Considering that Xfire is installed on perhaps 3 out of 10 kits. I do agree that it's not the most accurate statistic but then again, it is a good hint. If you wish to ignore it then by all means, be my guest but hints are always good in my book.
That's how I usualy decide if the next FPS game is worth playing. Then again, as an FPS gamer, it is much more comon to see Xfire since we can follow each other through that software. A bit like Steam...
2 weeks ago, I was wondering if I should reinstall battlefield 2 and grab the latest 1.5 patch. Thanks to Xfire statistic, I had a strong "HINT" that it was still very much played. The hint turned out to be correct... The game is full of people and most of the old servers back in 2006 or 07 are still open and rocking with people.
So no, don't do a University thesis with Xfire but it is a good source of unnofficial information.
I know a surprising number of people that are quiting Aion and returning to Age of Conan. AoC is almost ready for release now that they have had an extra year to polish it up.
When you take a random sampling of gamers and track their trends, you get a fairly good indication of a general trend. It's exactly the same concept that political polls, television polls, music polls etc. are based upon. Just over 1000 people, for example, and what they watch, decides what our entire country of 50 million will have offered to them on public television. A random sampling over such a small number of people. Are Xfire users a random sample? Yes. The only thing they have in common is that they all decided to sign up for Xfire. Is it a fact that among Xfire users, both of these games' playtime has decreased drastically since release? Yes.
How you can dispute that is beyond me, considering we all know that World of Warcraft is the biggest MMO, Guild Wars is about the only MMO in the Western world to come close to WoW's success and that both AoC and WAR have declined rapidly since release. Look at random MMO's like Ryzom or Vanguard, check their estimated subscription figures, then check their places on the Xfire list. In the large majority of cases, subscription figures are reflected by Xfire rank.
So whether you like it or not, Xfire stats do mean SOMETHING. They, at the very least, mean that among Xfire users, these two games aren't as played as they once were. That disproves your first three sentences. However, I, for one, believe they are a far greater indication.
Wow.........
There is a reason you and I dont run the major polling done for politics and Gallup does. They have to put a lot of effort into ensuring the poll is random and not biased. Quoting Xfire statistics is like me calling everyone that goes to my church and all my customers at the gun range and saying that my data shows a trend proving McCain can beat Obama in 2012.
Xfire is so accurate it can tell you which game is the most sold of all times: The Sims series. Oh wait.. They are FAR down on the list with a combined total of 4372 hours logged. Conclusion, The Sims is a massive fail. This years biggest game, Batman: Arkham Asylum? 65th. Guess noone bought that game. So much for a random sampling of gamers (you know, not everyone plays online), so much for the validity of the data, so much for the people who keep bringing them up.
this post makes to much sence .x fire fan boys just dont understand that its NOT a good sampling .just look at todays top 10 games ..
GAME MINUTES PLAYED
World of Warcraft 3,601,709
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Multiplayer 2,589,755
Call of Duty 2 Multiplayer 1,334,161
Aion 744,896
Counter-Strike: Source 482,223
Battlefield 2 352,789
Warcraft III - The Frozen Throne 316,369
Silkroad Online 252,896
Heroes of Newerth 250,855
Call of Duty: World at War Multiplayer 204,346
the only wow killer could be call of duty 4 by that list. rember we cant quesiton the intgrity of the numbers. i know for fact some games do not register time corectly in xfire.i know also it does not see all the games on your ssytem .you have to jump threw hoops to get it to see them when your playing them.which becomes more of a hassle than its worth.
also by the list that means silkroads is better than every other mmo out their than aion or wow.every other game is epic fail cause it cant get into that top 10.
an intresting enuff Heroes of Newerth on their site still has beta going on?
"Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing." Robert E. Howard, The Tower of the Elephant (1933)
1. Xfire numbers are indicative but highly inaccurate for determining an MMOG's subscriber numbers.
2. Xfire numbers are perfectly viable for identifying trends in an MMOG's subscriber numbers, keeping in mind any current or recent "use Xfire!" campaigns.
I have to agree. If you're not monitoring EVERY player, then you're not getting an accurate reading. All you're getting is.....the number of hours XFIRE USERS play. Period.
I've have YET, after about 15 years playing MMOs, to meet more than one or two people in any of the MMOs I have played, that actually USE XFire. Presently, I don't know one single solitary soul (other than people who talk about it here on the forums) that use XFire....not ONE.
