Over 10 Million Players?

f047ys3v3n

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

WoW had 12 million SUBSCRIBERS (aka active players) at its peak. No game will ever reach those numbers again, or get even close.

I totally disagree with this statement. Not only could ESO have reached these numbers, I think that it was legitimately expected to bury them.

Reasons

1) While great competition in MMO's exists now on the PC there is almost no competition on the console. ESO was aimed primarily at that market, a market that is far larger than the PC market today which is larger than the PC market was when WoW set those numbers. In other words, ESO faced no more competition than WoW and had a larger potential market.

2) ESO brought far more potential legacy players to the game from the previous ESO hits such as Skyrim than WoW whose predecessor was far less popular.

3) ESO had a massively larger budget.

4) Free to Play, micro transactions, and the like have proven far superior revenue models and thereby boosted both revenues and player bases.

What ESO got right:

1) Excellent, varied, and compelling quests and lore.
2) Excellent visuals, updated graphics and the like.
3) Limited size ability bars and a lower threshold to entry.

What ESO got wrong:

1) The game was not even close to ready at launch. Console, the target audience, as not ready for a full year and what should have been the launch game engine was not really done for 1.7 years, the time ESO+ with dynamic zone scaling and better grouping was finished.
2) ZOS pulled the funding plug in September of launch year with massive layoffs that basically killed timely development and balance capability as well as cost them many devs who actually knew how some of the code worked and would have been able to fix things more efficiently.
3) Endgame PVE has always been small in size, had rather weak rewards, generally poor and un-engaging mechanics, and has often not even been scaled to max level. Basically, little development effort has been put into it.
4) The main PVP experience proved a bit too ambitious and so has been plagued by lag and instability problems.
5) PVP and PVE balance have never been decoupled. Plenty of games have proven that PVP and PVE can never be balanced together. ESO's insistence on doing this is ignorant, idiotic, and they have paid the price in lack of balance in either.
6) The champion system created massive imbalance and a huge barrier to entry. It did everything we said it would and was at least the magnitude of disaster we predicted.
7) ESO's balance has often involved uber changes such as removal of dynamic ulti-regen, removal of regen while blocking, or an across the board 30 or so % decrease in resources. Balance steps of this magnitude basically just wreck everyone's builds and remove any reset any balance previously achieved. People hate them, they accomplish little, and give the impression of laziness and ineptitude.
8) Badly behaving players doing things such as running cheat engine, item duplication, spam reporting, and other exploits have never been dealt with sufficiently leaving an inmates are running the asylum vibe.
9) The game was not free to play at launch. It clearly should have both to retain players and because not doing so left a very bad impression on players who paid for most of a year with all those assurances that it was a subscription game.
10) ZOS have never ever been honest or open with players about what it is doing, what it plans to do, or why it does some things. Being left in the dark and fed *** sandwiches gets real old.

In conclusion, ESO not only could have bested WoW's peak numbers but, if run with only average competency, should have been expected too. It was not run with even average competency from the funding decisions (presumably made by the board) to the progression, balance and mechanics decisions. ESO deserves the infamy it has gained in some circles. Given the magnitude of advantages, and therefore expectations, it had, it's showing has been pitiful. ESO is like Star Wars Episode 1. Sure, it made money, but it was nevertheless a massive failure given the legitimate expectations. #WrobelforJarJar.

Megabear

One thing for sure is, there's a sizable bot community roaming around like NPC locust swarms.

Elsonso

Megabear wrote: »

One thing for sure is, there's a sizable bot community roaming around like NPC locust swarms.

Thus, the charge that there are 8 million bot accounts and 2 million player accounts.

snakester320

It's amusing to throw 10 million number accounts around how quickly ppl forget that's not 10 million players across the platforms constantly playing that's not even 10 millions subs .. so even if WoW fudged there numbers and only had 8 million subs it's still more money made in a month than what eso makes resulting in more revenue final fantasy arr has something like 7 million subs even if that's fudged and it 4 with 1 million bots there's still making more constant money than ZOS scamming money of players with crates and island housing and no compulsory sub I would say at best there lucky to have 1 million constant subs .. WHERES THERE FIGURES OF ACTUAL SUBS?? you won't see them figures EVER!
Nothing more than a play on words to sucker in more noobs to throw cash at them promising them that we are getting to WOW status when in reality they are no where near and never will be!!

Here something interesting next time you look at your guild lists see how many members haven't been active for over like 2- 6+ months ..
I've been in guilds where out of 300-500 members there's only like 50 to 100 that have been active in the last month or so!! There's your 10 million figure shot to sh.t right there

Jaazer

Elvenpath wrote: »

Why the hell you guys are comparing ESO with WoW. Instead of sub counting, install 2 games, and check graphics. Elven out.

