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Xfire, MMO player number and fun statistics, expect to get bored.
lalartu
Member UncommonPosts: 437
I noticed a lot of people refer to Xfire when trying to determine MMO popularity.
They do however tend to look at the wrong numbers when figuring out the longevity/potentials of a MMO.
Xfire can definitely be used as a statistical tool to determine how MMO is doing and even if it's fun or not, but the following is probably the best way of doing it:
1 - ignore the graph, it doesn't show anything important. It shows the number of hours played and in case of some games doesn't really show the specific details that we need to determine the game popularity
2 - instead of the graph, look at two numbers below it: average number of users and average hours played
3 - number of users is a more or less accurate population sample, this can be used to find the total number of users
4 - the ratio of hours played/average users would give us an average number of hours spent in the game - this can serve as a kind of a "fun" score, ie the more time you spend in the game, the more likely it's fun
With this in mind, here's a list of some MMOs I looked up:
Number of users on Xfire:
(average number per month)
1 - League of Legends: 37442
2 - WoW: 19751
3 - SWTOR: 9371
4 - Eve Online: 1178
5 - Guild Wars: 1051
6 - LOTRO: 935
7 - Aion: 928
8 - DCUO: 718
9 - Rift : 517
10 - Age of Conan: 204
11 - EQ2: 88
12 - Warhammer Online: 43
13 - Vanguard: 3
in Nov, LoL released official user numbers and according to them they had approx 11.5 mil monthly users
http://euw.leagueoflegends.com/news/community-grows-32-million-players
So, I'll take a big leap of faith here and assume that 1 in 307 users that play LoL also use Xfire because
11 500 000/ 37 442 = ~307
If we use this factor for other games, we can try to estimate how many monthly users each one has.
This of course under the assumption that this factor translates to other games as well
Number of users per month, based on rough estimates:
(this assumes that 1 in 307 players use Xfire)
1 - League of Legends: 11 500 000
2- WoW: 6 063 557
3 - SWTOR: 2 876 897*
4 - Eve Online: 361 646
5 - Guild Wars: 322 657
6 - LOTRO: 287 045
7 - Aion: 284 896
8 - DCUO: 220 426 (doesn't include PS3 users)
9 - Rift : 158 719
10 - Age of Conan: 62 628
11 - EQ2: 27 016
12 - Warhammer Online: 13 201
13 - Vanguard: 921
*SWTOR just came out a month ago, so basically everyone who bought the game probably tried it, so they probably sold almost 3 million copies. This more or less agrees with the figures from VGchartz (which don't include the digital copies and the Collector's edition). In other words, this number is probably also close to the total number of users in SWTOR and total number of copies sold.
Fun Factor
(average number of hours in game per user)
Now let's try to see how many hours each game is played by each user. this will determine the "fun factor" or how long the users are willing to play the game on average.
The assumption here is that on average, the longer an Xfire user plays a game, the more fun it probably is
This can be calculated by dividing the total number of hours by user number
1 - SWTOR* - 5.97 hrs
2 - Aion - 4.85 hrs
3 - WoW - 4.84 hrs
4 - Rift - 4.79 hrs
5 - Age of Conan - 4.68 hrs
6 - LOTRO - 4.56 hrs
7 - LoL - 4.51 hrs
8 - Warhammer Online - 4.42 hrs
9 - Eve Online - 4.03 hrs
10 - EQ2 - 3.68 hrs
11 - DCUO - 3.35 hrs
12 - Vanguard - 3.00 hrs (not enough data)
13 - Guild Wars - 2.90 hrs
* SWTOR is a novelty title, so it's expected that it will be played a lot more than other titles. It'll be intersting to compare these numbers in 3-4 months time
CONCLUSION: this was a very rough approach, but the numbers so far show that SWTOR is the most enjoyed game, flavor of the month if you wish
Aion is surprisingly more popular than both WoW and Rift
Guild Wars is somewhat unpopular
*** All of these numbers are very rough and the factor of 307 was found based on 2 months old statistics from the creators of League of Legends. There's a very high chance that the number is different (but not dramatically different) since they probably gained a huge number of new users in these two months.
