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Lost 2k active players within 5 days of release on Besaid server.
Hachiro
Member Posts: 92
Since the CE head start started i have been keeping a regular check on population of my server. The peak population we had during CE period was 3k. After the official release, it was expected to go up and it did for 4 days. But now we are downto 2k from 4K players.
Before someone asks me how i know about numbers. You can do this yourself through party search function in game. Now to test it further i checked during JP, EU and US primtime and results do not vary much. Most amount of players are on during JP prime time. US has decent population but EU prime time has lowest amount of players online.
Now i know it may not mean anything buy losing 2K players within 5 days doesn't seem good news to me. Even fansites like FFXIV core are full of unhappy players quitting game due to lack of AH, no mail system, laggy interface, SP bugs..pheww list is too long.
What about those who are on different servers? has anyone tried to keep a check on population numbers and if yes how considerable is fall in numbers?
MMORPGPRESS quote 7% of people have cancelled within a fortnight of subscribing. That might not sound like much, but it's a greater %age for a game which is a week old.
Opinions please.
Heso o kamedomo oyobanu -- Don't cut off your nose to spite your face.
Comments
You can't do a comparison of 5 days, you have to compare the same day or whole weeks, otherwise it's like comparing a Saturday to a Thursday.
i guess the 50 daily "this game sucks" threads really mean people dont like what they find. i'm still hoping they fix all that is wrong by the time the PS3 version comes out.
That's wierd, Besaid happens to be the server I play on, and I never saw more than ~2,600 players online during prime time (~7pm PST) of the first weekend after the collector's edition released. Yes, I too used the party tool world count.
Besaid was an exceptionally-hard-hit server because it was the unofficial roleplay server. (Although I betcha the unofficial oceanic servers were rather hard hit as well.) Even at 2,600 players, it was extremely laggy and uncomfortable. If we had reached 4,000 players, I dare say the server would not have run at all.
I imagine a lot of players would have been encouraged to jump ship to other servers at that the 2,600 point because of all the lag. If anything, we've proof the player population seems to be increasing, seeing how they had to add a new world 4 days ago.
Last I checked, we've got just short of 2000 players on during the evening, which is not that much less than the 2,600 I saw when the game was burning hot new.
In any case, even if we had lost 50% of our active players (we didn't), it's better than the 70% World of Warcraft loses, apparently.
I actualy left Besaid to reroll and join a real life freind on Kashuan. The game was unplayable for me on Besaid in Ul'Dah I was gettting 0 - 10 fps if i was lucky, and out hunting it would jump to around 10 - 20 but still rubberbanding and laggy, then when i moved server my FPS jumped to 20 - 50fps on Kashuan. I wonder if others have noticed somthing similar and decided to jump servers
I have been doing this since day one of CE. And more so since the official release. I will be keeping tabs for this whole week to make sure though.
Heso o kamedomo oyobanu -- Don't cut off your nose to spite your face.
This.
To have any kind of accurate reading, you need to chart the trend over several weeks, taking measurements on the same days at the same time. It's the only way to weed out meaningless variance.
After a month or so, you'll be able to detect a trend line that has some basis in reality. You just don't have enough data yet to draw any kind of conclusion.
I also have to support this.I'm indiffernet to this game as it stands right now but this is way to early to be drawing conclusions based on selective and suspect numbers....there will be plenty of time for both sides to do that when ther eis an abudnanc eof data to draw from!!!!
strange, im on besaid and it still averages at 2000 to 2500, though its currently 1900. I never saw anywhere near 4000k,
2 new servers openined up, and besaid became a locked world. re-rollers
dont see why this matters anyway, not everyone likes a game.
Well there could be a lot of reasons for you to notice such a drop on the server.
When a new MMO Launches, many people plan days off to get more time in at the start. The biggest time for an MMO is when it launches or an expansion hits, and thats when you will see the most people at a given time. So what you might be seeing is people getting back to playing normal lengths at more reasonable times.
Or it could be that people are jumping from the more crowded (more laggy) servers and re-rolling on less full servers. Or as others have said, moving to a server where friends/family are playing.
There are many other reasons the server could appear to be losing players, and you have to take them into account when tracking population trends.
There are 3 types of people in the world.
1.) Those who make things happen
2.) Those who watch things happen
3.) And those who wonder "What the %#*& just happened?!"
To have any kind of accurate reading, you need to chart the trend over several weeks, taking measurements on the same days at the same time. It's the only way to weed out meaningless variance.
After a month or so, you'll be able to detect a trend line that has some basis in reality. You just don't have enough data yet to draw any kind of conclusion.
That is what i am going to do but i hardly doubt that at this point game population will go up. Maybe, when they add some new content. But those who had to buy and try it have already done it. So losing 2K players is still significant, maybe it goes up again at weekend but then again population numbers were constant between 3K and 4K during all this time.
Heso o kamedomo oyobanu -- Don't cut off your nose to spite your face.
Of course a game is going to have the most active users right at the time of release. You can draw nothing from this except that people have returned to their normal schedule. Of course it's going to lose subscribers, but we won't be able to guess how many until at least a month from now.
Remember, all you're seeing are the numbers of people currently logged in, not the number of customers as a whole. Also, many people who are excited about a release will reserve some time immediately after to play, whereas normally, they wouldn't be able to. I myself have been known to book a couple of days off work to throw myself into a release. But eventually one has to return to RL so those initial numbers invariably drop. That's just the first thing I can think of off the top of my head. There are other valid reasons as well.