I think people play WoW for some of the following reasons:

- Well designed and fun RAIDs and dungeons
- LFR
- Classes that are very fun to play
- Main story
- Numerous mounts and mini pets that can be earned in game
- Well designed and stable group and RAID finder
- Robust cosmetic system
- Pet classes that are very fun and have robust pet systems (Hunters can tame their own pets!)
- Blizzard is very interactive with their community

I guess when you are having fun you tend to pay less attention to the lack of graphic fidelity.

Jollygoodusername

khele23eb17_ESO wrote: »

IvorySamoan wrote: »

Um, Bethesda just confirmed it?

They were at 8.5 sold units half way through last year, so they've sold 1.5 million since then: super impressive, going to hit 12 I reckon soon with Morrowind just releasing and getting pretty great word of mouth.

ESO, actually now looking like that WoW killer it was touted to be so long ago lol.

Lets be serious here. Have you any idea how many units WoW sold? To put things in perspective:
The Burning Crusade - 2.4M
Wrath of the Lich King - 2.8M
Cataclysm - 3.3M
Mists of Pandaria - 2.7M
Warlords of Draenor - 3.3M
Legion - 3.3M

Well, you might say 'thats not much at all' and Ill say 'this is how much they sold on the FIRST DAY' also it doesnt even include base game sales.

And this is not really a viable comparison anyway. We dont know how many people actually play the game. We could compare 'active eso+ accounts' to WoW subs. But we dont have those numbers either.

All of those numbers during Cataclysm and Blizzard was 8th tier profitability at the time. Large numbers of people all logging in and paying $15/mo + expansion toll, doesn't add up nearly as fast compared with digital items shops, in terms of profit. Plus, MMO's in general aren't as popular as sports/FPS titles.

Kiralyn2000

That's one marketing advantage of B2P/F2P games.... every account ever made could be active. Not needing an official running sub to play means they can count every copy ever sold.

Hyade

It seems pretty clear that they are talking about copies of the game sold across PC and console. With a B2P game that is a good metric, and the same metric Guild Wars 1 used to show off how well they were doing. Whatever metric they use, you would be able to find fault with it (remember how WoW's 12 million players included every single active time card in china?).

They are doing a great job, and hopefully that leads to this game having a long life.

MrBeatDown_

Kiralyn2000 wrote: »

That's one marketing advantage of B2P/F2P games.... every account ever made could be active. Not needing an official running sub to play means they can count every copy ever sold.

Don't forget to include the accounts created during the free weekend events.

Oh, I almost forgot, On my last forum account that I had before It got banned for disagreeing with the direction of the game, I remember posting the link to a ebay seller from Mexico that was selling NEW ESO CD keys for $6.99 a piece on ebay. That was about 2 months after the game went live. No telling how many UNAUTHORIZED accounts have been created. We see the bots in live. They don't even bother banning them anymore. We all know the numbers are fudged.

Elsonso

Kiralyn2000 wrote: »

That's one marketing advantage of B2P/F2P games.... every account ever made could be active. Not needing an official running sub to play means they can count every copy ever sold.

Right. There is no barrier, other than the couple days to download the latest version, to re-entering the game. You can just fire it up and log in, at any time. Anyone in that 10 million could wake up tomorrow and decide to start playing. Judging from the forum, that is not exactly a rare occurrence.

snakester320 wrote: »

Here something interesting next time you look at your guild lists see how many members haven't been active for over like 2- 6+ months ..

With guilds, it really depends on the guild leadership. I am in two guilds that are capped and have 98% of the guild membership that logs in at least once every 14 days. I have another guild that is not capped, is far more lenient towards inactive players, and has 88% that have logged in at least once in the last 14 days. Then, I have a dead guild where the guild leadership has been gone for 4 months and inactive the bulk of the last 2 years, and only 12% of the people in that guild log into the game at least once every 14 days.

Which guild is more representative of the game population? By my reasoning, none of them.

Jollygoodusername

Before I forget, let us remember that the battlecry of 10 MILLION PLAYERS!!! OMFG!!! Has two immediate functions, the first is to inflate your ego[hypetrain choo choo noise here]. The second is to blow that battlehorn as loudly into the wind as possible, that it carries onto the ears of the market [hypetrain choo choo again].

