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AoC and Xfire - steady growth
Aceundor
Member Posts: 482
There are now 1700+ xfire players enjoying AoC on sundays. Nice growth from the about 1000 players in december.
http://www.xfire.com/games/aoc/Age_of_Conan_Hyborian_Adventures/
Just aonther piece of proof that things are going in the right direction with this game.
Now, please tell me how its been manipulated by Funcom since december (and maybe why they didnt manipulate it in october......)
Originally posted by BishopB:
Are a lot of the trolls just angry kids with old gaming hardware?
Comments
Hey man this are numbers from sunday when most AoC population is playing and if you want to discuss Xfire numbers this sunday AoC have suffered lost compared to sunday so I'm not seeing nothing great there considering I remember when AoC was on sunday 41# on Xfire most of time this time just 44#.
I should have made myself clearer.
1) I am comparing number of players in xfire on sundays, and only sundays. (about 1.000 in december and 1700 yesterday)
2) I am not comparing it with other games so ranking is of no intterest to me as it is relative.
Originally posted by BishopB:
Are a lot of the trolls just angry kids with old gaming hardware?
Agreed. Certain games are wreaking havoc with the times right now.
C&C 3, WH40k- Dawn of War II, Runes of Magic (racing up the charts thanks to the fact it is so much like WoW, that WoW players get confused and play this game instead...oh, and the free part helps)
Basically Xfire "Rankings" work kind of like MMORPG review ratings...changing based on new entries, scoring values, etc.
But, yes, the number of players is much higher now. That rocks!
Where i can see Xfire numbers users playing per day for december?Maybe I suck but I have never found reports for playing per day for any other day than today.
Where i can see Xfire numbers users playing per day for december?Maybe I suck but I have never found reports for playing per day for any other day than today.
Perhaps it's just something he remembers...
I remember it beeing down to 800 around that time, but I'm not so sure if that was on a sunday or not.
It is preferable not to travel with a dead man.
Where i can see Xfire numbers users playing per day for december?Maybe I suck but I have never found reports for playing per day for any other day than today.
Perhaps it's just something he remembers...
I remember it beeing down to 800 around that time, but I'm not so sure if that was on a sunday or not.
I actually have the numbers archived on my blog. Check the following for the data at this time..
November - 1032
December - 1023
And of interest...all the way back in October, they were around #39 and had about 1500 playing.
So, we can see how the downfall went, and now the major turnaround. Pretty impressive!
Great work Craig!
That is great for Age of Conan if that increase in XFire players means an increase in subscriptions.
I guess we will find out in May when they announce the Q1/09 results.
i thought we learned not to use xfire as a tool to measure mmo's anymore? i remember the flame wars we used to have over aoc and war about xfire.
That's pretty impressive great work with doing this.
But anyway I dont think there is any major turnaround this should come with 1.5 and trials.It's more likely more peoples came back after half year what's changed or (maybe) more fanboys using Xfire after reading this forums lol no one really can tell.
Very nice job keeping screens on your blog. Its now bookmarked. Thanks for proving that I am not full of BS (as would probably been suggested by someone more negative than me)
Also, first time in ages that a "pro AoC" thread gets 10 answers without any trolls!!
Originally posted by BishopB:
Are a lot of the trolls just angry kids with old gaming hardware?
Where i can see Xfire numbers users playing per day for december?Maybe I suck but I have never found reports for playing per day for any other day than today.
Perhaps it's just something he remembers...
I remember it beeing down to 800 around that time, but I'm not so sure if that was on a sunday or not.
I actually have the numbers archived on my blog. Check the following for the data at this time..
November - 1032
December - 1023
And of interest...all the way back in October, they were around #39 and had about 1500 playing.
So, we can see how the downfall went, and now the major turnaround. Pretty impressive!
Great work Craig!
great post and great blog, i know those things require a lot of effort to keep and maintain regularly...
-blog bookmarked-
Ranking seems important because it indicates whether AOC is doing better specifically, or if people are just gaming more in general, or even if people are just using XFire more.
When I want a single-player story, I'll play a single-player game. When I play an MMO, I want a massively multiplayer world.
It would be very strange if the game wasn't rising abit. Quite alot of WOW players have nothing to do now so many MMO games are showing increased activity.
Its sad to see the state of AOC - considering that 90% of what has been going on is to be blamed on the company that released an unfinished product - fooled 800k ppl in buying that unfinished product and then expect everyone to keep playing.
I wonder if AOC should have gone down the Darkfall route of realseasing limited amount of copies at start and give those ppl extra playing time (34 days for Darkfall) at start cause of downtime and known issues that would be coming up. If I remember right - Funcom compensated 800k ppl with 1 day for the first month of AOC...
What I find most intresting atm tho is that the game director is talking about "word of the mouth" in pretty much every single interview relying on his PR group to fool even more ppl into buying the game before it is launched for free trial. Thats pathetic and a clear sign that the game can not stand on its own. It has to rely on fanboys to get ppl to buy it while most other games offer free trial to give ppl real chance to even see if it runs on their PC.
