Where is every1 these days?

Since the past few weeks, ive noticed the size of LA shrink, trade has died down, tombs is much less lively and mission areas are like abandoned ghost towns.... has every1 stopped playing? (i supose the game is on abit of a down right now) or is every1 2 busy farming....

yeah there has been a huge drop off it seems like, the sorrows update had brought it up some, but now its down to like 7 districts of war camp, the newness has just wore off of the game, i am sure alot of people will come back, they just might not play as much as before

School started.

more and more people are moving to pvp from pve.

school is a big factor too.

yea school. and most people have been thru the storyline 2 or 3 times now, and they've moved on to PvP. Im still in PvE tho! on my 4th char. my guild isnt big enough to GvG yet...but we're working on it. PvP just isnt a huge interest to me...but ya know. its kinda nice to be able to be in a town and not have the chat scroll so fast its like someone spamming. i was literally the ONLY person in a district of a war camp late last night. it was crazy.

Guys.. Go to www.xfire.com and you'll see GW is still doing as good as in the summer.

WTF? Is that some sort of "I get money for each click" scam or what, because all I get is a rubbish page in spanish.

ya but xfire users are the more hardcore types and seeing as that can only measure xfire users its not much of a scale

Dungeon Siege II is out...and it's http://www.xfire.com not that other crap.

Around 3/4th of my friend list is dead as well. And they mostly consisted of people with jobs rather than school-goers
Europe servers are definately getting smaller.

hehe i have 22 people on my list and so far 25 or so are dead/missing

Last night i had FOUR active people out of six that are on my list. I was so surprised because most days, i'm lucky if i have one friend online.
I couldn't think of enough to say to so many people.

Personally, i haven't seen a reduction in players...and i play alot!

There's constant ebb & flow of players.

I'm pretty sure ANet has a strategy for keeping numbers up. We've already seen the "limited availability" 10 hour demo, I bet that closer to christmas they'll make sure the demo becomes more widely available, e.g. by putting it on various computer mag cover CD's, make sure more people know about GW through more aggressive marketing (e.g. TV ads).

They don't really want BOOM x million gamers at once, who then BUST all tire at once and drop out. They want a steady & manageable number, and the way to achieve that is through careful marketing (e.g. releasing demos if there's a drop in number of players).

Do you really think there will be that much of a surge from a demo to blow the servers? I doubt it. Though I'm sure you're right as it is the modus operendi (sp) of most MMOs: Put out a free demo, drop the price of the software, ect.

Um I have like 30 people on friends and only four (at one time) are on for the past month.
Usually it is one or two people. I so need to get a guild. I'm Guildless since my old guild just died out at the start of the school year.


P.S. Xfire is usually hardcore gamers. But casual gamers (like me) use it too just to see how much time you spend on games without a /age count.

pvp, you might try going to int districts that's where most people hang out now to pvp

<-- Farming like there is no tomorrow for the beginning of the auction house.

i dont know about others, but i havent been on lately because of the hurricanes. that may be another factor.

people are borrrreeeeeedddddd of the game

true but they had a lot of fun before boredom set in for some.

count on them coming back for a second helping when chapter 2 comes out.

School..... i try to play on weekends tho, but i've really stopped playing

It looks as though the GvG community is in full swing right now. We lost 150 spots by taking a break from playing for just a few hours.

I wouldn't be worried, just a little more inclined to grab the hench when you can't find the perfect group.

D2 sucked me back in with all its diffrent items to choose from and randomized maps....

wow is beating gw 5:1... thats kinda... o_O

*checks the calendar*
*notes that SCHOOL has started*

Does o_O stand for obvious?

WoW is an MMO, one of the most successful games ever made. The game is pay-to-play and thus, they must make it very slow to reach the highest level in the game. After a month in Guild Wars, I had done pretty much everything. It will take me a few months to accomplish anything close to that in WoW.

well from what i hear, its the most boring game in the world. starts out with a blast, and then gets so boring you start to puke. at least thats what people tell me... ive never actually played it.

which is why ima bit confused about the numbers.

Its really exciting for the first 20 or so levels. After that it starts to become a grind. Then again, the first ten level are done within hours... the next ten take about 1-2 hours each... by level 25 you're spending a good 4-5 hours on a single level.

