Originally posted by TankYou88 Wildstar is still in the Top 20 most played PC games right now tons of people playing are still talking about how populated the later areas are still, even the smaller servers. Carbine has also said their servers are bigger than other games, low population can count for medium or high on other games.
Where did you get top 20? on Raptr its currently #42 with 68,937 hours for weekly hours, #32 on month hours 421,562, and it doesn't even appear on the All section of hours.
The same place he got rest of the post.. thin air.
Considering recently Carbine announced they are going to take an action to solve low server issue... you can disregard whatever he said.
Played one day of one beta, unnistalled. You can say "boring quests" or "hardcore end game raids" or "cartoony art style" or whatever, to me its only a bad game, one of the worst i played in a lot of ways. I can't lie saying that i am not happy to hear that it is sinking; but not because of the players, in truth because of the Developers; they where too much arrogant in their advertisements, and i hate arrogant people. Will not play it even if the devs pays me to play. For the players who really like the game; my feelings, best luck for all of you.
Played one day of one beta, unnistalled. You can say "boring quests" or "hardcore end game raids" or "cartoony art style" or whatever, to me its only a bad game, one of the worst i played in a lot of ways. I can't lie saying that i am not happy to hear that it is sinking; but not because of the players, in truth because of the Developers; they where too much arrogant in their advertisements, and i hate arrogant people. Will not play it even if the devs pays me to play. For the players who really like the game; my feelings, best luck for all of you.
I can't help but agree with this sentiment. It bought nothing new to the genre (in a lot of ways it regressed). It felt lazy in its design.
That it took 9 years to develop content that limited and simple astonishes me. It is one of those games that I will not mourn.
MMORPGs are generally in downward trend. Number of incoming AAA MMORPG games is diminishing, player interest in mmorpgs is diminishing, even mmorpg sites in order to try to save visitor / users numbers are de-facto changing to 'general gaming' - with reporting on moba, lobby, non-mmo online and even single player games nowadays.
Wildstar that looks like children mmorpg that in middle of development was changed to raider 'adult' mmorpg with many bad ideas (awful questing, bad combat, telegraphs, attunement, etc) is just sinking faster than other new releases. Above reasons I've mentioned are only reasons for faster sinking, but those are not reasons for sinking in first place.
MMORPGs are losing, because they not solved problems that exist in MMORPG for last 10+ years. Problems that players don't want to live with anymore and problems that are actually getting worse for most part as time passes.
Please stop equating below average success of one MMO with entire MMORPG genre. If anything MMOS are making more money than they ever did and also has lot more players.
By the way pass me whatever it is that you smoking. Looks like a good stuff.
Mhm, I think if we ever got to see the total sum of money involved and the amount of people who play MMO's these days most of us would be stunned by the numbers.
There's such an overwhelming amount of different MMOs out there, each with their own communities of several 100k players. Even in RL it's becoming increasingly more common to run into MMO players (usually WoW or GW2 players in my experience).
My SWTOR referral link for those wanting to give the game a try. (Newbies get a welcome package while returning players get a few account upgrades to help with their preferred status.)
The issue boils down not to the questing, not to art style, not to its lore.....it boils down to the fact that it was designed for the hardcore market only, yet isn't as hardcore as WoW's hard modes. Hardcore raiders dont have a reason to play it when there are greater challenges on the market, and neither do casual players.
Before you jump all over me frothing at the mouth claiming I havent cleared WS's raid encounters so what do I know...while true...I tend to listen to Enigma, the number 1 Wildstar guild right now. They themselves have stated that the raids, although the best raids of any MMO at launch, are still behind WoW's heroic encounters.
TLDR: If you are going to be a straight up hardcore raiding MMO and leave out casuals, you better make sure you are harder than your competition.
Really sad to hear about Wildstar, I still want to experience what the game has to offer but hearing the population problems are getting worse I just have a hard time convincing myself that it will be worth the 60 bucks. Unlike others I actually love the art style of this game, the animatons on the Chua are pretty amazing and overall the world looks really worth exploring. Hopefully Carbine gets their act together and comes up with solutions quick because I really want to see this game work out and not become another MMO casualty.
I've been tracking some numbers on Raptr for a while now. WS at the end of July was in the top 20 over the month, but if you look at the trends (which I've been manually saving since Raptr does not display this), their position was more due to their playtime at the beginning of the month as it was steadily declining.
