[mod edit] the truth is, the game is healthy and growing. the company has political issues like any other, burn out, etc. but if u look at a survey also posted on reddit, ANet is one of the best gaming companies to work at.
They also lay off people all the time without anyone knowing. They didn't mention Hrouda which is a pretty important developer until someone found out. Flannum has not been heard from, for over a year. And these are the higher ups including Leads Developers. Imagine the smaller guy.
I also like when people post WvW pictures to show how packed GW2 is. If WvW reached capacity, I mean all their 51 servers WvW maps were completely full at the same time, it would have about 15k - 18k players, that is it. It is a well known fact that ANet changes the capacity of what the WvW maps can handle, and I am sure they do the same with servers too.
I do think now the flaws and internal structure of Anet and the general bad management of the game is revealing itself. Give it a couple of months and we can all see it.
Hrounda wasn't a "pretty important developer". He was one content designer on a single Living World team out of 4 teams total. He's been with Arena.Net for a grand total of 2.5 years max, so he's by no means a "higher up" either, nor a founder. His posts on Facebook seem to indicate he had a sour attitude with the development process and cycle methods that went on with the Living Story. In an office environment with project deadlines, those kind of attitudes are toxic to their teams and other people around them.
As for Fllanum, he still works for the company. His likaden profile says so and even Colin has commented on it. Sure he was forefront on hyping up the game prelaunch, but now it's more about mentoring the new hires to get into the groove of the Living Story aspects of development.
In fact, here's a "Where's Waldo?" for you to find Filanum in this screenshot of A.Net's development team from their 1yr Anniversary: http://www.flickr.com/photos/arenanet/9615993971/sizes/o/ (hint: look for the red & white baseball cap)
I have and had dozens and dozens of screenshots from Living Story events, Lion's Arch, invasions, world bosses, the front of CoF (figures), WvW, and the Mists for sPvP filled with players. Why don't I post them here? I'm too lazy to upload them to this site and you'll probably say they're Photoshopped or some other excuse. Whatever 'proof' I come up with that this game isn't dead and is brimming with life will be met with your fingers in your ears as you sing "la, la, la, la , la" to yourself.
They went from roughly 50 launch server to like 10 servers.
How is that growing?
*but I guess they never lose players ever since its not a sub game so even if one person buys the game a month its technically growing...
just less are playing now...a LOT less.
Right now, as I still have the client up in the background, there are 24 North American servers and 27 European servers that are online. That means in total there are 51 servers all together? Oh, but the sources. We must have sources
So by that I say you are completely full of spite and vinegar....for what reason? Why do you spread such blatant lies to try to manipulate public opinion against a video game that they enjoy so much? Is it you're jealous of their happiness with this very fun game?
They went from roughly 50 launch server to like 10 servers.
How is that growing?
*but I guess they never lose players ever since its not a sub game so even if one person buys the game a month its technically growing...
just less are playing now...a LOT less.
Right now, as I still have the client up in the background, there are 24 North American servers and 27 European servers that are online. That means in total there are 51 servers all together? Oh, but the sources. We must have sources
So by that I say you are completely full of spite and vinegar....for what reason? Why do you spread such blatant lies to try to manipulate public opinion against a video game that they enjoy so much? Is it you're jealous of their happiness with this very fun game?
In fairness, the 51 worlds are arbitrarily seperated entities for WvW purposes that are distributed over server resources dynamically in their respective datacenter. Arenanet could be adding or detracting actual hardware servers without anyone ever knowing.
In fairness, the 51 worlds are arbitrarily seperated entities for WvW purposes that are distributed over server resources dynamically in their respective datacenter. Arenanet could be adding or detracting actual hardware servers without anyone ever knowing.
I suppose that's true. The only thing we really know for a fact is that they've been increasing the population limits for the individual worlds, however they're defined.
