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Did they change the server load rating end january?
Metentso
Member UncommonPosts: 1,437
Look at this image:
See how the two lines show a similar rate of descent. But there is a sudden rise in end january / start february.
Did they change the rating? So for instance a "Light" server would be a "Standard" server, and so on?
Don't have data of that period on xFire to compare with. Would be interesting if anyone had.
Comments
It's not rocket science. The game is losing subs all the time. They do the best to hide it until they have to take action and start merging the servers.
Happens to all new MMOs a couple months after launch. SWTOR is not special in that sense.
In fact, SWTOR is not special as an MMORPG in any sense.
Republic fleet ranges between 120 and 200 depending the day , on peak times in Progenitor . It was like that in January and still is. I bet most of the people playing the game play a second MMO also , so they dont play as many hours as they did when it launched . Server mergers cannot happen until people have truly moved on from the game , cause if they merge servers and people come back to check the march updates it will be a f***fest .
I play on this server and never seen 200 on the fleet ( imperial side). Certainly been a big decrease.
Was in a guild that went from 30 regular players to 5 and died.
I do find this kinda... iffy. I think "iffy" really describes this well.
Everything creates huge amounts of negativity on the internet, that's what the internet is for: Negativity, porn and lolcats.
What is the range of imperial?
They may not need to happen for your server, but they most certainly do need to happen for some. Sooner rather than later. I must have the worst luck picking servers because I have never since I played this game seen anywhere close to a 100 on fleet on either server I have played on. To clarify, I'm not saying there aren't servers like this. What I am saying is that those of you that somehow think all the servers are brimming with players like yours are simply wrong.
Seems fairly steady to me really but that isn't saying much considering how it fluctuates between the low 20s to the high 40s. It has dropped off slightly but considering I believe the population seems rather low to start with...
I really question their parameters for what they deem a population as being standard compared to light.
As to the OP, I have no idea. Frankly, I think their ratings have always been way too generous far as how many people on the server sets the rating between light, standard, and heavy.
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.
You don't even need data and a chart to tell, from the first month it went from 80% of servers being "heavy" and over half of those with 30 minute to an hour and 30 minute queue connection time and every zone averaging 150-300 people on the empire side, now only 4 or 5 servers hit heavy only at PEAK hour (EST time), half the servers are "standard" and the amount of "light" has grown.
There was a big patch at the end of January with an emergancy hotfix the following day, and coincidently XFire was down for a while too.
Was it the patch that changed Ilium mechanics? That could explain the increase then.
An honest review of SW:TOR 6/10 (Danny Wojcicki)
Anything from 50 during the day to about 120 peak.
The black lines are terribly misleading in this chart, quite likely on purpose. If you remove the black lines and see the chart for what it actually is, you'll see the chart spikes pretty regularly between 300 and 450 from mid January to mid February.
I think the day that patch came out. But still, it is a very misleading chart, and statement.
Or... they could go the Blizzard route and charge people $25 a pop to transfer off their dead servers.
While the black lines are a bit misleading, you don't need to be a rocketscientist to figure out they changed something to artificially polish up those charts. Everything points towards a steady decline except server loads. If I were in their shoes I might even do the same. It's not fooling anyone looking furter than those charts, but whatever. Nobody died, SOP.
Black line isn't misleading at all, those spikes are the weekends, the black lines simply show the trend of the peaks (weekends) going down, with a single exception. The fishy part being that after that odd gap, the trend looks almost the same. That would lead one to believe that there shouldn't have been any gap at all.
Of course, that is if you assume that the data is valid. In addition, while that is one explanation as to why we see the gap, it isn't the only possible explanation. Statistics can't ever really prove anything, and it can be very misleading at times.
I stand by my statement that "iffy" is the best way to describe this.
Everything creates huge amounts of negativity on the internet, that's what the internet is for: Negativity, porn and lolcats.
Exactly, you get lines that show trends connecting the tops or the bottoms, or both. Two lines at 450 and 300 wouldn't tell anything relevant, except pretending to show a stable server load over time when it's not. That would be misleading.
An honest review of SW:TOR 6/10 (Danny Wojcicki)
The Progenitor has pretty much stayed static (on concurrent player volumes) since launch. I know this as I play both Republic and Imperial on that server, and often. That's not to say there's been a turnover of players, as I know there has been. Guilds forming and dieing quickly within the first few months following launch isn't unusual. So using them for an assement doesn't represent the number of active players, but does indicate a turnover.
The Imperial fleet peaks somewhere between 180 - 190. Republic is 130 - 150. Its been a bit quieter (but not by much) this week, following schools returning from half term.
It is however a RP-PVE server, and given there's only two of them (EU) its likely to be amongst the least affected by any decline that was/is to occur. So I'd say it can't truely represent a general trend (either way). It is however why I selected it to play on, as the majority of MMOs that launch end up with to many servers due to the initial depand.
SWTOR has many more servers than most would have, given the short period. As a result players are more distributed, and declines are going to be more noticable even if they are a small margin.