Let it be known, ESO is worth investing in, we have 10 million consumers here... It's at minimum, investor clickbait. Or not, it's a private company so

Vizikul

Pallmor wrote: »

Neverwinter may not look as good as ESO, but it does have a FAR superior auction house system. And their events system is one of the best I've ever seen in an MMO. Neverwinter's events blow ESO's away. There is always some interesting event going on or coming up every weekend in Neverwinter and their quarterly events are a blast.

Well, I said Neverwinter has good aspects. About the superior auction house, it's not hard to be superior when ESO doesn't have any AH at all. All it has are the guild vendors with no search function. If you ask me the guild vendors feel more like trash cans. I wonder how many hundreds of pages of assassin belt and dagger motives I had to scroll through. Beside you have to pay money in order to have a chance of selling some of your stuff. Meh.

JiKama

Over 10 million players.... I would like to know how many have ESO+. Because the servers are laggy as hell and I'd like for some issues to be fixed. DungeonFinder/BG group finder. Kinda wish it was still subscription based so maybe... just maybe things would be fixed

idk

It's a meaningless number. It could include those who did trials. Even with f it's just those who purchase a copy of the game it's merely copies sold.

The numbers that matter are actual total players who have logged in and spent at least X ammoujt of time in game.

A more important figure would include the above filter if for Subs and those who have purchased DLCs and expansions. This is the number that would matter most.

Elsonso

Jollygoodusername wrote: »

Let it be known, ESO is worth investing in

In that, they would not necessarily be lying.

JiKama wrote: »

Over 10 million players.... I would like to know how many have ESO+

I want to say "well more than half of the active players" but I have a generally optimistic view of the game, and the success of the game.

Acrolas

How many are separate ERP accounts?

I want to say 2 million. Djlong Haardhammer and Greets-Sweet-Meats are building their own franchise...

Uriel_Nocturne

MissBizz wrote: »

Avran_Sylt wrote: »

They might just be counting total number of accounts. Maybe not even active accounts. I'd love to know the active users on a [x] day basis across all platforms, but I'm pretty sure they won't disclose that information for fear of turning away potential investors (or something, I've no clue).

Last year (or year before?) It was said there were 7 million accounts created, which I believe counted Xbox free trials. So since this number is now 10 million, I'd say it's accounts created, and not active players.

Bungie does this little trick to make Destiny sound much more populated than it is.

Bungie says: "Destiny has 8+ million registered accounts!! Our game is highly populated and healthy!! Invest in us!!"

In reality, the game is a freaking ghost town. But if they said that out of "8+ million accounts, we only have 200k active players"... well, that doesn't sound so "great" for attracting future investors. They worded it the way they did, because even if a Player buys the game, fires it up once, then never plays it again, that Player still counts as a "Registered Account", thus allowing them to bloat their numbers to Activi$ion's investors, rather than having to admit that their practice of locking base-game content behind an ever-increasing DLC paywall is causing the game to hemorrhage Players.

So they play that little wording trick to make the game sound much more populated than it actually is, and ZOS has picked up on how useful this trick is as well.

Shadzilla

jcaceresw wrote: »

Dominoid wrote: »

This is the wording from last year, so expect a similar metric:

Since we commercially launched at the end of March 2014, we have had seven million people acquire the game, create accounts and play. Please note that this number does NOT include beta players (who played the game before we launched) and it also does not include players from our free trial(s)

Source

I acquired the game 10 times in order to create my own guild banks. I only play in just one account. The other ones will not be touched again because they are for just the guild bank. That don't mean there are 10 players. Their numbers aren't accurate.

Dude... You paid for 10 games to get a couple guild banks? What do you do for a profession and how are you so successful...

Rohamad_Ali

You would think group finder would gather groups faster with 10 million people to choose from .

Shadzilla

f047ys3v3n wrote: »

MLGProPlayer wrote: »

WoW had 12 million SUBSCRIBERS (aka active players) at its peak. No game will ever reach those numbers again, or get even close.

I totally disagree with this statement. Not only could ESO have reached these numbers, I think that it was legitimately expected to bury them.

Reasons

1) While great competition in MMO's exists now on the PC there is almost no competition on the console. ESO was aimed primarily at that market, a market that is far larger than the PC market today which is larger than the PC market was when WoW set those numbers. In other words, ESO faced no more competition than WoW and had a larger potential market.

2) ESO brought far more potential legacy players to the game from the previous ESO hits such as Skyrim than WoW whose predecessor was far less popular.

3) ESO had a massively larger budget.

4) Free to Play, micro transactions, and the like have proven far superior revenue models and thereby boosted both revenues and player bases.

What ESO got right:

1) Excellent, varied, and compelling quests and lore.
2) Excellent visuals, updated graphics and the like.
3) Limited size ability bars and a lower threshold to entry.

