Age of Conan

once more for less bright readers. No one, at least I am not, trying to determine overall population from the Xfire numbers. What they do show really well though is the trends.

When the game first launched it was logging 95 K hours. Once the initial play all night surge was over 2 weeks later it was in the 60K hour range which I would use as a base number for trending purposes. Now it is down to 30K on a Friday night.

The game is bleeding players, even the densest fanbois should be able to see that. Sales are just now starting to drop off a bit so during this time period it had a good size influx of new players. Now that sales are beginning to drop off a bit I think you will see even more precipitous drops. Wait till the initial purchasers who were giving FC "one more month" to get their act together see that it is going to take FC several more months, and I am being a optimist here, to get the game up to full speed.

Plus, even if Xfire isn't a proper representation of the gaming community as some say, the fact of the matter is that the majority of people who were logging into Xfire when AoC was launched are most likely still logging in now. As a result, at least between those (many) users, play hours are decreasing. There's no escaping that fact.

Originally posted by Lydon

Plus, even if Xfire isn't a proper representation of the gaming community as some say, the fact of the matter is that the majority of people who were logging into Xfire when AoC was launched are most likely still logging in now. As a result, at least between those (many) users, play hours are decreasing. There's no escaping that fact.

Oh really? This dollar in my hand bets Avery begs to differ ^^.

Yes, really. Let's take those on my friends list and friends of friends' list for example. At launch there was at least 6 people playing, now those same people are still online regularly, but I only ever see 1 of them play AoC anymore. It really isn't rocket science.

 another 6500 hours down again between last Saturday and last night. It is down to 33K on a Saturday night now. Wonder if next Saturday it will be 27K or lower? It lost  8 K between the 22nd and the 29th so my bet it will be at 29K , it is time for the curve to start to flatten a bit I think. Mostly just diehard fanbois left now.

Originally posted by beaverz

You people can't eb serious judging games by their xfire ratings. Cmon it's not because in lotro and eve most ppl dont use xfire that these games are going down. Honestly xfire is one more of these kinda useless tools, never been in a guild where many ppl used it and most ppl never saw the point with xfire.

most people here agree that you cannot use xfire to compare how many players are playing which game, so it won't tell you how many subs aoc has.

The only thing you can use xfire numbers for is to see how much the same people play one game. The players that used xfire when aoc launched most likely still are using xfire so you can see how many of them are still playing aoc each day from the xfire numbers. around aoc launch the xfire users were counted to spend more than the double amount of hours in aoc than they do now.

This still doesn't mean that half of the players no longer plays aoc, one part of that loss is also caused by players that still play but  spend a shorter time each day in aoc (everyone spends a lot time with a new game, and that time usually goes down a bit over time). So it would be wrong to say aoc allready lost 50% of its subs just cause the played hours in xfire dropped by that amount. 

Also xfire numbers are just showing a trend gathered from a sample population that is probably big enough for statistical trending but the numbers that you get from the sample might still have a wide error margin. So even if you could say as an example that 35% of xfire players that bought aoc cancelled subscription allready it would probably have a statisticall 5-10% error added to it so that the rate of cancelled subscriptions after first month for whole aoc community might be somewhere between 25 and 45%.

Originally posted by quaiky

Originally posted by beaverz

You people can't eb serious judging games by their xfire ratings. Cmon it's not because in lotro and eve most ppl dont use xfire that these games are going down. Honestly xfire is one more of these kinda useless tools, never been in a guild where many ppl used it and most ppl never saw the point with xfire.

most people here agree that you cannot use xfire to compare how many players are playing which game, so it won't tell you how many subs aoc has.

The only thing you can use xfire numbers for is to see how much the same people play one game. The players that used xfire when aoc launched most likely still are using xfire so you can see how many of them are still playing aoc each day from the xfire numbers. around aoc launch the xfire users were counted to spend more than the double amount of hours in aoc than they do now.

This still doesn't mean that half of the players no longer plays aoc, one part of that loss is also caused by players that still play but  spend a shorter time each day in aoc (everyone spends a lot time with a new game, and that time usually goes down a bit over time). So it would be wrong to say aoc allready lost 50% of its subs just cause the played hours in xfire dropped by that amount. 

Also xfire numbers are just showing a trend gathered from a sample population that is probably big enough for statistical trending but the numbers that you get from the sample might still have a wide error margin. So even if you could say as an example that 35% of xfire players that bought aoc cancelled subscription allready it would probably have a statisticall 5-10% error added to it so that the rate of cancelled subscriptions after first month for whole aoc community might be somewhere between 25 and 45%.

everything you said is correct but it still boils down to the game is tracking about 6K less hours from XFire users each week. Which would lead me to believe that the game is steadily losing players faster than it is gaining them through box sales. This was not a one time drop, it is a very consistent decline of around 6K to 8K  a week.

The game is 11 on Amazon's best sellers in just over 6 weeks, and the gamecards, the biggest indicator of subscribers in this its first paid month, are 402nd. http://www.amazon.com/s/qid=1215459016/ref=sr_pg_34?ie=UTF8&rs=229575&bbn=229575&rh=n%3A468642%2Cn%3A229575&page=34

Conan, the bell tolls for thee...

Originally posted by Jackdog

Originally posted by quaiky

Originally posted by beaverz

You people can't eb serious judging games by their xfire ratings. Cmon it's not because in lotro and eve most ppl dont use xfire that these games are going down. Honestly xfire is one more of these kinda useless tools, never been in a guild where many ppl used it and most ppl never saw the point with xfire.

most people here agree that you cannot use xfire to compare how many players are playing which game, so it won't tell you how many subs aoc has.

The only thing you can use xfire numbers for is to see how much the same people play one game. The players that used xfire when aoc launched most likely still are using xfire so you can see how many of them are still playing aoc each day from the xfire numbers. around aoc launch the xfire users were counted to spend more than the double amount of hours in aoc than they do now.

This still doesn't mean that half of the players no longer plays aoc, one part of that loss is a