Now...I have to agree that those two games are quite probably in decline with subs and played hours, however....XFire is not a good measurement of whether that is factual. You've shown nothing except that those games are declining in the number of XFire users that play them.
I feel frustrated that neither one grabbed hold and took off but in a way I am quietly satisfied as this may show big firms that making an MMO that follow a simple formula, albeit with some interesting tweaks, won't cut it and firms need to really develop innovative gameplay. The numbers below are just tragic.... And for the record, yes I played both and even enjoyed AoC to a certain degree.
Uh, no.
We don't need innovative gameplay. Actually we need a simple formula with some interesting tweaks. No one has done that recently, and certainly NOT AoC nor WAR.
Both were tragically flawed, that is why they suck.
We don't need First Person Shooter combat, or Perma Death, or anything else "innovative". Just make a solid game with decent graphics. That would be a great start.
I distinctly remember one guy on waralliance forums using xfire in to calculate a number of 200k +/-50k, that was before EA released their earnings report and revealed the number 300k.
Its not THAT accurate, but at this point its the only thing we have.
Not that many players use xfire, but as shown in a post above, judgnig by the top 10 games, its userbase is pretty diverse and random, which should be enough to form a representative sample.
never loged on it ,never saw any of my friends log onto Xfire so it means nothing for me if you know subs number that is something but statistics of those addons can and are basicly very wrong since they cannot track all people who are in game
Just quoting my signature: 1. Xfire numbers are indicative but highly inaccurate for determining an MMOG's subscriber numbers.
2. Xfire numbers are perfectly viable for identifying trends in an MMOG's subscriber numbers, keeping in mind any current or recent "use Xfire!" campaigns.
Quoting your own signature? It must be true then...
Once again for the record I am not using Xfire as a 100% guideline here. However if 2 games, mentioned in this threa, where above 40k hours and now dropped down to 2500 hours, either people on mass have stopped using Xfire or they don't play the games anymore. Its a trend and even though its based on Xfire, there is historical data there to show a movement one way or another. Personally I don't need Xfire to tell me this trend since everyone I know including myself, don't play either game anymore. I just thought it was interesting to see such low numbers for 2 very big releases.
Personally I may still jump into AoC for a month when I get bored to just level a bit more to 80 but right now FE has answered my MMO needs.
Once again for the record I am not using Xfire as a 100% guideline here. However if 2 games, mentioned in this threa, where above 40k hours and now dropped down to 2500 hours, either people on mass have stopped using Xfire or they don't play the games anymore. Its a trend and even though its based on Xfire, there is historical data there to show a movement one way or another. Personally I don't need Xfire to tell me this trend since everyone I know including myself, don't play either game anymore. I just thought it was interesting to see such low numbers for 2 very big releases. Personally I may still jump into AoC for a month when I get bored to just level a bit more to 80 but right now FE has answered my MMO needs.
Listen, I ALWAYS used Xfire as a measuring tool ever since the launch of Vanguard and Lotro.
It always was a good measuring stick, because it traces how the evolution of a game was.
Both AoC and War were VERY good selling games (with around 800K sales at the launching weeks !!!).
And then you could follow ... the downward trends and even calculate the number of players with 2 references: 1. the now famous WOW-EVE-LOTRO reference "measuring stick" (5M - 300K - 180K) as a guidance AND 2. the number of servers a game has available.
But the technique is known now and with Aion for the first time XFire stats don't measure up against the tools of WOW-EVE-Lotro and the server numbers of that game.
Suddenly a "new" game is launched with 3X (3.5 even) number of EVE players on Xfire while it only has 32 servers and a launching pad of 400 K players. So that means ... the sample of 11K Xfire Aion players is not representative. Clearly this game doesn't have >1M players after 1 week. The servers simply lack, the sales figures are in NO way near War and AoC and so you have to ask ... why?
An 100% error rate on 11K XFire players can only come from some massively played extra 5K loggings to Xfire. My guess is it comes from the gold industry who want (desperatly) a new succesful game to sell in. A few fanboys here and there won't make 5K extra Xfire sample.
But for the rest Xfire was always spot on in viewing game population trends. Spot on. Even WITH the over sampled error of Aion Xfire, it shows the real players are quiiting it in the same rate as War and AoC in its first 3 weeks.
So it stays on as a nice tool to see evolutions in EACH game. Not between games anymore as it used to be. A pity.
