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How Many Players Of Mwo?


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#21 Lupin

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Posted 03 September 2013 - 12:09 AM

While there seems no way to find out for sure how many players are playing regularly, would suggest that some of the problems with match maker are related to smaller player pool.

My list of players I use to see online often now down to 2 of 8. I have no reason to play beyond checking what they have patched or broken.

Bad management of game has driven a lot of players away.

#22 nitra

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Posted 03 September 2013 - 12:17 AM

I really wish we had some solid metrics .

all we can do is guess and play with abstracted data sources that dont really tell anything conclusive .

I will say that from what i have seen is that mwo is steady, no real growth no real decline.

as far as numbers i believe sarah's jenners is a good way, to estimate current player base i think a fair estimate would be around 25,000 to 200,000 (using 12,000 + players donated as a base)

considering back in beta when we had a player counter it was always around 4000 players online .
and me doing silly math would put around 160,000.

Either way i would like to put to rest the speculation .

but we wont know until we get some actual numbers.

#23 travelbug

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Posted 03 September 2013 - 02:36 AM

View Postnitra, on 03 September 2013 - 12:17 AM, said:

I really wish we had some solid metrics .

all we can do is guess and play with abstracted data sources that dont really tell anything conclusive .

I will say that from what i have seen is that mwo is steady, no real growth no real decline.

as far as numbers i believe sarah's jenners is a good way, to estimate current player base i think a fair estimate would be around 25,000 to 200,000 (using 12,000 + players donated as a base)

considering back in beta when we had a player counter it was always around 4000 players online .
and me doing silly math would put around 160,000.

Either way i would like to put to rest the speculation .

but we wont know until we get some actual numbers.


i kinda concur with this.

using sarahs jenner numbers (12,000) to represent the paying, active customers and assuming that only 50% of paying, active customers are interested in piloting a light, you end up with 24,000 paying, active customers.

using paretos law wherein 20% of your customer base accounts for 80% of your sales, we come out with 100,000-120,000 active players for the game.

of course these are all assumptions. personally, i wouldnt know if this number is high or low.

#24 nitra

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Posted 03 September 2013 - 02:49 AM

View PostTolkien, on 03 September 2013 - 12:01 AM, said:

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

Posted Image

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.



am i wrong ?

but if i divide the number of hours in to the total xp earned, does that give me xp earned per hour ?

because if that does that number is quite low.


and would mean that there is only a few hundred players playing at a time.

Edited by nitra, 03 September 2013 - 02:50 AM.


#25 Tolkien

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Posted 03 September 2013 - 04:07 AM

I think we have to distinguish between 'Hours of Battle' versus 'Man Hours of Battle'.

If we assume their chart is Hours of Battle total then we can calculate how much each person received by dividing by 16 (This data was from before 12v12 hit).

3.83 x10^9 XP over 9.6x10^6 Hours is only 3982.25 XP per hour of battle.
With 16 players on the field at a time this is 249 XP per player per hour of battle.
Since the average match is supposed to be 8.5 minutes long (I can't remember where I read this) each individual can do 7.06 matches per hour, leading to a tiny 29.28 XP per match per player.

That seems ridiculously small since even a loss is 100 XP?

If however we assume they inflated their 'hours of combat' numbers by actually stating the 'Man hours of combat' we get
3.83 x10^9 XP over 9.6x10^6 Hours is 3982.25 XP per man-hour of battle.
We no longer divide by 16 since this is already per person.
Since the average match is supposed to be 8.5 minutes long (I can't remember where I read this) we assume 7.06 matches per hour and arrive at 564 XP per match.

Given that a good match can net you a thousand when you're on premium time, plus minus a founder/champion/hero mech XP boost I believe that this is the correct number. My personal XP/match is 671 so the correct answer is obviously 564 and not 29.

In conclusion since 564 XP/match is much more believable than 29 XP per match for an average player I have to conclude those numbers are 'Man Hours' of combat.

Therefore we proceed to say each 8.5 minute match of 16 players is 136 man-minutes or 2.27 man-hours.
This means the 9.6x10^6 Hours given above represents about 4.24 million matches total.

This graphic was posted on July 3, so from 29 October to 3 July this spans 35 weeks plus 2 days or 247 days. The 4.24 million matches over 247 days becomes 17179.2 matches per day.

Each 24 hour day produces 169.4 match slots of 8.5 minutes each. Dividing 17179.2 matches by 169.4 match slots per day we get 101.41 matches per average match slot.

Since we need 16 players to populate every single one of those matches we arrive at the average number of players online in open beta up to 3 July of 1623 average number of players online in a match.