I review lots of indie games and MMORPGs
Comments
Oh no, another dreaded Xfire thread.
Just kidding, kind of. It's nice to see a change of thought about Xfire that you presented. However I still hold by my own beliefs and this post(like most others) just secures me into it further. I do have to say this is one of the more thoughtful Xfire threads I've seen in a while, kudos.
What you did with LoL, you'd need to do with more games and average it out if you wanted to apply it to all games. Taking what's true for one thing and assume it's true for all will always lead to faulty data. Although I don't see you trying to make claims based off of what you did so you're pretty golden in my book.
There are certain things that we know to be true. (WoW's dominance of the genre for example) Yet Xfire does not always display this. People will then go on and spin Xfire data one way or another in hopes of proving their own agenda, ignoring reason on logic.
Some users take Xfire and say 'it hasn't been wrong yet'.(which has yet to thoroughly proven and documented) I liken this to the "Madden curse". Just because something appears to be generating valid data doesn't mean it actually is. Scientifically and statistically, Xfire just doesn't hack it. Whether or not it is an entertaining parlor trick, on the other hand, is definitely a topic of debate around here.
To quote Dilbert, "that's the problem with randomness, you can never be sure". Yes, that's a converse topic but applicable nevertheless.
We really need separate forums for every newly launched game. There can be the anti-<MMO> one and there can be the 'what general discussion should be' one. All the lamenting can happen together where each can find solace in like minded can't-move-on-ers leaving the rest of us to actually move forward and discuss meaningful and relevant topics.
Interesting results. The numbers appear to be very plausible.
OP: Thoughtful post, intelligent, solid grammar. I wish there were more of you on the internet.
As you well know, that magic number 307 is problematic, but at least it gets people looking in the right direction.
I am curious how different that factor might vary between games and whether or not it's statistically significant (my hunch is that it's not, but it certainly suggests options for future study).
Any ideas on how you could find a statistically significant "X" factor? I'm not sure there is enough data released to know.
well, to be on the safe side, we could wait for another MMO to release their numbers and try to calculate the magic number at that point.
If I did this back in November, I think it would be a lot more statistically significant
What really surprised me though is how populat Aion is despite all its negative reviews and "it's just a Korean grind fest" threads.
also, apparently LoL doubles in size in half a year and is still growing dramatically, so we'll be seeing a lot more MOBAs in the near future, as opposed to traditional EQ style MMORPGs
I think Xfire game ranking can definitely serve as a kind of a predictor to the types of games we'll see in the next few years
I review lots of indie games and MMORPGs
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
I think comparing LoL to MMORPGs doesn't work.
RTS fans used to have to use Xfire or other similar programs to find matches and stay connected online, because RTS games haven't included tools for it. Thanks to original DOTA, it's very likely that LoL has a lot of those RTS fans playing it. Whereas MMORPG fans have never used external tools to check if their friends are online to same extend. You'd need to find an MMORPG as baseline for approximating player numbers, otherwise it ends up like using apple as a baseline when comparing oranges.
I think your approximations about player numbers are off.
My problem with Xfire is that according to it only half the amount of people who play LOTRO play RIFT even though RIFT has a few more servers then it.
I don't care about innovation I care about fun.
Very Interesting numbers thank you!
My problem is that some games has higher needs of voice communication than others, so those games got a higher % Xfire users like Vrika posted above.
hm ... 11 500 000 is that the number of subscriptions or the active players ?
What is the possible error ratio of your little exercise ? 10%, 30%, ... ? And what would you consider an usable ratio ?
And even on the condtion this 307 has some "weight," you can't just use the value on any other game, you don't know anything. You can't just "assume" this is apllicable on any of the other games. You don't have the slightest indication that the number of Xfire users is constant.
Thus, your claim that it will not be drammatically different could be as true as it could be false.
These statistics could be usable as they could be bogus and therefor are, in the state they are presented here and now, not elligible to make any conclusion whatsoever.
In short they are worthless numbers, sorry.
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Why is league of legends in this list? Could this agenda of pushing lol as a mmorpg stop. This game is based of rts games and is closest to that or call it moba but dont put them under the mmorpg belt.