What ESO got wrong:

1) The game was not even close to ready at launch. Console, the target audience, as not ready for a full year and what should have been the launch game engine was not really done for 1.7 years, the time ESO+ with dynamic zone scaling and better grouping was finished.
2) ZOS pulled the funding plug in September of launch year with massive layoffs that basically killed timely development and balance capability as well as cost them many devs who actually knew how some of the code worked and would have been able to fix things more efficiently.
3) Endgame PVE has always been small in size, had rather weak rewards, generally poor and un-engaging mechanics, and has often not even been scaled to max level. Basically, little development effort has been put into it.
4) The main PVP experience proved a bit too ambitious and so has been plagued by lag and instability problems.
5) PVP and PVE balance have never been decoupled. Plenty of games have proven that PVP and PVE can never be balanced together. ESO's insistence on doing this is ignorant, idiotic, and they have paid the price in lack of balance in either.
6) The champion system created massive imbalance and a huge barrier to entry. It did everything we said it would and was at least the magnitude of disaster we predicted.
7) ESO's balance has often involved uber changes such as removal of dynamic ulti-regen, removal of regen while blocking, or an across the board 30 or so % decrease in resources. Balance steps of this magnitude basically just wreck everyone's builds and remove any reset any balance previously achieved. People hate them, they accomplish little, and give the impression of laziness and ineptitude.
8) Badly behaving players doing things such as running cheat engine, item duplication, spam reporting, and other exploits have never been dealt with sufficiently leaving an inmates are running the asylum vibe.
9) The game was not free to play at launch. It clearly should have both to retain players and because not doing so left a very bad impression on players who paid for most of a year with all those assurances that it was a subscription game.
10) ZOS have never ever been honest or open with players about what it is doing, what it plans to do, or why it does some things. Being left in the dark and fed *** sandwiches gets real old.

In conclusion, ESO not only could have bested WoW's peak numbers but, if run with only average competency, should have been expected too. It was not run with even average competency from the funding decisions (presumably made by the board) to the progression, balance and mechanics decisions. ESO deserves the infamy it has gained in some circles. Given the magnitude of advantages, and therefore expectations, it had, it's showing has been pitiful. ESO is like Star Wars Episode 1. Sure, it made money, but it was nevertheless a massive failure given the legitimate expectations. #WrobelforJarJar.

Dude so much truth in this post its disgustingly accurate.

lagrue

Uriel_Nocturne wrote: »

MissBizz wrote: »

Avran_Sylt wrote: »

They might just be counting total number of accounts. Maybe not even active accounts. I'd love to know the active users on a [x] day basis across all platforms, but I'm pretty sure they won't disclose that information for fear of turning away potential investors (or something, I've no clue).

Last year (or year before?) It was said there were 7 million accounts created, which I believe counted Xbox free trials. So since this number is now 10 million, I'd say it's accounts created, and not active players.

Bungie does this little trick to make Destiny sound much more populated than it is.

Bungie says: "Destiny has 8+ million registered accounts!! Our game is highly populated and healthy!! Invest in us!!"

In reality, the game is a freaking ghost town. .

The game was not a ghost town in its hayday on PS4 atleast - the tower was always lagging out from how many players were there, you would ALWAYS get 3/3 players in a Strike Team on random, PVP always filled up quick - in the wild you couldn't go 2 minutes without finding something - this persisted all the way up until the last DLC, which is when the game was kill. Expecting it to maintain a playerbase when there's not enough content isn't really realistic - once you've raided and gotten to max level - Destiny is over.

Slylok

alsuran wrote: »

I'm not sure how correct are these numbers: https://steamspy.com/app/306130

On Steam only:

Players in the last 2 weeks: 162,023 ± 12,132 (13.73%)
Players total: 1,105,416 ± 31,652 (93.66%)
Peak concurrent players yesterday: 16,902

They mentioned in the past that the number of users is split pretty evenly between the three platforms (PC, Xbox, PS4), so I guess about one third are Steam users on PC. The players in the last 2 weeks are supposed to be unique ids, number of people that have logged in at least once?

Since Steam accounts for only 11% of the total number of players, would that mean that in total there could be as many as 150,000+ concurrent players at peak time on all platforms and servers (NA/EU and PC/Xbox/PS4)?

The number seems pretty high to me, not sure if that's right.


PS: the site also mentions 38,000 owners for ESO: Morrowind ( https://steamspy.com/app/582880 ) ... once again, does it mean ~350,000 Morrowind sales if Steam has the same percentage of 11% of all games sold?