Keep in mind that there is probably a factor of 2-5 difference between the peak hours and the low hours given that this game is probably most popular in the US and Canada, and more people will be expected on the weekend than on week days. There are also players sitting in their mechlab that don't add to this number. If you spend 25% of your time fiddling about in the mechlab on average, add 25% to this number.

Please PM me if you spot a problem with my math, but I hope this answers your question.

Edited by Tolkien, 03 September 2013 - 09:57 AM.


#26 Syrkres

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Posted 03 September 2013 - 08:36 AM

Well it's funny.

I have been adding friends to my friends list in game, and back in Closed Beta, the game used to have a limit of 250 friends, so I would have to clean it out from time to time to add new friends (this would not be a full clean , just a dump of 10 or so to add new friends).

Now I have been adding merc mates, and have not had to remove anyone in a long time, but I never see more than 50 people on my friends list on at any single time, though I have a very full "RED" (offline) list.

Not sure how others people "RED" list is?

#27 Roland

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Posted 03 September 2013 - 08:38 AM

Some things to consider that I think folks may be missing:
I know folks who bought a Sara's Mech, who don't actually play MWO at all. They bought the mech because they thought the offering was very cool and they wanted to show support for it.

The reality is, the number of players MUST be low, because if it weren't low then they would have no trouble activating the already implemented Hardcore queues. The fact that they fear such a separation would make it take too long to find games means that there simply aren't that many folks playing at any given time.

#28 Sug

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Posted 03 September 2013 - 09:16 AM

View Postnitra, on 03 September 2013 - 12:17 AM, said:

I will say that from what i have seen is that mwo is steady, no real growth no real decline.


There's been a steady decline since open beta. We'll probably see another spike at launch, then another steady decline because there still won't be a real game.

View Postnitra, on 03 September 2013 - 02:49 AM, said:

am i wrong ?
but if i divide the number of hours in to the total xp earned, does that give me xp earned per hour ?
because if that does that number is quite low.


That's the infogram since Open Beta, October 29th 2012. It came out July 3rd.

Between those 2 days there have been 5928 hours.

If time is counted like this: 8v8 for an 8 min game = 16 players * 8 min = 128min = 2.1 hours of play time. Then:

Hours played 9,618,070 divided by 5,928 = 1623 average players per hour.


If time is counted like this: 8 min game = 8 min then

Hours played 9,618,070 divided by 5,928 = 1623 matches going on, on the average, at any given time, which means there are about 26,000 online on average.

Feel free to berate my math.

1623 average players per hour sounds right to me. Probably around 3k at peak hours and in the high hundreds during the night.

Edit: damnit tolkien.

Edited by Sug, 03 September 2013 - 09:21 AM.


#29 Tolkien

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Posted 03 September 2013 - 10:00 AM

View PostSug, on 03 September 2013 - 09:16 AM, said:


There's been a steady decline since open beta. We'll probably see another spike at launch, then another steady decline because there still won't be a real game.



That's the infogram since Open Beta, October 29th 2012. It came out July 3rd.

Between those 2 days there have been 5928 hours.

If time is counted like this: 8v8 for an 8 min game = 16 players * 8 min = 128min = 2.1 hours of play time. Then:

Hours played 9,618,070 divided by 5,928 = 1623 average players per hour.


If time is counted like this: 8 min game = 8 min then

Hours played 9,618,070 divided by 5,928 = 1623 matches going on, on the average, at any given time, which means there are about 26,000 online on average.

Feel free to berate my math.

1623 average players per hour sounds right to me. Probably around 3k at peak hours and in the high hundreds during the night.

Edit: damnit tolkien.



I have to berate your math of 26,000 players since I think that implies 29XP per match :wub: (Is this what your edit of "Damnit Tolkien" was about?) :ph34r:

#30 nitra

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Posted 03 September 2013 - 11:17 AM

ugh.. was afraid of that being the case.

Not really sure what else to say at the moment.

#31 Sug

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Posted 03 September 2013 - 03:51 PM

View PostTolkien, on 03 September 2013 - 10:00 AM, said:

I have to berate your math of 26,000 players since I think that implies 29XP per match :) (Is this what your edit of "Damnit Tolkien" was about?) :D


Those infogram numbers only kinda make sense if you realize that there really is no "average" anything in a match. You have the winning team, that gets the rewards and xp, and the losing team that gets {Scrap}.

And on the winning team you'll have the top 5 players that really did everything and earned the most rewards. So you'll have 5 people out of 24 getting 1000+xp, and the other getting like 100xp. Which kinda blows.