WoW has also been around for about a year more than GW. Factor in GW has no monthly fee and some of us don't want to spend $15 a month to look back and say, "Well, I got some shoulder pads this month" and you can understand that comparing GW and WoW is a futile effort.

In a year, I don't think Guild Wars will have even half the players of WoW.

Heh, sounds just like deusex, invisible war for xbox... that game started out SOOOOOO good, but after the frist/second area, it just plane started to suck. And not just a little.

School is starting, granted, which takes a lot of people off the game. I don't see WoW taking much of the population away from GW just because of the whole $15 it takes each month to play.

It can also be because Anet is continuing to nerf anything and everything just because they can; which can push people away who become too fed up with the way updates are being handled.

Also it can be because too many people are tired of the boring pve, and the continuous /copy /paste pvp teams that are so prevelant in today's arenas. Either you can go farm for your forge armor, run pvp against a smite/iway/spike (which is dwindling), and whatever build that someone chooses to run for months on end.

The game lacks replay value. There are no 'levels', so to speak, that D2 had with their item system. Players farmed for the best items, staying with the game; which is ultimately why D2 stood around so long: its variation in player items.
GW, on the other hand, tries to be so balanced that everything grows to monotony. Everyone has armor that is comparable, regardless of how long they spend farming. 10k is not hard to come up with to get a full set of droks armor for one person. Then you can find a trader somewhere, spend a day or two getting those items and have a decent weapon that is relatively comparable to most other items for that class.
If someone wants to spend 150k on an item that is 15>50, +30hp 10/10 sunder or 5/1 vamp, then they slightly have an advantage over someone with a 15>50 collector item with some random augments in it. Or they can make a pvp char (which is ridiculously easy to equip with faction changes) and get that sword that would cost an arm and a leg for if you were a RP character.

Ultimately, GW seems to be losing population because people are losing interest with the game itself. Granted, population spiked with the release of sorrows, as they spiked over 1million sales shortly thereafter.
Now people seem to be leaving (yes, I am aware that school is in session) because there is nothing left to do. Like I said, you can go farm for forge armor, run pvp against a lot of /copy /paste builds, or you can just go and hang out with people whose company you enjoy.

Sure, it's a game, and people are likely to come and go, yet it seems that a-net is going to have to do a lot to keep their playerbase around. Perhaps they will nail it with chapter two, yet of course; only time will tell if that will be the case.

Where is everyone at, to answer the OP? At home, working instead of throwing hours away at a game that seems to be of little interest to them anymore. This is just what I think...

Why do you think that when GW has shown consistent growth?

Heh, once again perpetuating the notion that there are only school children playing....sorry couldn't resist. Ahh sign of the times I guess.

It is kinda odd not too many hardcore people playing. 'ok well maybe in Korea.

Played a bit of L2, and they have a warning to let you know you've been playing too long...good times.

No, didn't get past the base of gamers who love the game. WoW, IMHO, was able to tap into the MMORPG, make it easily accesable to the masses and yet keep traditional MMO 'values'. Love it, or hate it they have a good formula.

Personally I enjoyed GW, but I just can't get used to the whole "I wanna rush through the game as fast as I can 6 times" attitude. There are alot of hardcore MMO'ers who don't dig it, but games like WoW are simply more palatable. since WoW has like, what is it, the 3rd largest paying subscriber base.

I have no idea what you're trying to say here.

I'm more inclined to believe Gaile about actual player numbers.

Based on numbers of WoW players right now...(I believe the last number I heard was four million)

and the fact the guild wars has only SOLD one million copies(This doesn't mean there are 1 million players, still)

I highly doubt we'll see two millions players by May.

Four million copies of a game sold and four million players are radically different things.

EDIT: Thanks Dax for you reply since it amounts to nothing. Which is my point. You can't compare WoW and GW.

School is absolutely the reason I haven't been playing as often as I'd like (I finally played for the first time this weekend since about sept 10th >_>)

I am so busy with school.. it's really, REALLY hard to even dedicate an hour to playing. I hope my schedule lets up a bit.

Of course you would, I however have no bias though.... I'd like to love GW.

I've paid for every MMO played through the first 30 days before settling on one....ok maybe two.

I can play through GW in the first 30 days (even shorted if I take the fast track approach) but it has no hook to keep me coming back. So in the end it really doesn't matter what I think. But then again if the game was that big school would not be excuse. Nor would you see that many upset people in the forums, but maybe thats just my interpretation.