42 replies to this topic

[deadlykleenex]

So I'm routinely unable to find a game after a couple of minutes of waiting on weeknights. I'm West Coast an I get that Easterners are in bed, but what gives?

[Dramborleg]

How does this metric indicate anything? It's not like the forum poster count goes down when the game loses players.

[Xanilos]

Anyone who is going to say that the data is invalid due to being incomplete please just keep it to yourself,its not helping anyone and its already been stated multiple times.All that has been said is "Here are the numbers for new accounts over time.".

That said I think its nice that someone is keeping track since PGI doesn't really tell us how many still play.

[Too Much Love]

Just for the matter of recording:

26 feb. 2014:

Total members - 573,652
Most online: 5982

[Ted The Prussian Striker]

This wekend's event gives us a rather good estimate for the active playerbase. We got a total score of 280,000. Taking an average score of 10 (actual score is higher, but 10 is easier to calculate and we are making assumptions anyway), this gives us roughly 28,000 matches. These matches have been played in 4 days or 96 hours. If we assume an average match length of 6 minutes, we end up with roughly 1000 matches/h in serial. Hence, there were about 28 matches in parallel this weekend on average. Of course, these matches are not evenly distributed (due to prime-time in different time zones), but I do not know about any other good distribution that would apply here, so I'll stick with it. 28 * 24 players gives amounts to an average in-combat playerbase of 672.

There are a lot of effects that I did not take into account here: Higher match scores, longer matches, player disconnects, etc. let's assume they even out. Finally we need to estimate the frequency of matches for every player (i.e. how long does the average joe timberwolf pilot pause before a new game). I usually pause around 1-5min, say 3min on average. Since I often encounter the same people in multiple matches in a row, I can safely assume that my average idle time is not too exceptional.
Depending on this number the active player base is probably averaging at 1000-2000. I played for 4h this weekend, so if that is an average value, the total number of players this weekend is roughly 24,000 - 48,000.

Since this is based on a lot of assumptions and averages, we can not be very precise, but I conjecture that this game has more than 10,000 and less than 100,000 active players. The lower bound is probably better established than the upper bound, but it correlates with earlier observations I made.

p.s.:

Depending on the actual contracts and the current size of the company, PGI probably has around 2.5 - 5 Mio $/a expenses for man power. Add to that operations, license etc. and we can safely assume at least 10Mio$/a. Given the numbers from above, it is thus fair to say that even a 100$/a average payment does not lead to a huge profit at PGI.

[Egomane]

A few things about your math, Ted...

10 AM Friday -> 10 AM Saturday = 24 hours
10 AM Saturday -> 10 AM Sunday = 24 hours
10 AM Sunday -> 10 AM Monday = 24 hours

So this event went for 72 hours, not 96.

We also still have, by the time of my posting, 7 hours and 20 minutes left on the clock.

In conclusion, so far we only had ~65 hours. A good 10 % of the total time is still remaining. You need to redo your numbers.

Edited by Egomane, 20 October 2014 - 01:43 AM.

[Gelion]

Also the current number of people on forums who are such as me, ex-players of MWO, isn't accounted for. It is rather interesting, as I do lurk to see if and when and how community warfare is being implemented and if it is a game I can come back to.

[Heffay]

I'm an active player, but didn't play this weekend. How do I figure into those calculations?

Also, the average match time is 8 minutes, not 6. Need to tweak your numbers to account for the proper match time as well.

[Ted The Prussian Striker]

Egomane, on 20 October 2014 - 01:42 AM, said:

So this event went for 72 hours, not 96.
In conclusion, so far we only had ~65 hours. A good 10 % of the total time is still remaining. You need to redo your numbers.

Errr ... that was a "did somebody even read my post" canary, of course! .

You are right of course, so here is the update to my guesstimate: Assuming we reach a score of 300,000, my guess of 28,000 matches is still viable. But we only had 750 matches in series (540 if you pick an 8min average game). So the number of parallel matches is 38 (52). This gives us 912 (1248) players engaged in combat simultaneously. When we add 50% idle players, we end up with with 1400-2000 players online. If 4h playtime is the average, we had roundabout 36,000 players online this weekend.

@Heffay: You simply don't. There is simply no way to estimate active players that did not play this weekend as long as there is no common definition of "active". As I said, these numbers are to provide a general overview of the dimension of the playerbase. We can define to be "active" to play once a day/weekend/week/month/year/ever. Since we have data for a weekend, I choosed that one. If you want to scale that up to the number of players that play at least once a month, ask yourself, how often you play during weekdays and multiply accordingly (i.e. if it is highly unlikely you ever play at weekends and you feel you are an average player multiply with a high factor).


To summarize: There are a lot of guessed factors involved (see the difference between 6min and 8min match length), but as usual it is highly unlikely that all of these factors are off in the same direction. What we can see is the dimension of the playerbase: A number of 100,000 players in this event would be somewhat high, but still plausible. 1Mio players definitely not. This also establishes us with an order-of-magnitude-estimate for the potential consumers: 1Mio is still possible (meaning that at least 90% of the players fall into the same category as Heffay), 10Mio is highly unlikely (meaning only < 1% would have played this weekend). Since paying customers is only a fraction of possible customers, we are talking about thousands or tens of thousands, possibly even 100,000-200,000 income-generators. So again: paying 100$/a is not really that much in this special economy, but rather the point of sustainability.