FYI, Raptr reports the previous month and week of total playtime, as gathered by their client that members can choose to run on their systems. WS lost almost 40% of their weekly playtime during July, and so far, over 55% of their playtime in Aug. If you want some comparisons to other games, their current weekly playtime is a little more than a third of SWTOR, about 5% belove EvE, and about 20% above (yes, above) TESO. However, it is steadily shedding 1-3% of this number daily. I expect it to drop below TESO in about a week or two unless this trend stabilizes (and depending on what TESO's trend is, which is also currently negative, but less so than WS).
A recent report about SWTOR put its active playerbase at over a million (but that was before a recent uptick probably due to their new housing/conquest feature patch, so if the million was accurate, I'd probably peg it at about 1.2-1.3 mil now), and EvE has approx 500k subs at last report (but that was a long time ago, no idea what it is now), so this might give an indication of what the playerbase might be--direct correlations between playtime on Raptr and subs or even true total playtime cannot be made with any accuracy as Raptr is essentially a self-selecting poll, and playtime does not necessarily correlate with subs, or even the # of active players.
It currently sits at #32 in the rankings based on monthly playtime, but only #45 in weekly.
EDIT: BTW, I don't track FF XIV stats, but since someone mentioned it above, looking at today's numbers, WS has about 30% the playtime of FF.
I've been tracking some numbers on Raptr for a while now. WS at the end of July was in the top 20 over the month, but if you look at the trends (which I've been manually saving since Raptr does not display this), their position was more due to their playtime at the beginning of the month as it was steadily declining.
FYI, Raptr reports the previous month and week of total playtime, as gathered by their client that members can choose to run on their systems. WS lost almost 40% of their weekly playtime during July, and so far, over 55% of their playtime in Aug. If you want some comparisons to other games, their current weekly playtime is a little more than a third of SWTOR, about 5% belove EvE, and about 20% above (yes, above) TESO. However, it is steadily shedding 1-3% of this number daily. I expect it to drop below TESO in about a week or two unless this trend stabilizes (and depending on what TESO's trend is, which is also currently negative, but less so than WS).
A recent report about SWTOR put its active playerbase at over a million (but that was before a recent uptick probably due to their new housing/conquest feature patch, so if the million was accurate, I'd probably peg it at about 1.2-1.3 mil now), and EvE has approx 500k subs at last report (but that was a long time ago, no idea what it is now), so this might give an indication of what the playerbase might be--direct correlations between playtime on Raptr and subs or even true total playtime cannot be made with any accuracy as Raptr is essentially a self-selecting poll, and playtime does not necessarily correlate with subs, or even the # of active players.
It currently sits at #32 in the rankings based on monthly playtime, but only #45 in weekly.
EDIT: BTW, I don't track FF XIV stats, but since someone mentioned it above, looking at today's numbers, WS has about 30% the playtime of FF.
All very interesting, while it would also be interesting to see how those games fared on other platforms like Xfire too, i would hate to use them as the basis of an argument without a certain amount of corroboration from sources that are a tad more 'reliable' unfortunately that kind of source material is rarer than hens teeth
Maybe it does display a trend, the trouble is, while i might agree with some of the conclusions reached, the truth is its entirely subjective, although more than a little amusing
All very interesting, while it would also be interesting to see how those games fared on other platforms like Xfire too, i would hate to use them as the basis of an argument without a certain amount of corroboration from sources that are a tad more 'reliable' unfortunately that kind of source material is rarer than hens teeth
Maybe it does display a trend, the trouble is, while i might agree with some of the conclusions reached, the truth is its entirely subjective, although more than a little amusing
So would I, but currently this is one of the few comprehensive playtime stat services around. Unfortunately, XFire is just about dead. For example, on XFire, WoW shows about 6k hrs/day, or 42k hrs/week. Raptr has 1160k hrs/week (yes, in k, so over a million hours...). That's roughly around a 25x factor. I just find that sample size far too small to consider seriously. If you presume that a person plays 3-6 hrs per day, that means there's only about 1-2k players in the sample on any given day.
But in any case, here's Wildstar on XFire. Roughly speaking, it shows the same 50% decrease in the past month that I see on Raptr.
