38 replies to this topic

[travelbug]

anyone care to make an educated guess as to how many active players mwo has?

[Kibble]

You can get a pretty good idea by going to the main forums and scrolling down. At the near bottom there will be a # users online.

[Eximar]

That has nothing to do with active players. The vast majority of players in any online game rarely visit the forum.

[Toong]

In one of the NGNG podcasts one of the devs mentioned they're over a million player accounts now. It's also been said a bunch of times that typical player retention rate is really high. Of course, these numbers are super vague, so all I can really safely say is "several hundred thousand."

Not bad for a game with almost no advertising.

[PropagandaWar]

10. Well if you read all the venom and hatred of the people who still return everyday and write scathing reviews for all to see anyway. It's gotta be only 10.

[Tezcatli]

Well Sarah's Jenner raised over a $100k. Assuming some of those were multiple accounts. It's probably still at least 10,000 people.

[Roland]

Eximar, on 02 September 2013 - 08:59 PM, said:

That has nothing to do with active players. The vast majority of players in any online game rarely visit the forum.

While this may be true, I have to wonder how folks who never come to the forum could possibly understand how this game works, given the utter lack of documentation in game.

For instance, if you did not visit the forums, you would have absolutely no idea how Ghost Heat works. It's not even something which a normal person could possibly derive through testing in game, since it's so overly complex.

Those players would just see a seemingly random deviation in their heat compared to what the mechlab told them.

I assume they'd then quit.

Toong, on 02 September 2013 - 09:03 PM, said:

In one of the NGNG podcasts one of the devs mentioned they're over a million player accounts now. It's also been said a bunch of times that typical player retention rate is really high.

This doesn't mesh with what they've actually been doing.

If player retention was actually high, then they wouldn't have done things like 3PV, which most of their existing community specifically stated that they did not want.

Part of the justification that PGI offered for 3PV, is that their player retention was abysmally low.

[Toong]

Roland, on 02 September 2013 - 09:17 PM, said:

This doesn't mesh with what they've actually been doing.

If player retention was actually high, then they wouldn't have done things like 3PV, which most of their existing community specifically stated that they did not want.

Part of the justification that PGI offered for 3PV, is that their player retention was abysmally low.

Not quite, though I might also be misrepresenting as well. Trying to remember as hard as I can, I think they've said something along the lines of "people who play for more than an hour never leave." I've listened to way too many podcasts and read way too many posts to remember where my information's come from, but I believe they've also said multiple times that the overall retention is high, but of the people who leave, the biggest reason by far is people not understanding the controls and interface.

Also, "most of their existing community" is misleading. It's more accurate to say "most of their existing forum community. There's a really good image floating around showing a poll responding to what they thought about 3pv. The poll ended with like 91% of voters saying they didn't want it at all, but the actual number of votes was only like 3,500. 3,500 voters is a drop in the bucket compared to the community as a whole.

[Sug]

What is an "active player" ? If the numbers were anything to brag about they'd brag about it.

Over 1 million registered accounts is meaningless if they don't spend money...



The last time this thread came up we looked at the "heat maps'' the devs put out that keep track of where people get killed on maps etc.

The more recent maps were visibly less populated with kills than older ones.

Edited by Sug, 02 September 2013 - 09:41 PM.

[Toong]

Sug, on 02 September 2013 - 09:38 PM, said:

The last time this thread came up we looked at the "heat maps'' the devs put out that keep track of where people get killed on maps etc.

The more recent maps were visibly less populated with kills than older ones.

There's absolutely no way to reasonably draw that conclusion, since you don't know how the colors were weighted to the numbers in each of the maps.

Edited by Toong, 02 September 2013 - 09:43 PM.

[DaisuSaikoro Nagasawa]

Kibble, on 02 September 2013 - 08:36 PM, said:

You can get a pretty good idea by going to the main forums and scrolling down. At the near bottom there will be a # users online.

Have you noticed how many posts some users around here have? They write more than they play.

No, it's harder to get a good distinction from the forums... especially with just how bleak they are.

[mike29tw]

Roland, on 02 September 2013 - 09:17 PM, said:

While this may be true, I have to wonder how folks who never come to the forum could possibly understand how this game works, given the utter lack of documentation in game.

For instance, if you did not visit the forums, you would have absolutely no idea how Ghost Heat works. It's not even something which a normal person could possibly derive through testing in game, since it's so overly complex.

Those players would just see a seemingly random deviation in their heat compared to what the mechlab told them.

I assume they'd then quit.


This doesn't mesh with what they've actually been doing.

If player retention was actually high, then they wouldn't have done things like 3PV, which most of their existing community specifically stated that they did not want.

Part of the justification that PGI offered for 3PV, is that their player retention was abysmally low.

Also, if the active player count is so promising as they hinted, they should've already given us the hardcore queue already.

Toong, on 02 September 2013 - 09:26 PM, said:

Not quite, though I might also be misrepresenting as well. Trying to remember as hard as I can, I think they've said something along the lines of "people who play for more than an hour never leave." I've listened to way too many podcasts and read way too many posts to remember where my information's come from, but I believe they've also said multiple times that the overall retention is high, but of the people who leave, the biggest reason by far is people not understanding the controls and interface.

