant enough to take seriously and I was making the comparison that in a survey, especially one that is not on the honor system, 20k was a fantastic number.
If you take a random (because we don't know the "test subjects") cross section of people doing one specific thing, playing MMOs, 20k results between two options is enough to see a trend and comment on it.
Seems i dint counted non english servers
I counted all English servers on the server selection screen at prime time Europe.
WoW has earned a place in the history of gaming. It doesn't need to be #1 anymore, it's living classic.
But I don't know what could make me go back to WoW these days. Most probably nothing.
MMORPG genre is dead. Long live MMOCS (Massively Multiplayer Online Cash Shop).
The number of people contributing to the poll isn't that relevant. How dependable the data resulting from the poll is relevant. XFire shows four times as many GW2 players as WoW players and we know that there are about a million possible GW2 players and four hundred thousand concurrent players. There are six million Chinese "subs", which leaves three million American, European and Oceanic "subs". For there to be four times as many GW2 players as WoW players, there would have to be about 100,000 WoW players in Europe, the U.S. and in Australia. That seems pretty unlikely.
Having 20,000 people, however randomly selected, doesn't make the data more valid. It just means there is more invalid data.
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Using what I consider conservative numbers for server populations from the post above, there are a quarter million concurrent WoW players in Europe and the U.S. That doesn't take into consideration Oceanic players...but how many of those are there really? That's assuming a full server holds 2,000 people, a high population server holds 1,000 people, a medium population server holds 500 people and a low population server holds 200 people. I have no idea how accurate those numbers are...they seem a little low to me, but WoW's servers are old, so I don't see any reason to increase the numbers.
This doesn't prove anything. We don't really know how many WoW players there are.
There's also no trend yet. A trend is something that happens over time and this thread is discussing a single point in time.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
It's not a random survey however. The people who use X-Fire are not going to be a random cross-section of the MMO gaming population. They're a self-selected group of people who chose to use a particular application for communication of various sorts. So right there you are skewed against casual gamers. Given the ubiquity of youtube, various messaging systems, etc, etc, there are quite possibly a number of other self-selection factors that cause people to go with X-Fire as opposed to other options. Any number of which could irrevocably taint the data (though that's already done by the skew against casuals).
The random thing is a red herring. You could have a very accurate poll from a group of self selected people, if you validate your data. That's one of the missing steps with XFire's information. None of the data is validated. Well, the publicly available data is not validated.
You'll notice that nobody, outside of internet forums like this one, uses the public XFire numbers. When a marketing company uses XFire numbers, it's always with XFire's cooperation, and it usually involves money. Those people are getting the data, and they are able to validate the data based on other information that isn't publicly available. The publicly available information is worth exactly what it costs to use.
** edit **
Interesting Factoid: TSW showed nearly as many players as WoW on XFire, but they only sold 200,000 copies of the game. There are something like three million subs between Europe, the U.S. and Australia. It seems unlikely that a game with 200,000 copies sold would be able to come close to a game with three million registered copies. It's not impossible, just really unlikely.
** edit edit **
I might have imagined the XFire numbers for TSW. I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Is GW2 Taco Bell then?
Think outside the bun?
In a random cross section I think the more results tallied the more relevant the argument becomes. So we don't continue circling the thread, what do you believe I am trying to say? I'll simply tell you that I believe the xfire numbers are worth talking about because of past data and the number of results tallied. You are of course, and most likely will, disagree with this and that's okay.
The people choosing xfire was not random. What they decide to play aftewards is and is what I am talking about when I say random.
The issues the bias the Xfire population so that it isn't random will similarly bias what sort of games those people play, how often they play them, when they start playing, etc, etc.
you couldnt be more wrong. xfire users represent a SAMPLE of gamers and presents a statistical sample of what said gamers who use xfire are playing. alot of people play wow -- as a result xifre accurately reports nearly 25% of its MMO playing users playing wow. dont think you are going to see Conan showing these results in xfire. the fact you and your buddies dont use it, doesnt mean the numbers are meaningless. and for the record i dont play GW2, wow or use xfire. but then again, that doesnt change the fact that enough gamers do use it, for it to provide a small idea of what is popular.
My only point is that trying to get good data out of a significantly biased source is quite difficult and in some cases it is impossible -- for instance, let's say Xfire showed what US Presidential candidate users liked (all users, no exception). It would be exceedingly difficult and likely impossible to use that data for say how likely voters felt, as huge sections of the general likely voting population would be almost completely left out. Of course, no attempt to get good data is going on here, well, garbage in, garbage out. Xfire numbers tell us nothing except what Xfire people are doing, and you can't relate that to the MMO gamer population as a whole.
Working with data to get good information out of bad is possible in many cases of course. But I think the more essential point is recognizing when the data is going to bad to begin with. Aelious thinks the Xfire data is good on its face, when it isn't.
It provides a small idea of what is popular among a certain subsection of the gaming community, in particular, among Xfire users. Last I checked, WoW makes up more than 25% of the MMO market for instance, over 50% in fact. So the Xfire numbers, if anything show a marked selection against WoW players.
That data is biased as heck, making drawing conclusions about the MMO community based on the Raw data worthless.
Biases exists in any group of polled people. It's unavoidable. That's why the data needs to be validated after it's been collected. You're not eliminated the bias, you're defining the bias. Think about it, the question being answered is, "What do people like to play?" Well, what is that if not defining a bias?
People being selected "at random" doesn't always mean that they are called or tapped on the shoulder at random. It just means that the polling entity isn't selecting the people. The polling entity gets a random sample, and the validates the data until the sample is no longer random. It becomes a meaningful sample. This never happens with XFire. The problem isn't that the sample isn't random, the problem is that it stays random and never becomes meaningful. Not for free at least. If you've got enough money, you can get meaningful data from XFire.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
The sample is still a random sample. A good polling agency will work to eliminate potential biases as part of the questioning process and by using screening questions. But you can certainly have a sample that's essentially random (with the only bias being inevitable fluctuations). If you couldn't do that, then you'd have know way to tell what sort of results made sense because you can't tell what a population looks like without using polling in one form or another to begin with.
But you certainly run into immediate problems if you are polling a group of people that are biased in some way relative to the relevant population. It's very hard to get good data out of such a group. Using Xfire as-is is horrible for this reason.
The Xfire sample is only problematic if you can demonstrate a reason why more/fewer WoW players would use it compared to GW2.
For example, suppose only lefthanded redheads use XFire. Doesn't matter, unless there is some systemic reason more lefthanded redheads play one of the two games.
As long as the same percentage of players in each game use XFire, the ratio is meaningful.
I don't need to demonstrate a reason, I just need to show that it exists. Since WoW makes up over 50% of the market for MMOs and that doesn't show up on Xfire, then Xfire is biased. This shouldn't be surprising as casual gamers don't typically get additional programs to help with their gaming. In general, services that are designed for a particular sort of interest tend to attract more people heavily interested in that activity, but there could be other biases at play and probably are.
Huh? WOW makes up 50% of the number of daily MMO players (F2P, B2P and sub combined)? Where did you get that number?
XFire does not measure subscribers or revenue, it measures the number of XFire users, and the number of hours, they were playing that day. That's it.
Name a game that XFire indicated had lost a lot of daily players that hasn't in fact lost them.
AoC? nope they got that right.
SWTOR? Guess again.
Diablo 3? Nope they got that right too.