So would I, but currently this is one of the few comprehensive playtime stat services around. Unfortunately, XFire is just about dead. For example, on XFire, WoW shows about 6k hrs/day, or 42k hrs/week. Raptr has 1160k hrs/week (yes, in k, so over a million hours...). That's roughly around a 25x factor. I just find that sample size far too small to consider seriously. If you presume that a person plays 3-6 hrs per day, that means there's only about 1-2k players in the sample on any given day.
But in any case, here's Wildstar on XFire. Roughly speaking, it shows the same 50% decrease in the past month that I see on Raptr.
For either service "number of people playing" is the more meaningful statistic for subscription based games. This doesn't improve the "accuracy" of the data but it does eliminate the "shiny new" factor. People playing their new game for 8-12 hours initially and then when the hours drop back to 3-5 say you get the impression of a 50% drop when in reality the number of players might be the same.
This is also why new games shoot to the top of such tables when they first launch.
As for XFire .. yes. May have been broken these last few days. If not number of Wildstar players: 14.
MMORPGs are generally in downward trend. Number of incoming AAA MMORPG games is diminishing, player interest in mmorpgs is diminishing, even mmorpg sites in order to try to save visitor / users numbers are de-facto changing to 'general gaming' - with reporting on moba, lobby, non-mmo online and even single player games nowadays.
Wildstar that looks like children mmorpg that in middle of development was changed to raider 'adult' mmorpg with many bad ideas (awful questing, bad combat, telegraphs, attunement, etc) is just sinking faster than other new releases. Above reasons I've mentioned are only reasons for faster sinking, but those are not reasons for sinking in first place.
MMORPGs are losing, because they not solved problems that exist in MMORPG for last 10+ years. Problems that players don't want to live with anymore and problems that are actually getting worse for most part as time passes.
Please stop equating below average success of one MMO with entire MMORPG genre. If anything MMOS are making more money than they ever did and also has lot more players.
By the way pass me whatever it is that you smoking. Looks like a good stuff.
Games like WoT, LoL, Dota 2 and many other lobby pvp online games are exploding. They're not MMORPG games though.
Many games like Destiny, Division, Warframe, Assasin Creed Unity and more that focus on lobby / co-op pve experience are incoming. They're not MMORPG games though.
MMORPG games are in retreat.
1. Almost every single game company / divison that did release non-indie MMORPG in last few years, had to underwent HEAVY restructurization, with heavy lay-offs and management change after their games underperformed. Example include - EA Bioware after Swtor, Funcom after TSW, Trion after Rift & Defiancea and few others.
2. MMORPG focused media - Massively scaled down numbers writers and MMORPG focused columns &news , brining & expanding at same time columns & news amont dedicated to other online games (MOBAs, lobby pvp / pve games).
MMORPG.com is doing same thing.
Many other smaller MMORPG-only (in past) websites are doing same thing. Expanding in other types of games or media in order to counter signs of drop in readers.
3, Ucpoming western AAA MMORPGs - Basically only EVERQuest Next & Star Citizen. Both using players money & hands (in case of EQN) as major development resources.
No western game company seem to want to finance development of AAA MMORPG title using their own resources. Actually there were cancelations of many AAA MMORPG projects - including Project Copernicus, World of Darkness, Warhammer 40k MMO and a rumor say that WB-Turbine MMORPG project also was trashed.
Online games are ok - they're exploding actually with huge financial successes of several titles that dwarf all MMORPG financial successes besides WoW (and Aion & Lineage 1 in Asia).
Single player games are ok - they're expreriencing a revival actually.
MMORPGs are diminishing. New projects are canceled, developer teams and budgets for existing MMORPGs are getting smaller,.
Does not look like MMOs are in retreat to me. I tried to play LoL but the point click was difficult to get used. Smite apparently the one with WASD is not doing that great. So not so sure about the in retreat part.
One thing which doesn't help Wildstar is how they split up the player base compared to other games (for Pve). Others either don't have factions (AoC, GW2), allow PvE with people from other factions (Rift, TSW) or you can PvE with people from other servers (WoW).
I am a casual player, I can play about 4-5 hrs per dayish. I did reached lvl 50 before drop 1 but what killed my experience is the following:
1) The attunement process is the biggest one, this is just unbelievably boring to get attuned. I saw literally is just a barrier set for no better reason than a time sink
2) PVP : The fact that you have to get PVE gears in order to be best-geared in pvp didn't quite make a lot of sense to me. No to mention, pvp players also have to go through the attunement process which to me make even less sense.