I left. My brother left. My friends left. We all understand the controls and interface, so I really don't know what PGI is smoking.

Toong, on 02 September 2013 - 09:43 PM, said:

There's absolutely no way to reasonably draw that conclusion, since you don't know how the colors were weighted to the numbers in each of the maps.

And we have more maps now than before, so it's really inaccurate to draw any conclusion from looking at the heat maps...

[Toong]

mike29tw, on 02 September 2013 - 09:47 PM, said:

I left. My brother left. My friends left. We all understand the controls and interface, so I really don't know what PGI is smoking.

"They say 1 out of every 5 people is Chinese. How is this possible? I know hundreds of people, and none of them is Chinese."

You're an incredibly tiny piece of the larger population. The people closest to you are also statistically more likely to share your perceptions, opinions, etc. Trying to extrapolate the feelings of the playerbase from your personal experience is silly.

[mike29tw]

Toong, on 02 September 2013 - 09:53 PM, said:

"They say 1 out of every 5 people is Chinese. How is this possible? I know hundreds of people, and none of them is Chinese."

You're an incredibly tiny piece of the larger population. The people closest to you are also statistically more likely to share your perceptions, opinions, etc. Trying to extrapolate the feelings of the playerbase from your personal experience is silly.

Sorry for the confusion but I'm referring to the "people who play more than an hour never leave" statement. You'd be pipe dreaming if you actually believe that.

[Thorqemada]

Many indicators show a slight decline or stagnation interrupted by up- and downspikes.
One NGNG-podcast had a hypothetical number of a concurrency ~7000 Players at primetimes.
To my friends PGI has "achieved" "SOE-Status" - so they will never return, not the ones that made it onto my friendslist and have actually played the game, not the ones that founded it but did not actively play so far and only know the hearsay.
The Forum grows a tad each day but well - how much double and tripple accounts does it show?

Around "Launch" will probably start some PR with some impressive numbers that be meant to impress...

Edited by Thorqemada, 02 September 2013 - 10:09 PM.

[Kattspya]

The devs released an infographic a while back with total amounts of hours played, mechs killed and so on. One player divided the hours by population and got an average of nine hours per player.

[Sug]

Toong, on 02 September 2013 - 09:43 PM, said:

There's absolutely no way to reasonably draw that conclusion, since you don't know how the colors were weighted to the numbers in each of the maps.

Less dots is less dots.

Introducing new maps should produced a distinct drop off then a steady pattern. Scrolling forward through the maps shows a steady decline.

Edited by Sug, 02 September 2013 - 10:52 PM.

[travelbug]

one of the reasons i ask is i seem to be seeing the same names when i play. granted that im from asia (+8 gmt), i dont usually play in what is considered primetime, its still interesting to see 5-6 of the same people in 5 games or so.

also, game devs usually advertise the number of players they have active or otherwise, as a sort of marketing ploy. admittedly, these marketing gimmicks may or may not reflect the actual active players, but i still see it as an effective pr tool - unless the numbers are too low to publish. just makes me think...

Edited by travelbug, 03 September 2013 - 12:01 AM.

[Tolkien]

In terms of player retention being super high, consider the infographic that PGI put out at the start of July.



Notice how there were 9.62 million hours spent in battle? If you believe PGI that there are ~1 million player accounts, that means that the average player spends about nine and a half hours in battle before being burnt out.

That means that for every founder who has done thousands of drops there are handfuls of players who play for one evening then don't come back.

EDIT> I have very good reason to state that the 9.6 million hours is MAN HOUR not battle hours. See my post on page 2. This means that the average player spends about 35 minutes in game before leaving, not 9 hours. See my post on page 2 for more info.

Edited by Tolkien, 03 September 2013 - 06:19 AM.

[Volthorne]

travelbug, on 02 September 2013 - 11:54 PM, said:

one of the reasons i ask is i seem to be seeing the same names when i play. granted that im from asia (+8 gmt), i dont usually play in what is considered primetime, its still interesting to see the 5-6 of the same people in 5 games or so.

As you said, you don't play in prime-time. The majority of the playerbase is (afaik) American. That means you're going to see a lot more of the same people. Also, because of how Elo is implemented, if you play against these same 5-6 people a lot and the wins/losses between you are roughly equal, you're going to keep seeing those particular names a lot more often.

Quote

also, game devs usually advertise the number of players they have active or otherwise, as a sort of marketing ploy. admittedly, these marketing gimmicks may or may not reflect the actual active players, but i still see it as an effective pr tool - unless the numbers are too low to publish. just makes me think...

Clearly you weren't around (or weren't on the forums, at the least) for what happened the last time PGI gave out specific numbers regarding ANY topic related to player numbers. If you can avoid fueling the doomsayers, why wouldn't you? Though of course, because this is the internet, PGI is stuck in a lose-lose (reveal numbers, get shat on; Don't reveal numbers, get shat on).