Im not gonna go into the discussion of how accurate Xfire is of predicting real numbers or even showing signs of more or less ppl playing it. Less than 2000 ppl playing means that its easy to manipulate the counter by rallying a group of fanboys and then use the "word of mouth" to make it look like the game is all of a sudden doing great.
The X fire users have been increasing for the last 4 months, but for the three months prior to Feb 22nd, there has been NO growth. So I'm inclined to believe any boost in Xfire activity is due to an outlier of casual subs logging on at the same time, it is a casual MMO, or Xfire manipulation.
Internet website traffic isn't up, in fact it is down over the last month. Also, AoC has not changed it's Xfire rank of 44 in a while so the other games have more player activity.
EDIT: The advocates need to find a new marketing tactic other than Growth spamming. AoC went from 800,000 accounts to under 100k subs, so I'm sorry to say, growth spamming won't cut it when the game has such a rock bottom sub base.
Use the used car slogan, "Age of Conan, Funcom is losing money on this deal!" 33 Million USD and counting
Funcom has reviewed all of its assets relevant for
impairment testing. This process has led to
recognition of an impairment loss of around
3,1 MUSD for Age of Conan due to a decrease in
numbers of subscribers for the game. Funcom Q4 10 report.
http://forums.ageofconan.com/showpost.php?p=2926123&postcount=7 500 mains/alts on Tyranny in past 30 days - instead of merge servers let's open a new PvP server, again! http://forums-eu.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=106427
Agreed that there is a sudden spike on sunday compared to the last month or so. There might be several reasons for that, even stat manipulation. However one point that makes stat manipulation in xfire unlikely in this case, is that the rank remains the same. When other games have been bosted in xfire due to "manipulation" (EVE/LOTRO) they have climed in rank. So read this boost from about 1500 to 1700 players on a sunday as either a growth in xfires genreal population or an increase of players in AoC. (casual or not)
Still xfire is a lousy tool and i only see it as an indiciation that the negative trend from last year has been turned. So if this continues its only a matter of time before Funcom becomes profitable ( i beleive its between 100 - 150k players according to a fincancial analysis i read)
Again - this positive trend needs to continue for a month or two before the figures go black. Buts its almost there...
Originally posted by BishopB:
Are a lot of the trolls just angry kids with old gaming hardware?
Where is the growth in Sundays?
Mar 22nd 7245
Mar 15th 7543
Mar 8th 6969
Mar 1st 7505
Do you just say 'growth' and hope nobody bothers to check Xfire? To me, it looks like a 5% decrease since March 1st. I don't care about subscriptions, or even the financial part of AOC... but you make yourself look like a liar when you say 'growth'.
Where is the growth in Sundays?
Mar 22nd 7245
Mar 15th 7543
Mar 8th 6969
Mar 1st 7505
Do you just say 'growth' and hope nobody bothers to check Xfire? To me, it looks like a 5% decrease since March 1st. I don't care about subscriptions, or even the financial part of AOC... but you make yourself look like a liar when you say 'growth'.
I already explained this here...
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/post/2737867#2737867
The numbers you list is time played and not "number" of players. Read this full thread again where I show proof of growth by representation of number of players and not time. Time can be affected by so many factors that you cannot show growth based on those numbers. Lets say I had dinner with my family this past Sunday, so I played for an hour, compared to the previous week where I played 4 hours...I still count no matter how long I played.
I hope that makes sense to you.
Yep, makes complete sense. So the average person is playing significantly less? Don't mean to be rude, but it's basic algebra.
Total Played Time = Players x average amount played
If total played time is constant (based on the last 4 Sundays).. and you say the number of players increased significantly(spiked).. then it means the average amount played decreased just as significantly.
I don't know. I was just going by the graph on Xfire.
Ok, I also hate to be rude, but since you cannot be bothered to go back and re-read this thread....
First, according to YOUR hypothesis time played should be constant. But, why would that be if I played 1 hour one weekend due to a prior engagement , but then played 4 hours another weekend. This STILL does not affect overall number of players, so your "basic" algebra does NOT take into account fluctuations in playtime.
Time fluctuates according to the player or according to the service (for example, previously I have shown that an outage for Xfire totally wreaks havoc with the times for the games, so that ALL games suffer huge losses...this explains the huge drop on March 8th, which is when Xfire had server issues). So, we do not know why these times show such spikes, but I can wager it is due to the reasons I have shown so far.
But, to look at this even further..going back to a previous post here, I had shown in October the game was averaging about 1500 players, yet was cranking about 6000+ hours
The game was still in it's newness phase at that time, but in November is when it started to drop.
October showed the game was ranked #39. But, now more time is being played, and more players are playing, but the game has dropped on the chart. Why would that be? Because like most "calculations" in math, it is averaged across time and across various games.
So, we have two conundrums. Fluctuations in time and changes in the market for games and how Xfire averages those scores.
So, to reiterate. You base growth on players and not times on Xfire. Since the change is so miniscule, the only way to know for sure how AoC is doing is how many people are logging in. And I have shown that more players are logging in now than they were in October, November and December of last year. That's pretty cool!
Cheers