Looking at current server status I'm seeing 25 EU servers at heavy.
http://www.swtor.com/server-status
I find this odd because I've been following the stats and not seen that for weeks.
Considering subs were due only the other day, I would have expected servers to be even lighter than usual. Monday evening too, not exactly peak.
I'm thinking they've "tweaked" things again, maybe a bit too obviously.
Well, every game gets a large spike of subs its first month. Those are the first-triers. The drop-off after the first month is also normal. Then the numbers stabilize, again totally normal.
The black lines are just there to manupulate the viewer into thinking people are fleeing a sinking ship.
No.. drop off after the first month is only normal in overblown shallow WoW clones that fail to live up to the hype their multi million dollar ad campaigns generated.
Actually sandbox games generally have a quicker decline, and tank more often. About the only game to break that trend has been EVE Online, and that wasn't a gradual growth either. It declined and settled at around 35k active subsciptions, then after a few years of improvements attracted more players, raising to around 300k. Which is still way less than most themepark MMOs have.
Yes, its a shame sandbox games aren't more successful.
DAoC, EQ, UO, AC, SWG, EQ2 all grew over time to EXCEED their initial box sales and gain MORE subscribers.
No big budget WoW clone has done that since. Hell, most themepark MMOs would crap themselves if they had as big a subscription base as Eve. There's a reason Funcom almost went bankrupt after AoC.
DAoC, EQ are 2nd generation MMOs. AC & UO first generation. Themepark MMOs didn't exist Also the market was a lot smaller (and I mean A LOT, regarding both the number of games and players).
SWG peaked at something like 300k within the first two months, then fell and kept falling until the CU. Upon which it bounced back for a few months, then was decimated by the NGE. So it certainly did not see a growth, other for when people came back to check out the CU. Apart from that its trend was always a decreasing one.
EQ2 declined very quickly, with the trend continuing as WoW launched the following month. EQ2 is also a themepark MMO.
By pure logical all MMOs have exceed their initial box sales, otherwise they'd never receive new players. New players in many case are simply representing turnover, not a growth.
That's what I never understand when people throw EVE out as a great MMO and the "way to do things" etc. Granted...I see EVE's appeal....the graphics have become gorgeous..full economy...political corruption and maneuvering. True double dealing and loss...as well a true comraderie and teamwork. All more or less in the same malleable universe. I see what it does right. But its taken almost 10 yrs to this point.... Why the patience for this game but others aren't allowed the same?. . The nature of mmos require constant change and tweaking ..I don't care if it cost 200,000 or 200 million dollars to create. Its always a learning and evolving process. How much money do you think has been invested into EVE from the beginning..from starting investment to money thrown back into making the game what it is today?
Because even at launch Eve was an interesting game doing something new, so it had potential to grow. WoW clones, do not, because by definition, they are clones. Reactionary at best. They'll never break new ground and grab up new players. All they can ever do is become closer and closer to WoW and more polished, in which case well.. people already have WoW.
And to the person saying themeparks didn't exist... what you mean is that WoW clones didn't exist, thus proving my point that the WoW clone model is the only one that has tripped after launched and steadily fallen.
The reason those old MMOs grew over time is because they had new ideas and good game design. Contrary to what you'd choose to believe, competition was heavy back then, and there were a lot of MMOs, you just only hear about 4-5 because those were the most successful ones. Good MMOs grow. Bad WoW clones rely on initial box sales and marketing campaigns, then ultimately fade away into nothingness. It happened to LotRO, to AoC, to WAR, and Rift.
The black line may be there to show that people could be "fleeing a sinking ship" but it is not manipulating you at all, it is simply showing a slope.
The iffy part comes because you have a (nearly) perfect downward slope, that has been "split" by some kind of external force. The OP stated that possibly this force is simply that the data is being tampered with... that the scale of the graph itself was altered. I doubt anyone will be able to disprove this, and people really have yet to give any other good explanation as to why this happened.
If you try to blame it on the illum patch that was a horrible failure bringing people back, you woudn't see the same slope right after the break, you'd see a steeper slope that would slowly level out back to the original.
Honestly I find your arguments very lacking, you're simply attacking parts of the graph, saying it is somehow altering the data by drawing a line over it. I'd say the best way to call this into question would be to find out if the data set itself is legit. The graph is pretty meaningless if its based on faulty numbers.
EDIT: EVE was actually a pretty amazing game right from the get-go. I was in closed beta and found it to be very compelling before they added all the new stuff we see now (hell, we only really had 4 ship types back then). That game was setting records long before it really hit its stride, back when we were all logging in on sunday for the first ever 10k concurrent users, where we now see 30k+ outside of peak times. I may no longer play the game because I don't enjoy it, but I still see that is an amazing feat, and one of the best made games around. It'll never be a mainstream mega-millions game, but it really doesn't need to be, it is already a success both for those making a living from it, and those who enjoy paying for it.
Everything creates huge amounts of negativity on the internet, that's what the internet is for: Negativity, porn and lolcats.