Believe it or not, Anet actually DOESN'T want people farming this game. Which is funny, because a lot of players just keep searching for new ways to farm. The dungeon 'nerfs' are just the most recent update to try and combat this. Yes, it limits your ability to farm CoF path1 all day. But on the flip side, it also rewards you a lot more for actually playing some of the other couple dozen dungeon paths available.
This is so true because they didn't want people farming in the original game either.
Those are authorization servers, not world servers.
Those are the servers that just channel people logging in, make sure people have the up to date client, and so on.
Uhm.
You really have no idea what the difference is though, probably.
Wiki isn't out of date, you just don't understand the difference.
Get Bandaid47 to the Burn Center quick!
Back to the topic at hand, the update brought back a looooooooot of players in WvW. I can't say much of the PvE aspect since I'm more of a PvP player. Nameplates everywhere since my toaster couldn't handle some of the models. Queues in EB and... one of the Borderlands?
Still anecdotal if the player base is growing. What I care most is that the game keeps this rate of updates and that the updates bolster the game up. This update was needed for me as a WvW, and I'm back in business.
There was an official announcement a month ago and a guy posted the numbers 3 pages back and noone touched on the subject? Can't even find a thread that mentions this on here. Dubyateeeff?
0.5 million sold since January is worth discussing, IMO, especially coming off the heels of some wildly optimistic predictions of a ~4-5 million sold after year 1 ...
Granted, the numbers from China aren't in yet, but since they don't count as "people" (they never did in the WoW subs discussions), it's moot.
There was an official announcement a month ago and a guy posted the numbers 3 pages back and noone touched on the subject? Can't even find a thread that mentions this on here. Dubyateeeff?
0.5 million sold since January is worth discussing, IMO, especially coming off the heels of some wildly optimistic predictions of a ~4-5 million sold after year 1 ...
Granted, the numbers from China aren't in yet, but since they don't count as "people" (they never did in the WoW subs discussions), it's moot.
Nah, it would contradict the story of huge success and therefore does not fit in
There was an official announcement a month ago and a guy posted the numbers 3 pages back and noone touched on the subject? Can't even find a thread that mentions this on here. Dubyateeeff?
0.5 million sold since January is worth discussing, IMO, especially coming off the heels of some wildly optimistic predictions of a ~4-5 million sold after year 1 ...
Granted, the numbers from China aren't in yet, but since they don't count as "people" (they never did in the WoW subs discussions), it's moot.
Well, quarterly report should be public soon ;P
And no, China for WoW doesnt count as SUBs because they arent subs.
Its ok to say "x" people play WoW, its not ok to say "WoW has "x" subs"
In the end its what point of view you consider: purely number of people playing or revenues. And line is not there in WoW because not every person that plays WoW in China = box+15$/month, it may be "worth" only a couple of cents by the method that Blizzard uses to "count subs"
Funny how China players != paying customers (they in actual fact are), but boxes sold = active players for GW2.
Giving out vague numbers like ~2,4 logins per week (talk about arbitrary) and what was it, 450k concurrent users? That doesn't help matters in terms of inspiring confidence, but the numbers sort of do:
When WoW had about 11 million subs in 2008 it had ~1,8 concurrent users (unoffiical http://www.warcraftrealms.com/temp/activity.htm + their offical statement of 1 mill conc in China), and unless MMO player habits changed, they should still play a game about the same so gw2 conc users would translate into about 2,9 million active players (at best).
Supposedly, GW2 doesn't require the time invested needed for WoW farming (even though that certainly turned out to be wrong) so I guess it's possible the concurrent users figure holds at some specific prime time, when the data was collected, supporting the high active player count (in which case, good job), but it's likely less than that.
If I'm wrong and the average GW2 player spends nowhere near the time a WoW player did in 2008, the official Anet numers are suspect at worst, or taken at a time when concurrency was at it's peak, never to be reached again, at best.
Funny how China players != paying customers (they in actual fact are), but boxes sold = active players for GW2.