Zorndorf, let me remind you once more
You do not have any hard numbers. Also nothing suggests Aion players are quitting, it's quite pathetic how far you take your WoW fanboyism.
TAlking about a DOWNWARD trend here )) despite the "oversampling".
And that ratio is taken ... today, so I guess Aion had 1.2 million players on ... 32 servers at launch.
A pity they only started with 400K )
So it is very clear Aion Xfire has around a 100% sampling rate error. (from the 11K samples).
Any idea where that oversampling (around 5K "players") came from ))
Because every Eve player dual box. Even I can come up with a lame stupid theory.
Really, stop coming up with stupid argument.
ps. I forget to add another stupid theory. Everyone likes Aion, No one is quiting. You see the xfire number going down because they just banned 1000 goldfarmer.
Xfire is so accurate it can tell you which game is the most sold of all times: The Sims series. Oh wait.. They are FAR down on the list with a combined total of 4372 hours logged. Conclusion, The Sims is a massive fail. This years biggest game, Batman: Arkham Asylum? 65th. Guess noone bought that game. So much for a random sampling of gamers (you know, not everyone plays online), so much for the validity of the data, so much for the people who keep bringing them up.
this post makes to much sence .x fire fan boys just dont understand that its NOT a good sampling .just look at todays top 10 games ..
GAME MINUTES PLAYED
World of Warcraft 3,601,709
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Multiplayer 2,589,755
Call of Duty 2 Multiplayer 1,334,161
Aion 744,896
Counter-Strike: Source 482,223
Battlefield 2 352,789
Warcraft III - The Frozen Throne 316,369
Silkroad Online 252,896
Heroes of Newerth 250,855
Call of Duty: World at War Multiplayer 204,346
the only wow killer could be call of duty 4 by that list. rember we cant quesiton the intgrity of the numbers. i know for fact some games do not register time corectly in xfire.i know also it does not see all the games on your ssytem .you have to jump threw hoops to get it to see them when your playing them.which becomes more of a hassle than its worth.
also by the list that means silkroads is better than every other mmo out their than aion or wow.every other game is epic fail cause it cant get into that top 10.
an intresting enuff Heroes of Newerth on their site still has beta going on?
A note on this - Heroes of Newerth is indeed in closed beta however it wasn't that hard to get a key for it. Many many giveaways and people who choose to support the company/game by prepurchasing get 3 invites for their friends.
I myself play HoN and I want to say that last night there were 19,707 players online and playing.
In my book for an unreleased game with controlled population it's quite good. Considering it's basically DOTA (what keeps a lot of WC3 players playing thus the high rank in xfire too) don't be suprised if it goes up in the Top 5 of Xfire when it's out !
Also wanted to say it's quite polished for a beta and fun since nobody mentioned it
Originally posted by Zorndorf And just read the review of 8.7 of Aion on this very site... Written by an "author" who plastered 25 different Aion review copies on the internet .. while living at the same city as the developpers.
What's wrong with that? It's marketing and advertising. Even people from amazon.com is spaming the points2shop program on this site's forum. And you obviously look like someone who hold Wow stock.
The point is, game company do that. If you say, well, Ncsoft themself might be fudging the xfire number themself. It's possible.
But saying gold farmer, which is just an indivisual or workshop employee bother to be fudging the xfire number is the most lol theory.
For the OP i have nothing to say sadly, but for the ungoing xfire discussion.
Xfire is more than just game hours recording. You can take screeshots, record videos, broadcast live! videos, chat with friends, send files to friends, download patches for many games. these are the most used imo.
When you are playing a game all your friends can one-click join the server. Instant messaging with friends makes emails obsolete. the downloads from xfire servers are start-, stop-, and continueable at any time, what is a good thing for people that have slow connection.
WoW never crashed with xfire, infact I think Blizzard integrated xfire as the invisible addon. It runs 100% stable in WoW.
Just like Nielson boxes only sample a tiny fraction of the TV watching audience and political polls only measure a fraction of the population, Xfire measures just a fraction of people playing games. It shows trends for sure. That fact is undeniable, because its right there in B&W. You can compare a graph of Xfire and a MMO and the tracking matches up. It shows the highs and lows. It can't track exact numbers but nobody says it does. It can't track whats best or worst because it can't track opinions. It tracks general usage. TRENDS!! Then you extrapolate.