LoL numbers are also a big fake if they have such a huge playerbase why dont they show it ingame like dota 2 or hon there u can see the number of played games. The most realistic statistic said around 3 million matches are played a day thats around 1 million active accounts. They just count every created account which is bs. So games like lineage 2 who have over 50mil and more created accounts would be then nr 1 too.
You have to take into account what type of games these are and how players spend time in them. Some of them are grindier than others (Aion, Vanguard) and some games you spend a huge portion of your time travelling (Eve). For example Guild Wars has virtually no grind and has map travel. Therefore the hours spent in the game does not give indication to the "fun factor". No-one plays an un-fun game. Even if the game, say Halo, could be finished in an afternoon, it doesn't make it less fun. The fun factor in Halo is very high and the action is tightly packed. It was not made to last long - it was made to be as fun as possible. Many MMOs can't say the same. Everyone knows P2P games have been made to last long.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Good post though as has been pointed out LoL is really a different genre. To really get a better 'magic number' can you not look at historical data? For example I seem to remember (though may be mistaken) CCP publishing 'hard' Eve figures in the past. Anything to improve the magic number would be valuable.
Ugh...can you do some research first before pulling numbers out of your ass? They have already said they have around 32.5m accounts created, 11.5m monthly users (active accounts) and 4.2m daily users.
That's a subtle but effective damnation of the methodology.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Interesting approach overall, but one glaring problem: interpreting hours played as equivalent of fun or even popularity is quite a stretch in a genre that is notorious for a game design that is built on timesinks and long stretches of non-fun repetitive activities.
LoL is on the list because it is the #1 game on Xfire and because I could find the officially released numbers from two months ago.
It seemed like the easiest way to try to estiamate the number of players in other games was to take the game with highest number of players as this would probably give us the least statistical error.
and just as stated several times in my OP, there is a huge margin of error here, so take it easy guys:P
The reason why I didn't choose Eve Online is:
1 - the officially released numbers are quite old (almost a year old)
2 - there are a lot less players there, so the population sample is smaller, which makes the "magic number" with a higher margin of error
Once they release a new playerbase stats, I could try again.
I understand that certain games have more Xfire users and other games have no need for Xfire, but from what I see so far, LOTRO and Eve numbers are actually almost spot on, at least compared to the numbers both games releases 6-7 months ago.
As for RIFT having lower number than LOTRO, I think this has something to do with people taking a break and moving to SWTOR for this month. It will most likely go back up next month. I noticed tons of "see you in SWTOR" posts on Rift forum, but a lot of those people have been coming back lately too.
LOTRO numbers may be a little off, but I play it right now and I've been seeing TONS of players everywhere, even some really remote locations.
Finally, the fun factor obviously doesn't take into account "what you actually do in the game", I just couldn't find a better name for this particular variable. It shows an average amount of time players spend in a given game. Be it traveling or grinding, if a player is willing to spend more time in Aion than in Guild Wars, there must be something in that game that makes people play it longer. It could be a specific game design (i.e. long travel time) or just the fact that it's very compact and easy to group (Guild Wars). Either way though, the numbers are there for you to make your own conclusions.
I personally think that you could easily compare WoW, Aion, LOTRO, EQ2, AoC and Rift because all five have a somewhat similar game design, so in that sense, people spend more time in Aion and a lot less time in EQ2, which kind of surprised me personally. i'm sure there are millions of reasons why on average people spend 1.2 hours longer in Aion than in EQ2 and why a lot more players play Aion than EQ2, but my guess would be because there's some sort of a fun factor involved.
PS once I figure out how to make this more statistically significant and rule out various biases, I'll try this again as there seems to be at least *some* validity to this approach.
I review lots of indie games and MMORPGs
I enjoyed the stats, good job. I personally think xfire is an acceptable platform to measure results. Sure different MMO communities may use it more then others, but if you can find a way to conduct a meta-analysis of 1000's of MMO gamers I would be surprised.
Aion is not dead and does have a relatively strong player base. Though since the FTP (EU) announcement it has stagnated somewhat. I myself unsubbed after 2 years of playing. Bought SWTOR and unsubbed after 1 month!
Good work.
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