Giving out vague numbers like ~2,4 logins per week (talk about arbitrary) and what was it, 450k concurrent users? That doesn't help matters in terms of inspiring confidence, but the numbers sort of do:
When WoW had about 11 million subs in 2008 it had ~1,8 concurrent users (unoffiical http://www.warcraftrealms.com/temp/activity.htm + their offical statement of 1 mill conc in China), and unless MMO player habits changed, they should still play a game about the same so gw2 conc users would translate into about 2,9 million active players.
Supposedly, GW2 doesn't require the time invested needed for WoW farming (even though that certainly turned out to be wrong) so I guess it's possible the concurrent users figure holds at some specific prime time, when the data was collected, supporting the high active player count (in which case, good job).
If I'm wrong and the average GW2 player spends nowhere near the time a WoW player did in 2008, the official Anet numers are suspect at worst, or taken at a time when concurrency was at it's peak, never to be reached again, at best.
I like your post because it has highs, lows, and makes sense.
anyhow. it's hard to compare gw2 to wow. because one is b2p and one is a subscription. gw2 is after box sales, wow after subscription. it would make sense to me that wow (forget that it has more players) is after a concurrent players number. moreso than gw2, who's sales dept, is focued on selling boxes to make money over keeping people playing.
in the end is doesn't really matter. in the words of 'Annie', "the sun will come out, tomorrow."
Funny how China players != paying customers (they in actual fact are), but boxes sold = active players for GW2.
Giving out vague numbers like ~2,4 logins per week (talk about arbitrary) and what was it, 450k concurrent users? That doesn't help matters in terms of inspiring confidence, but the numbers sort of do:
When WoW had about 11 million subs in 2008 it had ~1,8 concurrent users (unoffiical http://www.warcraftrealms.com/temp/activity.htm + their offical statement of 1 mill conc in China), and unless MMO player habits changed, they should still play a game about the same so gw2 conc users would translate into about 2,9 million active players (at best).
Supposedly, GW2 doesn't require the time invested needed for WoW farming (even though that certainly turned out to be wrong) so I guess it's possible the concurrent users figure holds at some specific prime time, when the data was collected, supporting the high active player count (in which case, good job), but it's likely less than that.
If I'm wrong and the average GW2 player spends nowhere near the time a WoW player did in 2008, the official Anet numers are suspect at worst, or taken at a time when concurrency was at it's peak, never to be reached again, at best.
I guess because a box sold is a box sold and chinese players are paying customers but not a $15/month sub customers.
The game clearly is doing well, with no server merges and no word about layoffs.
Last financial report had GW2 revenues at $25M.
If GW2 wasn't doing well financial they would be rushing an xpac.
Currently playing: GW2 Going cardboard starter kit: Ticket to ride, Pandemic, Carcassonne, Dominion, 7 Wonders
Funny how China players != paying customers (they in actual fact are), but boxes sold = active players for GW2.
When WoW had about 11 million subs in 2008
No. Chinese players = paying customers but they are not in fact paying a 15 dollar a month subscription.
And boxes sold are not active players for GW2, either.
These are all separate figures, and logical people should know that. You're making strange blanket statements here.
When they say 'WoW had 11 million subs', you have to remember that Chinese people were counted if they played at least 5 minutes during a month timespan. Which is fine for the purpose of measuring players (Sort of. I mean, 5 minutes during a month hardly seems like an active player, but whatever), but is not very useful at all when people keep making the ridiculous calculation of 11 million players x 15 dollars a month (Since most of those players are not paying a monthly sub, despite being called 'subscribers')
There is a very specific reason why people count the Chinese customers as different (They are), and argue they shouldn't count as subs (Since they're not, actually, paying a subscription). It's not to pick on China, it's just because WoW is using a different pricing model in China due to Chinese regulations and their online gaming culture. It'd probably make more sense to say 'WoW had 11 million customers', since they don't actually have subscriptions in China. I'm not sure why they insist on calling it subs. Guess it probably sounds better in marketing.
The usual reason for why companies say what they do.