Edited by Sug, 03 September 2013 - 03:52 PM.


#32 Kattspya

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Posted 03 September 2013 - 10:51 PM

View PostSug, on 03 September 2013 - 03:51 PM, said:



Those infogram numbers only kinda make sense if you realize that there really is no "average" anything in a match. You have the winning team, that gets the rewards and xp, and the losing team that gets {Scrap}. huh

And on the winning team you'll have the top 5 players that really did everything and earned the most rewards. So you'll have 5 people out of 24 getting 1000+xp, and the other getting like 100xp. Which kinda blows.
Average is average is average.. I'm not sure I understand what your point is. If it just is that we can not say anything about an individual player then I'm with you. But that is a given when talking averages so please elaborate.

We get plenty of valuable data from the graphic. A feel for retention and a ball park estimate of active players. **** poor and **** poor respectively

#33 Xendojo

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Posted 04 September 2013 - 05:47 AM

The 1623 number seems right.

Back when they had the player counter up it never broke 5K, spiking around 4300-4500. And that was a total number of players, not players in matches. But most telling is the fact that they removed that feature rather quickly, and refuse to give concrete playerbase numbers.

So then...it would seem that us, the hardcore fans and vocal forum users, are the MAJORITY. And that the *target demographic* is any new players at all.

I really hope they decide to keep us happy, we are all they have.

Edited by Xendojo, 04 September 2013 - 05:48 AM.


#34 Oriius

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Posted 04 September 2013 - 06:54 AM

Hmm the figure of 1623 is interesting, I'd be kind and assume it to be around 2000.

It does help explain why they will just ignore us, and more specifically ignore (most of/a good % of) the founders.

The most common thing I see is people talking of the "CoD kiddies" so lets look at a couple of the older games, just looking at steam here, cod: mw2 Has currently (at 3:25pm GMT) 5,145 people in-game. That game came out, what in 09-ish right?

The next game cod: mw3 has 8,269 players in-game (3:25pm GMT). I was looking Multiplayer mode only there for both.

This doesn't really mean much I understand, however PGI is sat looking at a figure around 2000, in a free to play game, where only a very small % actually pay real money for anything. The Cod games have their players money already.

I've read different stats on it but anywhere from 0.5% to 6% will actually pay money for things in free to play models (this includes phone games and such). It might even go as high as 10%.

This makes me assume the strategy would be to get as many people playing as possible. How best to do that? well you "appeal to a wider audience" a term that I am growing to hate in the Games industry.

Could a smaller free to play game with a more dedicated fan base be profitable? It's tough to say since I have never run such a business, so I have only a vague idea of the running costs involved with such a project.

Though it does as I said help explain why the founders are considered a minority (at least in terms of potential audience). Though one must wonder, is it wise to annoy those that do pay currently? I don't think it's a good idea, but I am no expert.

Edited by Oriius, 04 September 2013 - 07:17 AM.


#35 Sug

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Posted 04 September 2013 - 07:34 AM

What's funny is that if 1623 is in any way accurate then at sometimes of the day there might be more people reading the forums than playing the game.

"Vocal minority" indeed!

Oh god anyone else notice that our highest number of forum users ever was from Dec 18th 2012?

#36 mike29tw

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Posted 04 September 2013 - 08:10 AM

View PostSug, on 04 September 2013 - 07:34 AM, said:

What's funny is that if 1623 is in any way accurate then at sometimes of the day there might be more people reading the forums than playing the game.

"Vocal minority" indeed!

Oh god anyone else notice that our highest number of forum users ever was from Dec 18th 2012?


I know I spent way more time the on forum than in the game, mostly because the game was just not very enjoyable in the past few months.

#37 Angel of Annihilation

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Posted 05 September 2013 - 02:25 PM

View PostSug, on 02 September 2013 - 09:38 PM, said:

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.



The problem with using registered accounts is that number only represents the total number of people that signed up for an account, not the number of players that are still playing.

Also 1 million is the number of accounts AFTER what, 18 months of closed and open beta. How many people are still playing this game after 18 months?

The reality is there are probably somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 accounts actively playing (logging in at least once a week) with probably only 1500-2000 actively logged in at any given time.

Edited by Viktor Drake, 05 September 2013 - 02:37 PM.


#38 Hellcat420

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Posted 05 September 2013 - 02:41 PM

View Posttravelbug, on 02 September 2013 - 08:33 PM, said:

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

not nearly enough, which is why they wont release the numbers.

#39 Nik Van Rhijn

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Posted 08 September 2013 - 10:34 AM

Far too few for their present MM to work successfully.





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