Online Player Numbers as of July 2005 - PC Zone Magazine

Did post this in anyother thread, but I figured it needs one of its own, maybe Sticky this?

As it stands there is increase talk of people saying, GW is doomed, loads of people have left, cats and dogs are getting alive... you know end of the world sort of thing?

Nonetheless Guild Wars remains ONE of the most popular onlines games at the moment in time!

Here is the list of best online games, based on player numbers as stated in the lastest copy of PC Zone magazine:

These figures are correct as of July 2005 - "PC Zone Magazine September Issue"

1. Lineage 2 ( appox 2.2 million players)

2. World of Warcraft (appox 2 million players)

3. Lineage 1 (appox 1.9 million players)

4. Final Fantasy XI Online (appox 500,000 players)

5. Guild Wars (appox 400,000 players)

6. Everquest Live (appox 380,000 players)

7. RuneScape (appox 380,000 players)

8. Everquest 2 (appox 360,000 players)

9. Star Wars Galaxies (appox 350,000 players)

10. Dark Age of Camelot (appox 340,000 players)

11. Ulitma Online OFFICAL SERVERS (appox 340,000 players)

12. City of Heroes (appox 300,000 players)

13. Toontown Online (appox 200,000 players)

14. EVE Online (appox 100,000 players

15. Planetside (appox 50,000 or less players)


Guild Wars has more players then, Everquest 2, City of Heros, Planetside and Dark Age of Camelot!

So tell me, how is Guild Wars dying?

These figures were provided to the mag by the guy who runs MMOGChart.com, so flame him NOT me if you don't agree.

They are based on not sales, but subcribers to the game, and or active accounts.

But don't hold me to that, the fact remains that Guild Wars is damn popular still.

Again these numbers are most likely very close to 100% accurate for the total number of people who have ever played those games. Those numbers are not a very good indication of how many people are regularly using or still subscribed to said service.

When you start getting down towards the bottom of the scale eve and PS specifically, you are able to track how many people are actually using the game without much effort if any at all. On a busy night eve might pull down 12% of that 100,000 players, but regularly does far less than that 6-8% is more normal. Even if the entire playerbase that had ever subscribed was that much and all of them played only once a day in different 8hr segments split evenly throughout the day (it doesnt) over the course of a week would you even reach a figure that would represent that approximated total. (Id feel sorry for the poor schmuck who only played 12-8am pst on monday mornings) Also, from knowing the player behavior within that game, many of the accounts are shared by the same user cutting down that total dramatically of people actually playing the game. Planetside is even worse the last time i was playing it. Hell on planetside you were lucky at times to find new/unfamiliar faces you hadn't fought before in the previous day, let alone hour to hour. Many of the other games listed follow a similar pattern.

To be pessimistic, I'd have to agree with Phades. I mean... how many of the accounts on all of the games are bot accounts? -.-

Planetside doesn't have bots... and your very much find players outnumber the bots in all cases.

Still the point of this tread is to get people to chill out about Guild Wars is already on its last legs...

Well stats should never be trusted totally as there's always a way to get them to show what you want. However these figures are about as good as you'll get.

Phades you seemed to be mixing concurrency with subscribed users at points, I agree though that with some games (especially eq2 / swg/ etc two or more subs is not rare and are not acoRED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GOed for).

I'm also curious about the guild wars figure as most of the other games produce their figures based on all people subscribed in the prior month, whereas guild wars can only go by boxes sold or accounts registered and accessed in the last month. Not the same thing.

So you see these should only be treated as very rough guides. for exaple WoW is now claiming 3.5 million subscribers followingits chinese launch. Not the 2 million posted above.

Who said Guild Wars is dying out?? How can a game that came out two months ago be "Dying out" so fast?

Planetside does have single users, multiple cr5 character accounts. Planetside also had multiple users on single accounts.

GW isnt on its last legs, but in my opinion, is starting to show the first signs of a parting from the game, very similar to what i witnessed within planetside. This does not doom the game, because virtually every game has a flow of people in and out of it. Only over the course of the next few months could really tell if the flow out is worse than the flow in.

Also, i had to hold back a small laugh after experiences i had within lineage and the chineese bots on the american servers. They did outnumber the active player base in some parts of the map and there were times when players would block enterances clogging up the bots within an area in towns. What was really sad was when you could identify shift changes where they would ritualistically strip themselves down nude and have the guards kill them over and over again to drop their level back down so their level wouldnt affect their drop rates. There were portions of dungons that you could not gain access to, due to these individuals/programs.
Well games that do that are usually called dead on arrival. Not many tittles do this though and GW is not one of them.

It's probably becuase of all these "OMHZ I THOUGHT DIS WAZH GOING TO B BF1942! My W/mo doesn't have a skill that can blow everything" type people. "Now I'm going to spam in a forum that nobody wants to play guild wars anymore!"

The high position of GW in that list is mostly due to migration of players from the other games to see what GW is all about. GW being a freely playable game(besides the box fee ofcourse), attracts more number of curious gamers than something like Everquest 2 would.
Again, the liveliness of the game is judged by the attitude of the hardcore players. And at the moment the attrition of top guilds is very high. :/

Top guilds, bah! We have lots of fresh new comers.

Funny thing is their be back in time when PvP is improved, and then will start complaining that us PvE have access to PvP. :P

Nah, just something like that.

Correct, but the SOE devs have already stated they track player numbers but the people subcribed to the account, NOT the number of characters each person has.

Planetside was on its last legs last time I checked, I came from that game to this one.

Remeber the figures are a guildlines... accurate maybe, or maybe not.

the only bit that was vaguely right about that was:

OMHZ I THOUGHT DIS WAZH GOING TO B BF1942

in that you dont have to officially hack through a combined total of 10000000000000000000 hp to get on with things. cause thats all the creeps are tbh. large amounts of hp.

they dont want uber skills, they probably already know exactly what skills they need, but they arent going to get them in the current system, that is the point.

saying they are moaning little kids who want to pwn is a complete misjudgement.

Well i hope that the influx of new people doesnt follow the trend ive noticed with the new people that have been invited into the guild im apart of. Typically see them off and on for around a week then never see them again (1 month+ inactive).

Aye that was the problem with had with Planetside, a Outfit (Guild) required 8 players to start a new one, but required only 2 people to be on it to keep it alive.... resulting in MASSIVE numbers of inactive outfits (Guilds), which I can see if becoming a ongoing issue.

In my old Outfit, we use to kick people if they were inactive for more then 1 month.

Those numbers are probably based on active accounts, which in Guild Wars will mean how many people actually bought the game. People started quitting after the game was released.

im glad you posted this because now i know not to buy PC zone magazine. at least one of those numbers is oh so wrong.

i only know this because i used to play and still have friends that do, but runescape has over 1 million active users. maybe not daily, but definetly during the summer and on weekends seeing as how mostly 12 year olds play it. and sadly it has been ranked as one of the top mmo's a few times

sidenote

http://www.blizzard.com/press/050720.shtml

well I WAS thinking about going back to city of heroes.

depends if you are talking FREE or paying users


the game designers have stated (at their site) that their goal for 2005 is to exceed 400,000 paying subs

http://www.bcuc.ac.uk/careersdb/stud...ails.asp?r=830

How can the numbers be based on subscriptions when GW doesn't have subscriptions?

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

You also have to consider that many companies are very reluctant to reveal their server logs unless it's a huge success like WoW. Even then I'm sometime suspicious because it's unlikely that a company will tell you the truth if a game is failing. A game won't attract new players when you admit that your current player base is dwindling. Nobody likes to join a sinking ship.