You think NBC knew EXACTLY how many people were watching Seinfeld or Friends? No. They knew how many of their boxes were watching and they saw how popular it was in the media. They saw how it effected popular culture, magazine, newspapers, news, entertainment shows. They heard what was talked about Friday mornings around the water cooler. Thats statistics.
Comments
Considering that Xfire is installed on perhaps 3 out of 10 kits. I do agree that it's not the most accurate statistic but then again, it is a good hint. If you wish to ignore it then by all means, be my guest but hints are always good in my book.
That's how I usualy decide if the next FPS game is worth playing. Then again, as an FPS gamer, it is much more comon to see Xfire since we can follow each other through that software. A bit like Steam...
2 weeks ago, I was wondering if I should reinstall battlefield 2 and grab the latest 1.5 patch. Thanks to Xfire statistic, I had a strong "HINT" that it was still very much played. The hint turned out to be correct... The game is full of people and most of the old servers back in 2006 or 07 are still open and rocking with people.
So no, don't do a University thesis with Xfire but it is a good source of unnofficial information.
I know a surprising number of people that are quiting Aion and returning to Age of Conan. AoC is almost ready for release now that they have had an extra year to polish it up.
When you take a random sampling of gamers and track their trends, you get a fairly good indication of a general trend. It's exactly the same concept that political polls, television polls, music polls etc. are based upon. Just over 1000 people, for example, and what they watch, decides what our entire country of 50 million will have offered to them on public television. A random sampling over such a small number of people. Are Xfire users a random sample? Yes. The only thing they have in common is that they all decided to sign up for Xfire. Is it a fact that among Xfire users, both of these games' playtime has decreased drastically since release? Yes.
How you can dispute that is beyond me, considering we all know that World of Warcraft is the biggest MMO, Guild Wars is about the only MMO in the Western world to come close to WoW's success and that both AoC and WAR have declined rapidly since release. Look at random MMO's like Ryzom or Vanguard, check their estimated subscription figures, then check their places on the Xfire list. In the large majority of cases, subscription figures are reflected by Xfire rank.
So whether you like it or not, Xfire stats do mean SOMETHING. They, at the very least, mean that among Xfire users, these two games aren't as played as they once were. That disproves your first three sentences. However, I, for one, believe they are a far greater indication.
Wow.........
There is a reason you and I dont run the major polling done for politics and Gallup does. They have to put a lot of effort into ensuring the poll is random and not biased. Quoting Xfire statistics is like me calling everyone that goes to my church and all my customers at the gun range and saying that my data shows a trend proving McCain can beat Obama in 2012.
this post makes to much sence .x fire fan boys just dont understand that its NOT a good sampling .just look at todays top 10 games ..
GAME MINUTES PLAYED
World of Warcraft 3,601,709
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Multiplayer 2,589,755
Call of Duty 2 Multiplayer 1,334,161
Aion 744,896
Counter-Strike: Source 482,223
Battlefield 2 352,789
Warcraft III - The Frozen Throne 316,369
Silkroad Online 252,896
Heroes of Newerth 250,855
Call of Duty: World at War Multiplayer 204,346
the only wow killer could be call of duty 4 by that list. rember we cant quesiton the intgrity of the numbers. i know for fact some games do not register time corectly in xfire.i know also it does not see all the games on your ssytem .you have to jump threw hoops to get it to see them when your playing them.which becomes more of a hassle than its worth.
also by the list that means silkroads is better than every other mmo out their than aion or wow.every other game is epic fail cause it cant get into that top 10.
an intresting enuff Heroes of Newerth on their site still has beta going on?
"Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing." Robert E. Howard, The Tower of the Elephant (1933)
Arguing on the internet is like special olympics; in the end you're still retarded.
Except um..I'd say you're more retarded because you all choose to camp the thread and argue. *gets popcorn*
Stupid ppl are fun to watch =D
If your not willing to contribute to a post, its probably better if you dont post at all, or ever for that matter
Just quoting my signature:
1. Xfire numbers are indicative but highly inaccurate for determining an MMOG's subscriber numbers.
2. Xfire numbers are perfectly viable for identifying trends in an MMOG's subscriber numbers, keeping in mind any current or recent "use Xfire!" campaigns.
I have to agree. If you're not monitoring EVERY player, then you're not getting an accurate reading. All you're getting is.....the number of hours XFIRE USERS play. Period.