Its pretty obvious all these threads claiming GW2 is growing, is nothing but PR
Sadly, it will work on many gamers, who will buy the game only to find out how dead it is
The population peaked early on, then dropped for a while, steadied out.
It's supposed to have been growing the past 2 months or so though.
Hard to prove whether it's growing lately or not.
Easy to disprove your assertion that it's dead though. Every single world boss I go to and Lion's Arch are still populated even at ridiculous times of night. If I'm not fast to go to an invasion, I end up in overflow. Tequatl is in overflow most of the time. Sometimes even Lion's Arch is.
Every map I go to, I run across some people.
Sometimes I even have to queue for WvW (Usually I don't because I basically keep Oceanic hours).
Its pretty obvious all these threads claiming GW2 is growing, is nothing but PR
Sadly, it will work on many gamers, who will buy the game only to find out how dead it is
Ya, that is the reason. Keep on peddling your anti-PR, it actually helps GW2. The more advertising it gets, good or bad, makes other gamer's curious.
It's a very solid mmorpg and for $40 (starting next patch) and no subscription, there is nothing better on the market. That includes PC or Console imho.
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, Death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
Its pretty obvious all these threads claiming GW2 is growing, is nothing but PR
Sadly, it will work on many gamers, who will buy the game only to find out how dead it is
Ya, that is the reason. Keep on peddling your anti-PR, it actually helps GW2. The more advertising it gets, good or bad, makes other gamer's curious.
It's a very solid mmorpg and for $40 (starting next patch) and no subscription, there is nothing better on the market. That includes PC or Console imho.
Purely subjective
But the point stands, a solid game doesn't need PR, because word of mouth between gamers is all that's needed
We have seen a dozen of these threads over the last couple weeks. That makes me suspicious, and I'm not alone
There was an official announcement a month ago and a guy posted the numbers 3 pages back and noone touched on the subject? Can't even find a thread that mentions this on here. Dubyateeeff?
0.5 million sold since January is worth discussing, IMO, especially coming off the heels of some wildly optimistic predictions of a ~4-5 million sold after year 1 ...
Granted, the numbers from China aren't in yet, but since they don't count as "people" (they never did in the WoW subs discussions), it's moot.
Well, quarterly report should be public soon ;P
Revenue will be down. That is for certain. People will interpret that how they will.
Its pretty obvious all these threads claiming GW2 is growing, is nothing but PR
Sadly, it will work on many gamers, who will buy the game only to find out how dead it is
Ya, that is the reason. Keep on peddling your anti-PR, it actually helps GW2. The more advertising it gets, good or bad, makes other gamer's curious.
It's a very solid mmorpg and for $40 (starting next patch) and no subscription, there is nothing better on the market. That includes PC or Console imho.
Purely subjective
But the point stands, a solid game doesn't need PR, because word of mouth between gamers is all that's needed
We have seen a dozen of these threads over the last couple weeks. That makes me suspicious, and I'm not alone
.... 'word of mouth between gamers' 'unless the gamers say something I disagree with in which case they're actually being paid by a company'.
Comments
Hrounda wasn't a "pretty important developer". He was one content designer on a single Living World team out of 4 teams total. He's been with Arena.Net for a grand total of 2.5 years max, so he's by no means a "higher up" either, nor a founder. His posts on Facebook seem to indicate he had a sour attitude with the development process and cycle methods that went on with the Living Story. In an office environment with project deadlines, those kind of attitudes are toxic to their teams and other people around them.
As for Fllanum, he still works for the company. His likaden profile says so and even Colin has commented on it. Sure he was forefront on hyping up the game prelaunch, but now it's more about mentoring the new hires to get into the groove of the Living Story aspects of development.