As people stated before, cartoony graphics, we sort of accepted them when we buy the boxes so it is not a turn-off per say but the grindy, laborious, good-for-nothing attunement process that they call "hardcore gameplay" is what gets me
Does not look like MMOs are in retreat to me. I tried to play LoL but the point click was difficult to get used. Smite apparently the one with WASD is not doing that great. So not so sure about the in retreat part.
That list is bad.
Some of those games are already released.
Some of those games are already cancelled.
Some of those games are small budget projects.
Some of those games are not MMORPGs at all. There are even single player games there listed in link you provided !
Sounds like (in addition to other issues, I'm sure), that they made one of the same mistakes as Anet did with Guild Wars 2 - overestimating their sustained player numbers and launching with way too many servers.
Server merges may come across as "end of the world," but it's needed here, and badly.
Originally posted by Sixli Such an OP troll post! You win.
Not everyone can handle the truth. It is ok. Hug?
No truth-handler, you. I deride your truth-handling abilities.
lol.
To be honest with you this topic has turned into something else. I simply wanted to find out a more active server to play dominion. And since i made this topic i got several pm to suggest me stormtalon so i am playing there now.
I didn't make this topic for people to post how much they 'dislike' the game. But yeah that is what it is about now.
I enjoy the game i won't deny even though i know end game is very limited and population is dwindling very fast.
I will stick to it for atleast till end of this month in hope they merge servers soon.
Originally posted by Sixli Such an OP troll post! You win.
Not everyone can handle the truth. It is ok. Hug?
No truth-handler, you. I deride your truth-handling abilities.
lol.
To be honest with you this topic has turned into something else. I simply wanted to find out a more active server to play dominion. And since i made this topic i got several pm to suggest me stormtalon so i am playing there now.
I didn't make this topic for people to post how much they 'dislike' the game. But yeah that is what it is about now.
I enjoy the game i won't deny even though i know end game is very limited and population is dwindling very fast.
I will stick to it for atleast till end of this month in hope they merge servers soon.
Just curious, how do you know this?
Yes, the pop dropped rather quickly; yes, the servers seem to be stuck at low no matter what time you log. I'm just not sure how this statement could be valid. Will the population circle the drain and dwindle down to zero? The number of players who have stayed could just reflect the hardcore fans who are willing to put up with the deficiencies until the Devs tweak and change things to bring in more players. The drop could also just be a reflection of the go-go-go, gotta have it now crowd not getting their immediate satisfaction and leaving for 'the next big thing'. It could also be the butt-hurt crowd who can't take the difficulty. These are ALL speculation, much like the statement in red seems to be.
As far as reviewers, it's obvious to me that NCsoft spreads the money around well. Say good things they might throw some money your way.
And the tin hat award goes to ^
It seems that reviewers in general take on a title and play to a relatively low level, get invited by the Devs to run a dungeon or two, and jump to the writing. While it seems like they only 'taste' the game, I'm fairly certain they aren't as neurotic and ADHD prone as most of the crowd here. I've never seen a reviewer rush to end content and pronounce their Epeen-ness in a forum, proclaiming their review to be 'truth' or 'the reason why is failing'. I'm also fairly certain that if a reviewer was paid by the Devs, THAT info would get leaked pretty quickly. Tin hat conspiracies are cute though.
I'm not sure if you're being deliberately obtuse or not...
I don't think anyone believes that devs/publishers pay reviewers directly for a good review. But sites like this one rely on site traffic to generate income from advertising. One way to get site traffic is by having exclusive interviews/previews with devs about upcoming games/expansions etc.
If a site gets known for publishing negative reviews the game publishers will stop offering exclusives. The site won't have anything to publish that we can't get from somewhere else, so we'll stop coming here in favour of those other sites. Site traffic goes down, revenue from advertising goes down and, eventually, site goes down.
Any review site that is reliant on advertising revenue has to keep the game devs/publishers on side or risk a lack of funding.
Unfortunately it's a catch 22 situation. If you start up a review site or you tube channel, to start with you can be totally honest with your opinions as you are not beholden to anyone but yourself. If you become popular you will get noticed by the publishers and they will start offering you freebies: Access to press events and betas etc. These early access pieces will increase your following and, if on You Tube, increase your own revenue from the annoying ads. And now they've got you. You don't want that revenue to drop so you keep the devs happy by saying nice things about their games.