I've have YET, after about 15 years playing MMOs, to meet more than one or two people in any of the MMOs I have played, that actually USE XFire. Presently, I don't know one single solitary soul (other than people who talk about it here on the forums) that use XFire....not ONE.
Now...I have to agree that those two games are quite probably in decline with subs and played hours, however....XFire is not a good measurement of whether that is factual. You've shown nothing except that those games are declining in the number of XFire users that play them.
President of The Marvelously Meowhead Fan Club
Uh, no.
We don't need innovative gameplay. Actually we need a simple formula with some interesting tweaks. No one has done that recently, and certainly NOT AoC nor WAR.
Both were tragically flawed, that is why they suck.
We don't need First Person Shooter combat, or Perma Death, or anything else "innovative". Just make a solid game with decent graphics. That would be a great start.
I distinctly remember one guy on waralliance forums using xfire in to calculate a number of 200k +/-50k, that was before EA released their earnings report and revealed the number 300k.
Its not THAT accurate, but at this point its the only thing we have.
Not that many players use xfire, but as shown in a post above, judgnig by the top 10 games, its userbase is pretty diverse and random, which should be enough to form a representative sample.
never loged on it ,never saw any of my friends log onto Xfire so it means nothing for me if you know subs number that is something but statistics of those addons can and are basicly very wrong since they cannot track all people who are in game
Xfire is waste of bandwidth - stopped using it a while back.
Quoting your own signature? It must be true then...
"nerf rock, paper is working as intended."
- Scissors.
Head Chop
Once again for the record I am not using Xfire as a 100% guideline here. However if 2 games, mentioned in this threa, where above 40k hours and now dropped down to 2500 hours, either people on mass have stopped using Xfire or they don't play the games anymore. Its a trend and even though its based on Xfire, there is historical data there to show a movement one way or another. Personally I don't need Xfire to tell me this trend since everyone I know including myself, don't play either game anymore. I just thought it was interesting to see such low numbers for 2 very big releases.
Personally I may still jump into AoC for a month when I get bored to just level a bit more to 80 but right now FE has answered my MMO needs.
Listen, I ALWAYS used Xfire as a measuring tool ever since the launch of Vanguard and Lotro.
It always was a good measuring stick, because it traces how the evolution of a game was.
Both AoC and War were VERY good selling games (with around 800K sales at the launching weeks !!!).
And then you could follow ... the downward trends and even calculate the number of players with 2 references: 1. the now famous WOW-EVE-LOTRO reference "measuring stick" (5M - 300K - 180K) as a guidance AND 2. the number of servers a game has available.
But the technique is known now and with Aion for the first time XFire stats don't measure up against the tools of WOW-EVE-Lotro and the server numbers of that game.
Suddenly a "new" game is launched with 3X (3.5 even) number of EVE players on Xfire while it only has 32 servers and a launching pad of 400 K players. So that means ... the sample of 11K Xfire Aion players is not representative. Clearly this game doesn't have >1M players after 1 week. The servers simply lack, the sales figures are in NO way near War and AoC and so you have to ask ... why?
An 100% error rate on 11K XFire players can only come from some massively played extra 5K loggings to Xfire. My guess is it comes from the gold industry who want (desperatly) a new succesful game to sell in. A few fanboys here and there won't make 5K extra Xfire sample.
But for the rest Xfire was always spot on in viewing game population trends. Spot on. Even WITH the over sampled error of Aion Xfire, it shows the real players are quiiting it in the same rate as War and AoC in its first 3 weeks.
So it stays on as a nice tool to see evolutions in EACH game. Not between games anymore as it used to be. A pity.
Zorndorf, let me remind you once more
You do not have any hard numbers. Also nothing suggests Aion players are quitting, it's quite pathetic how far you take your WoW fanboyism.
Must be correct. Sure looks like WoW is trending downward.
I don't know if people's quiting Aion. But the amusing part is Zorndorf think chinese gold farmer use xfire.
The Boss of those Chinese gold farmer's needs a way to make sure his slaves are doing their job. Enter Xfire, clocking on for gold farmers.
So how do you explain there are 3 times more Aion XFire players than there are EVE Xfire players (which has a confirmed officialy 300K subs).
And this even with this downward trend:
http://www.xfire.com/games/aion/Aion/
TAlking about a DOWNWARD trend here
)) despite the "oversampling".
And that ratio is taken ... today, so I guess Aion had 1.2 million players on ... 32 servers at launch.