In fact, here's a "Where's Waldo?" for you to find Filanum in this screenshot of A.Net's development team from their 1yr Anniversary: http://www.flickr.com/photos/arenanet/9615993971/sizes/o/ (hint: look for the red & white baseball cap)
I have and had dozens and dozens of screenshots from Living Story events, Lion's Arch, invasions, world bosses, the front of CoF (figures), WvW, and the Mists for sPvP filled with players. Why don't I post them here? I'm too lazy to upload them to this site and you'll probably say they're Photoshopped or some other excuse. Whatever 'proof' I come up with that this game isn't dead and is brimming with life will be met with your fingers in your ears as you sing "la, la, la, la , la" to yourself.
They went from roughly 50 launch server to like 10 servers.
How is that growing?
*but I guess they never lose players ever since its not a sub game so even if one person buys the game a month its technically growing...
just less are playing now...a LOT less.
.... they've only added servers since launch, never taken any away.
But uh.
Hmm.
Don't bother breaking your misinformed streak.
Right now, as I still have the client up in the background, there are 24 North American servers and 27 European servers that are online. That means in total there are 51 servers all together? Oh, but the sources. We must have sources
So by that I say you are completely full of spite and vinegar....for what reason? Why do you spread such blatant lies to try to manipulate public opinion against a video game that they enjoy so much? Is it you're jealous of their happiness with this very fun game?
http://gw2status.com/
http://www.mmoserverstatus.com/guild_wars_2
I have sources. dated wiki?
No you don't.
Those are authorization servers, not world servers.
Those are the servers that just channel people logging in, make sure people have the up to date client, and so on.
Uhm.
You really have no idea what the difference is though, probably.
Wiki isn't out of date, you just don't understand the difference.
In fairness, the 51 worlds are arbitrarily seperated entities for WvW purposes that are distributed over server resources dynamically in their respective datacenter. Arenanet could be adding or detracting actual hardware servers without anyone ever knowing.
I suppose that's true. The only thing we really know for a fact is that they've been increasing the population limits for the individual worlds, however they're defined.
Oderint, dum metuant.
This is so true because they didn't want people farming in the original game either.
Get Bandaid47 to the Burn Center quick!
Back to the topic at hand, the update brought back a looooooooot of players in WvW. I can't say much of the PvE aspect since I'm more of a PvP player. Nameplates everywhere since my toaster couldn't handle some of the models. Queues in EB and... one of the Borderlands?
Still anecdotal if the player base is growing. What I care most is that the game keeps this rate of updates and that the updates bolster the game up. This update was needed for me as a WvW, and I'm back in business.
There was an official announcement a month ago and a guy posted the numbers 3 pages back and noone touched on the subject? Can't even find a thread that mentions this on here. Dubyateeeff?
0.5 million sold since January is worth discussing, IMO, especially coming off the heels of some wildly optimistic predictions of a ~4-5 million sold after year 1 ...
Granted, the numbers from China aren't in yet, but since they don't count as "people" (they never did in the WoW subs discussions), it's moot.
http://lyrics.iztok.org/verse/Lynyrd_Skynyrd/Simple_Man/80615
Nah, it would contradict the story of huge success and therefore does not fit in
Well, quarterly report should be public soon ;P
And no, China for WoW doesnt count as SUBs because they arent subs.
Its ok to say "x" people play WoW, its not ok to say "WoW has "x" subs"
In the end its what point of view you consider: purely number of people playing or revenues. And line is not there in WoW because not every person that plays WoW in China = box+15$/month, it may be "worth" only a couple of cents by the method that Blizzard uses to "count subs"
Funny how China players != paying customers (they in actual fact are), but boxes sold = active players for GW2.
Giving out vague numbers like ~2,4 logins per week (talk about arbitrary) and what was it, 450k concurrent users? That doesn't help matters in terms of inspiring confidence, but the numbers sort of do:
When WoW had about 11 million subs in 2008 it had ~1,8 concurrent users (unoffiical http://www.warcraftrealms.com/temp/activity.htm + their offical statement of 1 mill conc in China), and unless MMO player habits changed, they should still play a game about the same so gw2 conc users would translate into about 2,9 million active players (at best).