Then of course the fact that all these early access press events are very carefully managed so that the press only see the really good, polished, bug free bits of the game. What is experienced probably is as good as the following article says. Once the game launches though everyone can now see all the un-finished, buggy bollocks that is the rest of the game. But the press now can't put out an honest review as 1) they'll look like idiots for publishing brilliant previews then a crap review and 2) a bad review will block them from any future press events for what could be truly great games.
The only we will ever get an unbiased review site is for someone to start one that doesn't ever take advertising from game publishers or the creators of anything that will ever be reviewed on the site and that is then visited by gamers that don';t mind not getting exclusive previews, articles and interviews with developers.
Now taking bets on how long it will take someone from MMORPG to come along and say that this isn't how they work and they publish what they truly think at the time and yadda yadda yadda...
You seem to be under the assumption that money is changing hands regardless of the intention of the reviewer. Do game companies want a good review? Yes. Do game companies simply WANT their game reviewed? Absolutely. Suggesting that these sites are pulling direct funding from Devs is 'obtuse'. Yes, there is likely monies coming in from ads, but to sway a review, I would think we'd see a lot more hyperbole and much higher scoring than what we see now. Further, there is little correlation with a bad review and the desire to get a review. The game companies are likely hoping that their game 1) gets a review, and 2) gets a good review. If the review comes out bad, it's unlikely that the game company will ban any contact with the reviewer. They may limit access, or try to follow-up when they've addressed the reviewers concerns, but pulling up shop and cutting association is bad press and not conducive to getting the word out about their game. If this IS such an issue, then why hasn't there been a call to look at MMORPGs financials EVERYTIME a suspect review is out (or for that matter, any other reviewer site)? Looking at the possibilities of an influx of cash when there happens to be a favorable word said about a company. It's obvious that this would be a silly venture, but oddly it still doesn't stop the tin hat community from speculating.
Originally posted by Sixli Such an OP troll post! You win.
Not everyone can handle the truth. It is ok. Hug?
No truth-handler, you. I deride your truth-handling abilities.
lol.
To be honest with you this topic has turned into something else. I simply wanted to find out a more active server to play dominion. And since i made this topic i got several pm to suggest me stormtalon so i am playing there now.
I didn't make this topic for people to post how much they 'dislike' the game. But yeah that is what it is about now.
I enjoy the game i won't deny even though i know end game is very limited and population is dwindling very fast.
I will stick to it for atleast till end of this month in hope they merge servers soon.
Just curious, how do you know this?
Yes, the pop dropped rather quickly; yes, the servers seem to be stuck at low no matter what time you log. I'm just not sure how this statement could be valid. Will the population circle the drain and dwindle down to zero? The number of players who have stayed could just reflect the hardcore fans who are willing to put up with the deficiencies until the Devs tweak and change things to bring in more players. The drop could also just be a reflection of the go-go-go, gotta have it now crowd not getting their immediate satisfaction and leaving for 'the next big thing'. It could also be the butt-hurt crowd who can't take the difficulty. These are ALL speculation, much like the statement in red seems to be.
Do i really need to speculate anymore? with in two months from high to medium to low and constant demands for free transfers and server merges on forums?
Stormtalon used to be med server and now it has been days it is sitting on low not to mentioned i had to change guilds atleast 4 times because people stopped logging.
Writing is on the wall it is up to you if you want to believe it or not.
This game will do much better with 4 to 5 servers so that all players have bigger pool of members to play with.
Originally posted by Archlyte I hope all games that present a cartoon as their face enjoy this doom. EQNext specifically. Developers should be punished for being fucking foolish.
Originally posted by Sixli Such an OP troll post! You win.
Not everyone can handle the truth. It is ok. Hug?
No truth-handler, you. I deride your truth-handling abilities.
lol.
To be honest with you this topic has turned into something else. I simply wanted to find out a more active server to play dominion. And since i made this topic i got several pm to suggest me stormtalon so i am playing there now.
I didn't make this topic for people to post how much they 'dislike' the game. But yeah that is what it is about now.
I enjoy the game i won't deny even though i know end game is very limited and population is dwindling very fast.