[Heffay]

Ted The Prussian Striker, on 20 October 2014 - 05:05 AM, said:

Errr ... that was a "did somebody even read my post" canary, of course! . You are right of course, so here is the update to my guesstimate: Assuming we reach a score of 300,000, my guess of 28,000 matches is still viable. But we only had 750 matches in series (540 if you pick an 8min average game). So the number of parallel matches is 38 (52). This gives us 912 (1248) players engaged in combat simultaneously. When we add 50% idle players, we end up with with 1400-2000 players online. If 4h playtime is the average, we had roundabout 36,000 players online this weekend. @Heffay: You simply don't. There is simply no way to estimate active players that did not play this weekend as long as there is no common definition of "active". As I said, these numbers are to provide a general overview of the dimension of the playerbase. We can define to be "active" to play once a day/weekend/week/month/year/ever. Since we have data for a weekend, I choosed that one. If you want to scale that up to the number of players that play at least once a month, ask yourself, how often you play during weekdays and multiply accordingly (i.e. if it is highly unlikely you ever play at weekends and you feel you are an average player multiply with a high factor). To summarize: There are a lot of guessed factors involved (see the difference between 6min and 8min match length), but as usual it is highly unlikely that all of these factors are off in the same direction. What we can see is the dimension of the playerbase: A number of 100,000 players in this event would be somewhat high, but still plausible. 1Mio players definitely not. This also establishes us with an order-of-magnitude-estimate for the potential consumers: 1Mio is still possible (meaning that at least 90% of the players fall into the same category as Heffay), 10Mio is highly unlikely (meaning only < 1% would have played this weekend). Since paying customers is only a fraction of possible customers, we are talking about thousands or tens of thousands, possibly even 100,000-200,000 income-generators. So again: paying 100$/a is not really that much in this special economy, but rather the point of sustainability.

The average F2P game generates $2-$4 per month per active player. And monetization is something they've *always* done very well.

We also know that MWO is generating enough money to support the company with enough left over for them to venture into other games as well.

My best guess is that the active player base is around the 100k order of magnitude, with the average number of concurrent users in the 5000-10000 users. I've done a bunch of math on this in the past, and won't go back into it here, but that is where my guesses fall.

[no1337]

Haha.. such a lonely sunday afternoon drags me back to my gaming time... Well, just sorted out Battlefield Play For Free, RUST and here MWO. All player numbers have been decreasing consistently (and I'm gettn' to old for new games lol) and I'm just wondering if it's so with MWO as well or worth it to buy a decent pc and jump back in...?

Any tendency?

Cheers

No1337

[Heffay]

no1337, on 26 October 2014 - 06:00 PM, said:

Haha.. such a lonely sunday afternoon drags me back to my gaming time... Well, just sorted out Battlefield Play For Free, RUST and here MWO. All player numbers have been decreasing consistently (and I'm gettn' to old for new games lol) and I'm just wondering if it's so with MWO as well or worth it to buy a decent pc and jump back in...?

Any tendency?

Cheers

No1337

Game isn't shrinking, that's for sure. They actually ran out of server space a couple weekends ago and PGI_jon mentioned that he has been tasked to increase their server farm.

And with CW coming out in less than 2 months... yah. It's a good time to get back into the game.

[Gremlich Johns]

drunkblackstar, on 25 February 2014 - 08:27 AM, said:

Just for the matter of recording:

26 feb. 2014:

Total members - 573,652
Most online: 5982

Statistically, the responding forum population for any poll probably represents the total player population BETTER than a 1,000 person political or lifestyle poll by any news outlet.

[Heffay]

Gremlich Johns, on 28 October 2014 - 01:38 PM, said:

Statistically, the responding forum population for any poll probably represents the total player population BETTER than a 1,000 person political or lifestyle poll by any news outlet.

By a news out let or a polling company? The 1000 people, if they are a statistically significant portion of the population and sampled at a rate that reflects that population can tell a lot. A forum poll is a self-selected group in the first place, with far different concerns than the average player out there.

Your lifestyle poll and forum polls are probably a good comparison though. The only people who are going to vote on a Miley Cyrus poll are people who want to vote on a Miley Cyrus poll.

[Too Much Love]

It seems that now we know the exact number of the MWO players, at least since the time the leaderboard was introduced.

This number is 27982.

Go to Leaderboard, sort it by Matches played, find the last page and you should see something like this:

[Heffay]

That's not the full number. It is a floor. I'm not on the leaderboard for example, as I'm on vacation and haven't played since the patch. Others will only come on sporadically.

It's a pretty good floor though!

[Davegt27]

I just looked and I am not on the leader board at all
Lightning strike took out my Computer so I have not played in awhile

Edited by Davegt27, 12 August 2016 - 08:17 PM.

[Too Much Love]

Judging by Leaderboard numbers 64315 people played since Leaderboard was introduced.

It means that from 25 of June to 25 of July the amount of players almost doubled.

Apparently, still there are many people playing MWO, but most of them don't do it regulary, so the average numbers of gamers online are relatively low.

[Chavette]

Thanks for keeping this thread alive, it will stay here as a monument for how bad I had sonned that s3 dude.

[Heffay]

Marack Drock the Unicorn Wizard, on 10 August 2016 - 01:48 PM, said:

64k is a sad fraction of what this game once was.

I wonder how small this community will have shrunk by December. Yeah we have had a small increase in players since steam, but older players are going missing regularly from what I see.