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Poll - How many actually use Xfire
Dragonantis
Member UncommonPosts: 974
in Guild Wars 2
These Xfire threads are a pain, so lets nip this in the butt, lets have a poll about it, how many of us in the MMORPG community use Xfire.
Comments
Oderint, dum metuant.
Just as Xfire trends are irrelevant to the games people associate them with. Your point?
The number of people who use x-fire is irrelevant, and not the problem with x-fire. You can get incredibly accurate data from a very small sample size. Most political polls for example only survey between 500 and 1500 people to represent the 100 million plus voters (in American politics). Guild wars 2 itself has between 9k and 12k on a given day. Many researchers would murder wives/husbands in their sleep for a samble that big. The problem with xfire is not the size of the sample, but the method of collecting the sample. Since x-fire users are self selected, there's no generalizability. So you can't compare game to game in any meaningful way regarding size of population. But you can detect trends within the sample itself and the game itself. X-fire is very good at detecting week to week trends within a game as long as the number of users for that game stays obove 300 or so. Lower than that and you start to see games with erratic points on their lines.
Posted this in another thread seems to fit better here.
Still trying to figure out how Xfire can determine success or failure for any game or current data which represents any significant information. Its a tool that gives some data and shows a potential correlation. The biggest problems are several variables that can't be accounted for and the incredbily low number of GW2 players who use Xfire. There has been research which shows that Xfire has an average of about 3% users in many of the recent most popular games at release. How is such a low percentage representive of the entire population? Also with such a low percentage, how can xfire be considered viable when it doesn't meet any minimum criteria for an accurate representation of any game? Common sense tells us numbers will die off after one month for any game. Does this define success or failure? How many times have those same numbers been wrong or even come back with a second life or surge? At this pointt there are to many failed criteria IMO to use xfire for any viable correlational data on games.
Please rewatch all the Andy Griffith Show episodes it is "Nip it in the Bud" R.I.P Andy and Barney
I also do not use Xfire.
No sane person would ever use X-Fire. However in the insane shooter and MOBA community it is widely spread. You cant rely on data, which is only provided by a single type of players
Its just like going to a NRA meeting and asking if they would vote democratic or republican.
Hodor!
Polling non MMO gamers about MMO's is relevant though?
You can if that type of players quits/gets less active at similar rate that the rest of the player base does. How can you check how similar it is? Well, one way is to check how well xfire trends have correlated with actual trends in previous games.
It doesn't really matter what % of people are sampled, what matters is the raw number of people. Anything over around 500 will get you margin of errors that are good enough for most pollsters who are looking at the voting of over 100 million people. Generally it is closer to 1000 than 500, but 500 is acceptable, and that is much smaller than 3% of the populatoin being looked at. In order to even get up to 3% for most polls you would have to survey over 30k people, which is overkill to most statisticians and pollsters.
Yeah, but don't the X-fire MMO trends always turn out to be correct? The mystery isn't "who is using x-fire", it's "why does it work?"
Xfire posts this info on its front page, not sure the point of this thread:
Xfire users: 22,278,278
Will your poll actually capture 100% of the mmorpg.com members who use xfire regularly? Will you be able to verify they are not giving false information?
What would knowing how many of the above members are also mmorpg members do for proving/disproving or validating/invalidating xfire trend numbers?
So let's say that you verifiably find out that 4500 mmorpg users are regular xfire users, now what do you do with that info?
What exactly are you nipping in the bud?
But no one is polling non MMO gamers about MMOs or supporting that idea, the only people captured are those players of a particular MMO who have XFire installed, ie MMO players.
What I found more interesting though, reading all these threads, is the irony of how those GW2 fans who'd been gleefully quoting the Xfire stats regarding SWTOR all the time, either have gone completely silent and mute on the topic of Xfire when it comes to GW2 now, or have been forced in the role of defender, using the exact same arguments that SWTOR fans used and they were all too happy to dismiss all the time a few months back.
Now that's irony at its best :-D:-)
Proof?
Not saying your wrong but all I rmeember form the past year is xfire onyl being brought up by Sandbox agenda posters and TSW fans and like any tiem before xfire numbers are onyl brought uip if they seem to gel with the poster's opinion and agenda.
It's pointless for even more reasons. You can click on the chart for any game and it will tell you how many different users played that game the day before. So XFire does the work for you.
All of these anti-XFire threads are from the GW2 crowd who can't handle that people are leaving GW2 just as rapidly as they've left the last several major MMOs to be released. They thought it would be different this time. That GW2 would change everything. Hell it would change the way all MMOs are created in the future. So to see people saying the same things about GW2 and to see the same rate of player loss as all the other MMOs is killing them. They could have avoided this feeling by having realistic expectations of GW2 and how many people would stick with it.
They also don't get (they probably actually do but pretend not to in order to try and say you can't go off of XFire numbers) the concept of taking a sample of the larger audience and using that to predict what is happening with the larger audience. The way they do a scientific study with only a couple thousand people to determine the same effects/results on a population of 7 billion.
Xfire trends seem to be pretty accurate in telling how well an mmorpg is doing.
Is GW2 the special snowflake where xfire is wildly inaccurate?
Sorry OP, but statistics don't work that way.... the few of you (on this forum) who don't use xfire won't change the nmubers enough to even make a report on it.
It would be like polling 3 dentists and then telling the world that 3/3 dentists prefer brand x.
The same people who were celebrating in the "gw2 has 4 times more players than wow on xfire" thread are now denouncing it.
The xfire numbers and graphs force 1 of 2 comments on here all of the time:
1) non-GW2 players - i am SO glad i didn't buy GW2 now
2) GW2 players - at least there is no sub so i can come back and play it someday
hopefully everybody realizes these 2 positions are not all inclusive... just seen all of the time
lol.. xfire rocks for bringing peepz to the table
SZ
:-)
Proof?
Not saying your wrong but all I rmeember form the past year is xfire onyl being brought up by Sandbox agenda posters and TSW fans and like any tiem before xfire numbers are onyl brought uip if they seem to gel with the poster's opinion and agenda.
I'm not gonna call up names (even if I could remember the exact names which I don't, just a thought I often had with some posts and posters, 'hmm, I wonder where you ppl will be when GW2 gets released and Xfire stats aren't as rosy, what'll you do') but I'll just use logic and reason instead, which should suffice too: like you said, xfire number were brought up to support a poster's opinion and agenda, so when Xfire stats were used to hammer on SWTOR, that was done by a number of hardcore SWG vets, WoW fans, themepark haters and GW2 fans alike. Generally by those who disliked SWTOR for various reasons, a number of hardcore GW2 fans included.As for how useful Xfire really is for trend analysis and numbers deduction, devoid of any biased agendas, well, that's a whole different discussion, and the OP has chosen a wrong angle for that debate.
What proof do you require, a photo of me smiling?
Ok then I completely agree with you then .Live by the sword and die by the sword and all.