I will stick to it for atleast till end of this month in hope they merge servers soon.
Just curious, how do you know this?
Yes, the pop dropped rather quickly; yes, the servers seem to be stuck at low no matter what time you log. I'm just not sure how this statement could be valid. Will the population circle the drain and dwindle down to zero? The number of players who have stayed could just reflect the hardcore fans who are willing to put up with the deficiencies until the Devs tweak and change things to bring in more players. The drop could also just be a reflection of the go-go-go, gotta have it now crowd not getting their immediate satisfaction and leaving for 'the next big thing'. It could also be the butt-hurt crowd who can't take the difficulty. These are ALL speculation, much like the statement in red seems to be.
Do i really need to speculate anymore? with in two months from high to medium to low and constant demands for free transfers and server merges on forums?
Stormtalon used to be med server and now it has been days it is sitting on low not to mentioned i had to change guilds atleast 4 times because people stopped logging.
Writing is on the wall it is up to you if you want to believe it or not.
This game will do much better with 4 to 5 servers so that all players have bigger pool of members to play with.
I could take a screenshot of WoW servers at 4 am and it wouldn't look different.
Just saying.
My opinion is my own. I respect all other opinions and views equally, but keep in mind that my opinion will always be the best for me. That's why it's my opinion.
As has been mentioned elsewhere and often in these forums, the focus on "hardcore" raiding for endgame will doom any mmorpg in today's market to a very small niche.
At WoW's height of popularity, what percentage of the player base was into "hardcore" raiding?
EDIT: By the way, was that North American prime time? Even if it is Oceanic prime time, it doesn't look good for the Oceanic server.
This.
It sounds like Carbine actually listened to the whinging minority that raid and made a game for them.
Comments
The same place he got rest of the post.. thin air.
Considering recently Carbine announced they are going to take an action to solve low server issue... you can disregard whatever he said.
Not much to say except: I told you all...
Played one day of one beta, unnistalled. You can say "boring quests" or "hardcore end game raids" or "cartoony art style" or whatever, to me its only a bad game, one of the worst i played in a lot of ways. I can't lie saying that i am not happy to hear that it is sinking; but not because of the players, in truth because of the Developers; they where too much arrogant in their advertisements, and i hate arrogant people. Will not play it even if the devs pays me to play. For the players who really like the game; my feelings, best luck for all of you.
I can't help but agree with this sentiment. It bought nothing new to the genre (in a lot of ways it regressed). It felt lazy in its design.
That it took 9 years to develop content that limited and simple astonishes me. It is one of those games that I will not mourn.
Mhm, I think if we ever got to see the total sum of money involved and the amount of people who play MMO's these days most of us would be stunned by the numbers.
There's such an overwhelming amount of different MMOs out there, each with their own communities of several 100k players. Even in RL it's becoming increasingly more common to run into MMO players (usually WoW or GW2 players in my experience).
My SWTOR referral link for those wanting to give the game a try. (Newbies get a welcome package while returning players get a few account upgrades to help with their preferred status.)
https://www.ashesofcreation.com/ref/Callaron/
The issue boils down not to the questing, not to art style, not to its lore.....it boils down to the fact that it was designed for the hardcore market only, yet isn't as hardcore as WoW's hard modes. Hardcore raiders dont have a reason to play it when there are greater challenges on the market, and neither do casual players.
Before you jump all over me frothing at the mouth claiming I havent cleared WS's raid encounters so what do I know...while true...I tend to listen to Enigma, the number 1 Wildstar guild right now. They themselves have stated that the raids, although the best raids of any MMO at launch, are still behind WoW's heroic encounters.
TLDR: If you are going to be a straight up hardcore raiding MMO and leave out casuals, you better make sure you are harder than your competition.
HEAVEN OR HELL
Duel 1
Lets ROCK!
I've been tracking some numbers on Raptr for a while now. WS at the end of July was in the top 20 over the month, but if you look at the trends (which I've been manually saving since Raptr does not display this), their position was more due to their playtime at the beginning of the month as it was steadily declining.
FYI, Raptr reports the previous month and week of total playtime, as gathered by their client that members can choose to run on their systems. WS lost almost 40% of their weekly playtime during July, and so far, over 55% of their playtime in Aug. If you want some comparisons to other games, their current weekly playtime is a little more than a third of SWTOR, about 5% belove EvE, and about 20% above (yes, above) TESO. However, it is steadily shedding 1-3% of this number daily. I expect it to drop below TESO in about a week or two unless this trend stabilizes (and depending on what TESO's trend is, which is also currently negative, but less so than WS).