Most who play ESO on PC did not buy the game through Steam. The game did not arrive on steam until much later after release. The same goes for the expansion imo.

qsnoopyjr

Best indicator is by looking at Facebook

ESO has 2 million likes aka followers
WoW has nearly 7 million likes aka followers
GW2 has 1 million likes aka followers

We can all agree that WoW is still the reigning #1 BEST MMORPG

timidobserver

It's advertising, what do you expect? Assuming you have ever even ate at McDonalds, how often do you get a burger that looks like the one on TV.

ProfesseurFreder

There are always at least a few dozen players in every area of the game that I go to, no matter the tine of day. When you take into account that not everyone plays at the same time, that PC/Mac users are split between North America and EU servers, and consoles are also on separate servers, and THEN take into account things like instancing and shards (is that what they call them? Not sure) that create new instances of each zone when they fill up or get busy with too many players ---

-- yeah, I believe it. Anyhow, there's no way you can make any kind of accurate judgement call on the number of players, active or otherwise, based on what you see in the game.

Shadzilla

ProfesseurFreder wrote: »

There are always at least a few dozen players in every area of the game that I go to, no matter the tine of day. When you take into account that not everyone plays at the same time, that PC/Mac users are split between North America and EU servers, and consoles are also on separate servers, and THEN take into account things like instancing and shards (is that what they call them? Not sure) that create new instances of each zone when they fill up or get busy with too many players ---

-- yeah, I believe it. Anyhow, there's no way you can make any kind of accurate judgement call on the number of players, active or otherwise, based on what you see in the game.

I would have to disagree. The general agreement is that 10m is the actual amount of total accounts created over the last 39 months, which is not spectacular.

Wifeaggro13

ProfesseurFreder wrote: »

There are always at least a few dozen players in every area of the game that I go to, no matter the tine of day. When you take into account that not everyone plays at the same time, that PC/Mac users are split between North America and EU servers, and consoles are also on separate servers, and THEN take into account things like instancing and shards (is that what they call them? Not sure) that create new instances of each zone when they fill up or get busy with too many players ---

-- yeah, I believe it. Anyhow, there's no way you can make any kind of accurate judgement call on the number of players, active or otherwise, based on what you see in the game.

you can base it off the number of guilds you joined with 500 max caps that no longer exist and your completely grey friend's list that you have purged three times to make new for new churn players. so you can accurately say more 70% of those 10 million accounts tried a bite ESO and spit it out like a dirty diaper sandwich

ccfeeling

I dont think ESO server could run normally with 10M players lol

DaveMoeDee

Uriel_Nocturne wrote: »

MissBizz wrote: »

Avran_Sylt wrote: »

They might just be counting total number of accounts. Maybe not even active accounts. I'd love to know the active users on a [x] day basis across all platforms, but I'm pretty sure they won't disclose that information for fear of turning away potential investors (or something, I've no clue).

Last year (or year before?) It was said there were 7 million accounts created, which I believe counted Xbox free trials. So since this number is now 10 million, I'd say it's accounts created, and not active players.

Bungie does this little trick to make Destiny sound much more populated than it is.

Bungie says: "Destiny has 8+ million registered accounts!! Our game is highly populated and healthy!! Invest in us!!"

In reality, the game is a freaking ghost town. But if they said that out of "8+ million accounts, we only have 200k active players"... well, that doesn't sound so "great" for attracting future investors. They worded it the way they did, because even if a Player buys the game, fires it up once, then never plays it again, that Player still counts as a "Registered Account", thus allowing them to bloat their numbers to Activi$ion's investors, rather than having to admit that their practice of locking base-game content behind an ever-increasing DLC paywall is causing the game to hemorrhage Players.

So they play that little wording trick to make the game sound much more populated than it actually is, and ZOS has picked up on how useful this trick is as well.

It isn't really about investors. Serious investors will get to see the books. It is about selling more units. It is hard to sell a multiplayer online game if you lack active players.

EnglishTea123

I don't mean to brag, but I still have 10 million active customers for my lemonade stand that I started 10 years ago. lol.

Okay but really... just as some others have said, if there were even 500k active players, Rawl'Kha would be just as full, if not more because vet zones and normal zones are combined, as before. New players may think that it's crowded right now, but, boy, Rawl'Kha was PACKED way-back-when. Can't believe some people would actually believe ZoS' statement claiming that they have 10 million active players. Like... really? Guess I'll never know why they reduced PvP pop limit, cut down on PvP campaigns, and combined vet zones and normal zones. If ZoS actually fixed things that needed, and still need, fixing, maybe then the game could have at least one million active players... but nah they thought we needed housing and warden before anything else.