Gather more data.
Also, he's probably flat out lying. As many others pointed out, I to play on Besaid...and I have never ever noticed a peak of players higher than 2700 or so, and I've been playing since CE release.
Mne eto nado kak zuby v zadnitse.
This.
To have any kind of accurate reading, you need to chart the trend over several weeks, taking measurements on the same days at the same time. It's the only way to weed out meaningless variance.
After a month or so, you'll be able to detect a trend line that has some basis in reality. You just don't have enough data yet to draw any kind of conclusion.
That is what i am going to do but i hardly doubt that at this point game population will go up. Maybe, when they add some new content. But those who had to buy and try it have already done it. So losing 2K players is still significant, maybe it goes up again at weekend but then again population numbers were constant between 3K and 4K during all this time.
Remember, all you're seeing are the numbers of people currently logged in, not the number of customers as a whole. Also, many people who are excited about a release will reserve some time immediately after to play, whereas normally, they wouldn't be able to. I myself have been known to book a couple of days off work to throw myself into a release. But eventually one has to return to RL so those initial numbers invariably drop. That's just the first thing I can think of off the top of my head. There are other valid reasons as well.
Gather more data.
Also, he's probably flat out lying. As many others pointed out, I to play on Besaid...and I have never ever noticed a peak of players higher than 2700 or so, and I've been playing since CE release.
Did you make an effort to check player population every day? its very easy to call people liar. You are most welcome to put forward your own data. Besaid hit 4K and was also closed for down to stop more people rolling on it. 3K was average population of besaid.
Heso o kamedomo oyobanu -- Don't cut off your nose to spite your face.
Not suprising but like most agree, the pc version is the guinea pig for the PS3 version. If people really want to play then go buy a ps3 and get the polished version at the ps3 release.
Yes, I actually made an effort to check the population quite often because the server was closed and I had a friend that wanted to join the unofficial RP server. So I would check every few hours to see if the population was dipping at all, as it made sense that's when they'd reopen the server. It's pretty much never seemed to have had an, "off-peak" time, and remained pretty consistently betweene 2700 to 2200. The only time I even noticed it going below 2500 is around Noonish Sunday PDT, which is about when the server reopened briefly.
So...yeah, I'm callling you a liar.
Mne eto nado kak zuby v zadnitse.
Why? theyre playing on the same servers as us.
I could do what im currently doing, playing the playable game, no caring about 30+ content straight off the bat, and enjoying the mandatory grins that EVERY SINGLE MMO HAS.
There's three of my fellow Besaidians who agree that the server population was never over the 2600s. Whether or not the OP is a liar is hard to say -- could just be he imagined it somehow. Mistakes happen, you know?
If I want to be really fair, I will say that the active player population seems to have dropped from that 2600 to 1900. However, that's really complicated to draw a conclusion from. The thing is:
It's natural that there will be a lot of currently logged in players when the game is still fresh and new. Then, after they're good and settled in, they'll still log in, just less often.
It's natural that there will be players who play a game and decide they don't like it. Doesn't even have all that much to do with the quality of the game - people just have different preferences.
So, lets say we've got 700 less players logging in this evening than logged in the evening of the first weekend after the collector's edition release? It doesn't mean a whole lot.
Even at 2600 to 1900 (27%), its a bad indication. Irrespective of the quality of the game its only the first week, a period when it should be booming not rapidly declining.
The OP qualifies to become the next POTUS...
"Torquemada... do not implore him for compassion. Torquemada... do not beg him for forgiveness. Torquemada... do not ask him for mercy. Let's face it, you can't Torquemada anything!"
MWO Music Video - What does the Mech say: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF6HYNqCDLI
Johnny Cash - The Man Comes Around: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0x2iwK0BKM
Over the course of 5 days...it's not that surprising especially considering that Besaid has been locked for a almost a week and a half solid from new people creating on it. It only recently opened up to new creations longer than half an hour, I expect it to fill back up over the next week.
Mne eto nado kak zuby v zadnitse.
Wouldn't that simply mean the CE players, who I assume maxed out the server are simply not logging in? End result is the same thing (i.e. less people playing).
Its a little of CE people aren't playing, and probably a lot more of the Standard-Ed people telling their CE friends "Well since your server was locked, we all rolled here, make a new guy if you wanna join us".
So you have 3 types of CE players right now:
The one whos still on the server and active, enjoying the game.
The ones who deleted their original character to reroll on the server their friends rolled on.
The ones who stopped playing.
I'm betting that portion of your server you feel stopped playing all had to take a big #2.
Lets Push Things Forward
I knew I would live to design games at age 7, issue 5 of Nintendo Power.
Support games with subs when you believe in their potential, even in spite of their flaws.
I doubt it, as I've seen that scenario many times. Unless they are very close friends people will just continue playing on the server they've invested time on during the head start. People then move across, if they feel left out. However, usually they they just form a new social group. If they are close friends, they are likely to have all purchased the CE.
Did you read that article?
"Blizzard has revealed a startling fact - only 30% of trial players ever make it past World Of Warcraft's first ten levels"
World of Warcraft isn't losing active players, they're just not gaining prospective trial players.
Thats a big difference.
(Just lurking these forums seeing how everything is going, I don't have any interest in FFXIV failing. I actually want it to be good. Right now I don't have a computer that can run it, by the time i do hopefully it'll be polished - similar to my timing with FFXI
)