A recent report about SWTOR put its active playerbase at over a million (but that was before a recent uptick probably due to their new housing/conquest feature patch, so if the million was accurate, I'd probably peg it at about 1.2-1.3 mil now), and EvE has approx 500k subs at last report (but that was a long time ago, no idea what it is now), so this might give an indication of what the playerbase might be--direct correlations between playtime on Raptr and subs or even true total playtime cannot be made with any accuracy as Raptr is essentially a self-selecting poll, and playtime does not necessarily correlate with subs, or even the # of active players.
It currently sits at #32 in the rankings based on monthly playtime, but only #45 in weekly.
EDIT: BTW, I don't track FF XIV stats, but since someone mentioned it above, looking at today's numbers, WS has about 30% the playtime of FF.
All very interesting, while it would also be interesting to see how those games fared on other platforms like Xfire too, i would hate to use them as the basis of an argument without a certain amount of corroboration from sources that are a tad more 'reliable' unfortunately that kind of source material is rarer than hens teeth
Maybe it does display a trend, the trouble is, while i might agree with some of the conclusions reached, the truth is its entirely subjective, although more than a little amusing
So would I, but currently this is one of the few comprehensive playtime stat services around. Unfortunately, XFire is just about dead. For example, on XFire, WoW shows about 6k hrs/day, or 42k hrs/week. Raptr has 1160k hrs/week (yes, in k, so over a million hours...). That's roughly around a 25x factor. I just find that sample size far too small to consider seriously. If you presume that a person plays 3-6 hrs per day, that means there's only about 1-2k players in the sample on any given day.
But in any case, here's Wildstar on XFire. Roughly speaking, it shows the same 50% decrease in the past month that I see on Raptr.
For either service "number of people playing" is the more meaningful statistic for subscription based games. This doesn't improve the "accuracy" of the data but it does eliminate the "shiny new" factor. People playing their new game for 8-12 hours initially and then when the hours drop back to 3-5 say you get the impression of a 50% drop when in reality the number of players might be the same.
This is also why new games shoot to the top of such tables when they first launch.
As for XFire .. yes. May have been broken these last few days. If not number of Wildstar players: 14.
Games like WoT, LoL, Dota 2 and many other lobby pvp online games are exploding. They're not MMORPG games though.
Many games like Destiny, Division, Warframe, Assasin Creed Unity and more that focus on lobby / co-op pve experience are incoming. They're not MMORPG games though.
MMORPG games are in retreat.
1. Almost every single game company / divison that did release non-indie MMORPG in last few years, had to underwent HEAVY restructurization, with heavy lay-offs and management change after their games underperformed. Example include - EA Bioware after Swtor, Funcom after TSW, Trion after Rift & Defiancea and few others.
2. MMORPG focused media - Massively scaled down numbers writers and MMORPG focused columns &news , brining & expanding at same time columns & news amont dedicated to other online games (MOBAs, lobby pvp / pve games).
MMORPG.com is doing same thing.
Many other smaller MMORPG-only (in past) websites are doing same thing. Expanding in other types of games or media in order to counter signs of drop in readers.
3, Ucpoming western AAA MMORPGs - Basically only EVERQuest Next & Star Citizen. Both using players money & hands (in case of EQN) as major development resources.
No western game company seem to want to finance development of AAA MMORPG title using their own resources. Actually there were cancelations of many AAA MMORPG projects - including Project Copernicus, World of Darkness, Warhammer 40k MMO and a rumor say that WB-Turbine MMORPG project also was trashed.
Online games are ok - they're exploding actually with huge financial successes of several titles that dwarf all MMORPG financial successes besides WoW (and Aion & Lineage 1 in Asia).
Single player games are ok - they're expreriencing a revival actually.
MMORPGs are diminishing. New projects are canceled, developer teams and budgets for existing MMORPGs are getting smaller,.
http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/show/development/MMORPG-Games-in-Development.html
Does not look like MMOs are in retreat to me. I tried to play LoL but the point click was difficult to get used. Smite apparently the one with WASD is not doing that great. So not so sure about the in retreat part.