Supposedly, GW2 doesn't require the time invested needed for WoW farming (even though that certainly turned out to be wrong) so I guess it's possible the concurrent users figure holds at some specific prime time, when the data was collected, supporting the high active player count (in which case, good job), but it's likely less than that.
If I'm wrong and the average GW2 player spends nowhere near the time a WoW player did in 2008, the official Anet numers are suspect at worst, or taken at a time when concurrency was at it's peak, never to be reached again, at best.
http://lyrics.iztok.org/verse/Lynyrd_Skynyrd/Simple_Man/80615
I like your post because it has highs, lows, and makes sense.
anyhow. it's hard to compare gw2 to wow. because one is b2p and one is a subscription. gw2 is after box sales, wow after subscription. it would make sense to me that wow (forget that it has more players) is after a concurrent players number. moreso than gw2, who's sales dept, is focued on selling boxes to make money over keeping people playing.
in the end is doesn't really matter. in the words of 'Annie', "the sun will come out, tomorrow."
I guess because a box sold is a box sold and chinese players are paying customers but not a $15/month sub customers.
The game clearly is doing well, with no server merges and no word about layoffs.
Last financial report had GW2 revenues at $25M.
If GW2 wasn't doing well financial they would be rushing an xpac.
Currently playing: GW2
Going cardboard starter kit: Ticket to ride, Pandemic, Carcassonne, Dominion, 7 Wonders
No. Chinese players = paying customers but they are not in fact paying a 15 dollar a month subscription.
And boxes sold are not active players for GW2, either.
These are all separate figures, and logical people should know that. You're making strange blanket statements here.
When they say 'WoW had 11 million subs', you have to remember that Chinese people were counted if they played at least 5 minutes during a month timespan. Which is fine for the purpose of measuring players (Sort of. I mean, 5 minutes during a month hardly seems like an active player, but whatever), but is not very useful at all when people keep making the ridiculous calculation of 11 million players x 15 dollars a month (Since most of those players are not paying a monthly sub, despite being called 'subscribers')
There is a very specific reason why people count the Chinese customers as different (They are), and argue they shouldn't count as subs (Since they're not, actually, paying a subscription). It's not to pick on China, it's just because WoW is using a different pricing model in China due to Chinese regulations and their online gaming culture. It'd probably make more sense to say 'WoW had 11 million customers', since they don't actually have subscriptions in China. I'm not sure why they insist on calling it subs. Guess it probably sounds better in marketing.
The usual reason for why companies say what they do.
Its pretty obvious all these threads claiming GW2 is growing, is nothing but PR
Sadly, it will work on many gamers, who will buy the game only to find out how dead it is
The population peaked early on, then dropped for a while, steadied out.
It's supposed to have been growing the past 2 months or so though.
Hard to prove whether it's growing lately or not.
Easy to disprove your assertion that it's dead though. Every single world boss I go to and Lion's Arch are still populated even at ridiculous times of night. If I'm not fast to go to an invasion, I end up in overflow. Tequatl is in overflow most of the time. Sometimes even Lion's Arch is.
Every map I go to, I run across some people.
Sometimes I even have to queue for WvW (Usually I don't because I basically keep Oceanic hours).
Pretty healthy feeling for 'dead'.
Ya, that is the reason. Keep on peddling your anti-PR, it actually helps GW2. The more advertising it gets, good or bad, makes other gamer's curious.
It's a very solid mmorpg and for $40 (starting next patch) and no subscription, there is nothing better on the market. That includes PC or Console imho.
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, Death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
Purely subjective
But the point stands, a solid game doesn't need PR, because word of mouth between gamers is all that's needed
We have seen a dozen of these threads over the last couple weeks. That makes me suspicious, and I'm not alone
Revenue will be down. That is for certain. People will interpret that how they will.
.... 'word of mouth between gamers' 'unless the gamers say something I disagree with in which case they're actually being paid by a company'.
Sure.