Daily Archives: January 25, 2012

SWTOR Population Counts

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Here’s an interesting site TORStatus.  I play on Sith Meditation Sphere.

The numbers are basically a scale of 1-5 based on BioWare’s description of server population – Light to Full.  My server is usually Standard with a few spots of Light.  When I started it was full a lot of time time and heavy the rest.  I’m not sure if BW changed the numbers behind the words, perhaps that’s it.  The metrics show that there’s a 5-10% drop in clients since last week and I think that number will increase next week due to subs coming up.

Anyhow, I was on last night in prime time and there were less than 130 people on the Fleet.  It took me a half hour to get a group and it wasn’t a hard mode.  Then it took me 10 minutes to get to the dungeon.  I was on the fleet so I had to Leave Fleet -> Enter Ship Zone -> Enter Ship & Fly to Ilum -> Zone into dock -> Zone into Orbital Station -> Zone into Ilum & run to instance -> Zone into instance.  Each arrow is a loading screen.  Let’s compare to WoW.  I want to group, I press the LFG group and I’m ported to the dungeon.  One loading screen.  In Rift, I press the tool, I’m ported to the dungeon.  In either of them if I didn’t use the tool I would fly (mount or flighpoint) to the dungeon and zone in.

All in, it took nearly an hour from the time I logged on til the time I killed the first bad guy in the zone.  That’s a tad too much.

WoW Patch 4.3

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World of Warcraft released its final patch for this expansion (4.3) on November 30th, 2011.  So we’re a few days short of the 2 month mark.  MMO-Champion has break downs of the success with data charts and whatnot.  Let’s go over the recent one.

First, some basic numbers.  WoW has about 10 million active players, based on their financials.  A guild attempt at a raid has 10 or 25 players, with the latter usually being a bit easier.  100 guilds have defeated Heroic Madness, the most recent hard-mode raid, after 2 months.  So in the best case, 2500 people out of 10,000,000 have completed the content.  That’s 0.025% of all players.  Ok.

Just the basic raid itself has interesting numbers.  1 month after the raid launched, 4% of players had completed it on normal and 34% had completed it on easy-mode (LFR).  The previous raid tier didn’t have easy mode and after months of it being 0ut, and nerfed to heck, only 17% of the entire population’s characters (players can have more than 1 character) had completed it.

All of that to say that Hard Mode raids are statistically a non-issue.  One quarter of a percent of people actually bother with them.  Less than 15% bother with normal mode, even months after release.  Easy-mode however gets 1/3 of all players, seemingly a worthwhile investment.

I’ve said it for a bit but hardcore players are dead and hardcore gaming is not mainstream.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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