I had a bit o insominia and found a way to entertain myself.

When logged into the LOTRO forums I decided to snoop around a bit just wondering if the "come back weekend" could have promoted some business. You know, word of mouth and the like. Once I came up with new accounts made in the last week I took it one step farther and said how does this compare to last year? The numbers weren't significantly higher recently so my belief that the xp weekend would send in the clown car full of ppl was sort of wrong. But it was interesting regardless.

What I do know . This assumes that they use a sequential number system. This is confirmed because the "Join dates" seem to also go sequential by date. These seem to be for the most part genuine accounts. There are some wacky names but there are some wacky ppl out there also. They do not seem to be generated but I did not examine each one, just randoms. They could be though and they do NOT imply that someone has subscribed to the game monthly, but at least that they applied for a trial... Well that's my thinking anyway for a forum account to be created.

To me it seems a healthy growth even a year after release and a steady interest. The biggest thing I kept in mind when comparing was that a new game is bound to attract more people simply because players want to see if it is for them. That would explain some pretty large numbers you will see - well large to me. I mean, if I got email from this many new clients a day, I would be ecstatic - oh and still reading my email to fall asleep :D

Now I'll share this with you and see what your conclusions are. Do you think it spells doom or decent growth, generated nicknames to imply interest to competitors, guess away... that's what I'm doing. I'm passing the links I used but I don't think you can view them w/out an active account. The links are mostly to see the math in case i borked it.

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Around 5 months into release

http://forums.lotro.com/member.php?u=687019
http://forums.lotro.com/member.php?u=685774
1245 sept 28th 07

http://forums.lotro.com/member.php?u=688611
http://forums.lotro.com/member.php?u=687020
1591 sept 29th 07

http://forums.lotro.com/member.php?u=690470
http://forums.lotro.com/member.php?u=688612
1858 sept 30th 07

http://forums.lotro.com/member.php?u=691687
http://forums.lotro.com/member.php?u=690471
1216 oct 1st 07

http://forums.lotro.com/member.php?u=693028
http://forums.lotro.com/member.php?u=691688
1340 oct 2nd 07

http://forums.lotro.com/member.php?u=694384
http://forums.lotro.com/member.php?u=693029
1355 oct 3rd 07

http://forums.lotro.com/member.php?u=695733
http://forums.lotro.com/member.php?u=694385
1348 oct 4th 07

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Around 1 year and 5 months into release and an expansion within 1 month coming

http://forums.lotro.com/member.php?u=1053152
http://forums.lotro.com/member.php?u=1052953
199 oct 4th 08

http://forums.lotro.com/member.php?u=1052952
http://forums.lotro.com/member.php?u=1052773
179 oct 3rd 08

http://forums.lotro.com/member.php?u=1052772
http://forums.lotro.com/member.php?u=1052605
167 oct 2nd 08

http://forums.lotro.com/member.php?u=1052604
http://forums.lotro.com/member.php?u=1052404
200 oct 1st 08

http://forums.lotro.com/member.php?u=1052403
http://forums.lotro.com/member.php?u=1052187
216 sept 30th 08

http://forums.lotro.com/member.php?u=1052186
http://forums.lotro.com/member.php?u=1052001
185 sept 29th 08

http://forums.lotro.com/member.php?u=1052000
http://forums.lotro.com/member.php?u=1051762
238 sept 28th 08

You do know that LoTRO has a free trial right? I'm not sure what you are trying to say.... soo:

That's pretty clever, actually.  To explain to the 2nd poster, since each person who signs up for an account for the game @ Turbine also gets registered for the forums, you can look at the sign up dates of the people on the forums (by their id number) and see how many signed up for the game that day.  Very clever indeed.

200 per day doesn't seem bad, but it doesn't seem great, either.

Another way to look at it - after 5 months, they had almost 700,000 people who had at least tried the game. One year later, that's only crept up to about 1 million.

And now it's increasing by about 200 per day, which is only about 6,000 per month.

edit: I signed up in early July and my account is 101something. It's now up to 105 something, which means 40,000 players since then, about 3 months.

So it actually seems to be slower the closer that Moria is coming. Maybe people are putting off trying it?

Originally posted by trancejeremy

That's pretty clever, actually.  To explain to the 2nd poster, since each person who signs up for an account for the game @ Turbine also gets registered for the forums, you can look at the sign up dates of the people on the forums (by their id number) and see how many signed up for the game that day.  Very clever indeed.

200 per day doesn't seem bad, but it doesn't seem great, either.

Another way to look at it - after 5 months, they had almost 700,000 people who had at least tried the game. One year later, that's only crept up to about 1 million.

And now it's increasing by about 200 per day, which is only about 6,000 per month.

edit: I signed up in early July and my account is 101something. It's now up to 105 something, which means 40,000 players since then, about 3 months.

So it actually seems to be slower the closer that Moria is coming. Maybe people are putting off trying it?

Great explanation on what I was trying to discuss! You get it

Aye, maybe expansions give ppl a chance to wait for reviews or player reactions too without plunking down the coin first or even burning a free trial. Maybe post expansion release I could requery a week and see the change according to reviews and comments that seem to say fail or good job. For sure someone already buying or have purchased war and aoc lately or have the wotlk expansion to pay for might be pinching pennies till the holiday gifts start rolling in.

Too bad noone would want the data and the game company would probably think it annoying to hit the site that much often so I'll likely space case it. I was sort of surprised the page used querystrings instead of only working with a get/post sort of behind the scenes ( Web jabber, sorry for getting a bit technical)