One thing which doesn't help Wildstar is how they split up the player base compared to other games (for Pve). Others either don't have factions (AoC, GW2), allow PvE with people from other factions (Rift, TSW) or you can PvE with people from other servers (WoW).
I am a casual player, I can play about 4-5 hrs per dayish. I did reached lvl 50 before drop 1 but what killed my experience is the following:
1) The attunement process is the biggest one, this is just unbelievably boring to get attuned. I saw literally is just a barrier set for no better reason than a time sink
2) PVP : The fact that you have to get PVE gears in order to be best-geared in pvp didn't quite make a lot of sense to me. No to mention, pvp players also have to go through the attunement process which to me make even less sense.
As people stated before, cartoony graphics, we sort of accepted them when we buy the boxes so it is not a turn-off per say but the grindy, laborious, good-for-nothing attunement process that they call "hardcore gameplay" is what gets me
That list is bad.
Some of those games are already released.
Some of those games are already cancelled.
Some of those games are small budget projects.
Some of those games are not MMORPGs at all. There are even single player games there listed in link you provided !
Sounds like (in addition to other issues, I'm sure), that they made one of the same mistakes as Anet did with Guild Wars 2 - overestimating their sustained player numbers and launching with way too many servers.
Server merges may come across as "end of the world," but it's needed here, and badly.
R.I.P Wildstar. 2014-2014.
Well I guess Archeage, Destiny, H1Z1 can hold me over until Everquest Next is released.
lol.
To be honest with you this topic has turned into something else. I simply wanted to find out a more active server to play dominion. And since i made this topic i got several pm to suggest me stormtalon so i am playing there now.
I didn't make this topic for people to post how much they 'dislike' the game. But yeah that is what it is about now.
I enjoy the game i won't deny even though i know end game is very limited and population is dwindling very fast.
I will stick to it for atleast till end of this month in hope they merge servers soon.
Just curious, how do you know this?
Yes, the pop dropped rather quickly; yes, the servers seem to be stuck at low no matter what time you log. I'm just not sure how this statement could be valid. Will the population circle the drain and dwindle down to zero? The number of players who have stayed could just reflect the hardcore fans who are willing to put up with the deficiencies until the Devs tweak and change things to bring in more players. The drop could also just be a reflection of the go-go-go, gotta have it now crowd not getting their immediate satisfaction and leaving for 'the next big thing'. It could also be the butt-hurt crowd who can't take the difficulty. These are ALL speculation, much like the statement in red seems to be.
You seem to be under the assumption that money is changing hands regardless of the intention of the reviewer. Do game companies want a good review? Yes. Do game companies simply WANT their game reviewed? Absolutely. Suggesting that these sites are pulling direct funding from Devs is 'obtuse'. Yes, there is likely monies coming in from ads, but to sway a review, I would think we'd see a lot more hyperbole and much higher scoring than what we see now. Further, there is little correlation with a bad review and the desire to get a review. The game companies are likely hoping that their game 1) gets a review, and 2) gets a good review. If the review comes out bad, it's unlikely that the game company will ban any contact with the reviewer. They may limit access, or try to follow-up when they've addressed the reviewers concerns, but pulling up shop and cutting association is bad press and not conducive to getting the word out about their game. If this IS such an issue, then why hasn't there been a call to look at MMORPGs financials EVERYTIME a suspect review is out (or for that matter, any other reviewer site)? Looking at the possibilities of an influx of cash when there happens to be a favorable word said about a company. It's obvious that this would be a silly venture, but oddly it still doesn't stop the tin hat community from speculating.
Do i really need to speculate anymore? with in two months from high to medium to low and constant demands for free transfers and server merges on forums?
Stormtalon used to be med server and now it has been days it is sitting on low not to mentioned i had to change guilds atleast 4 times because people stopped logging.
Writing is on the wall it is up to you if you want to believe it or not.
This game will do much better with 4 to 5 servers so that all players have bigger pool of members to play with.
2edgy4me
Thanks, that's all I needed.
I could take a screenshot of WoW servers at 4 am and it wouldn't look different.
Just saying.
My opinion is my own. I respect all other opinions and views equally, but keep in mind that my opinion will always be the best for me. That's why it's my opinion.
This.
It sounds like Carbine actually listened to the whinging minority that raid and made a game for them.
Now they are reaping the benefits.