A pity they only started with 400K
)
So it is very clear Aion Xfire has around a 100% sampling rate error. (from the 11K samples).
Any idea where that oversampling (around 5K "players") came from
))
Because every Eve player dual box. Even I can come up with a lame stupid theory.
Really, stop coming up with stupid argument.
ps. I forget to add another stupid theory. Everyone likes Aion, No one is quiting. You see the xfire number going down because they just banned 1000 goldfarmer.
So how do you explain there are 3 times more Aion XFire players than there are EVE Xfire players (which has a confirmed officialy 300K subs).
And this even with this downward trend:
http://www.xfire.com/games/aion/Aion/
TAlking about a DOWNWARD trend here
)) despite the "oversampling".
And that ratio is taken ... today, so I guess Aion had 1.2 million players on ... 32 servers at launch.
A pity they only started with 400K
)
So it is very clear Aion Xfire has around a 100% sampling rate error. (from the 11K samples).
Any idea where that oversampling (around 5K "players") came from
))
Easy explanation (which you actually offer): Xfire is unreliable for subscription statistics.
And may I add: Duh!
this post makes to much sence .x fire fan boys just dont understand that its NOT a good sampling .just look at todays top 10 games ..
GAME MINUTES PLAYED
World of Warcraft 3,601,709
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Multiplayer 2,589,755
Call of Duty 2 Multiplayer 1,334,161
Aion 744,896
Counter-Strike: Source 482,223
Battlefield 2 352,789
Warcraft III - The Frozen Throne 316,369
Silkroad Online 252,896
Heroes of Newerth 250,855
Call of Duty: World at War Multiplayer 204,346
the only wow killer could be call of duty 4 by that list. rember we cant quesiton the intgrity of the numbers. i know for fact some games do not register time corectly in xfire.i know also it does not see all the games on your ssytem .you have to jump threw hoops to get it to see them when your playing them.which becomes more of a hassle than its worth.
also by the list that means silkroads is better than every other mmo out their than aion or wow.every other game is epic fail cause it cant get into that top 10.
an intresting enuff Heroes of Newerth on their site still has beta going on?
A note on this - Heroes of Newerth is indeed in closed beta however it wasn't that hard to get a key for it. Many many giveaways and people who choose to support the company/game by prepurchasing get 3 invites for their friends.
I myself play HoN and I want to say that last night there were 19,707 players online and playing.
In my book for an unreleased game with controlled population it's quite good. Considering it's basically DOTA (what keeps a lot of WC3 players playing thus the high rank in xfire too) don't be suprised if it goes up in the Top 5 of Xfire when it's out !
Also wanted to say it's quite polished for a beta and fun since nobody mentioned it
What's wrong with that? It's marketing and advertising. Even people from amazon.com is spaming the points2shop program on this site's forum. And you obviously look like someone who hold Wow stock.
The point is, game company do that. If you say, well, Ncsoft themself might be fudging the xfire number themself. It's possible.
But saying gold farmer, which is just an indivisual or workshop employee bother to be fudging the xfire number is the most lol theory.
For the OP i have nothing to say sadly, but for the ungoing xfire discussion.
Xfire is more than just game hours recording. You can take screeshots, record videos, broadcast live! videos, chat with friends, send files to friends, download patches for many games. these are the most used imo.
When you are playing a game all your friends can one-click join the server. Instant messaging with friends makes emails obsolete. the downloads from xfire servers are start-, stop-, and continueable at any time, what is a good thing for people that have slow connection.
WoW never crashed with xfire, infact I think Blizzard integrated xfire as the invisible addon. It runs 100% stable in WoW.
My pc runs xfire at starup, and this wont change.
Just like Nielson boxes only sample a tiny fraction of the TV watching audience and political polls only measure a fraction of the population, Xfire measures just a fraction of people playing games. It shows trends for sure. That fact is undeniable, because its right there in B&W. You can compare a graph of Xfire and a MMO and the tracking matches up. It shows the highs and lows. It can't track exact numbers but nobody says it does. It can't track whats best or worst because it can't track opinions. It tracks general usage. TRENDS!! Then you extrapolate.
You think NBC knew EXACTLY how many people were watching Seinfeld or Friends? No. They knew how many of their boxes were watching and they saw how popular it was in the media. They saw how it effected popular culture, magazine, newspapers, news, entertainment shows. They heard what was talked about Friday mornings around the water cooler. Thats statistics.