Is the player population really dead?

Raraaku

geekboy09 wrote: »

I made a mistake the video said 200000 instead of 3000 but still

I'm not sure if you're counting the zeros you're adding to these numbers. In OP you stated 2,000, then you stated it's 3,000 before the incredibly large leap to 200,000... that's 198,000 in terms of how far off you are from your numbers. 2,000 to 200,000 is a 100x fold error.

This is also relegating the population to only players that use Steam to login; Steam has been causing a lot of trouble with allowing players to login lately and there has been apparently a way for Steam players to buy the base game from ESO and still access their account/content without the headache of Steam.

Also, very few companies, accurately, publish the numbers of their active player population to the public; which is why active player population is often a guessing game. Not only does Steam not represent the majority of the player population; the PC platform is roughly only 1/3 of the total ESO player population.

One last thing as well; the "eye test" can also be a bit misleading since ZOS's MegaServers often create multiple instances of an area/city when there are large concentrations of players within that area to help ease the load on those servers. Which is why when you group up with guild mates before queuing for a trial/dungeon the game initiates a prompt asking if you want to port into the same instance that your party leader is in.

Edit: I'm also having a hard time counting zeros apparently

efster

I don't know about all the other players in the population, but I can confirm that I am not dead.

Hessen

https://mmo-population.com/activity

Franieck

I'd actually enjoy a low population on overland and cities. It's hugely annoying competing for mobs in public delves and waiting 5 minutes for NPCs to load because 40 players and their annoying ability spams have to be rendered first. With that said, simply reducing the number of rendered players would solve this issue. Dungeon and trial wise, the current population has been great and finding groups is rather easy and enjoyable.

thumpthing

Hessen wrote: »

https://mmo-population.com/activity

...again irrelevant 3rd party estimating, estimates number of players based on how many active subreddits there are... might be a decent estimate of how many crossover from mmo to reddit, but nothing else

Earthewen

geekboy09 wrote: »

I just saw a YouTube video there was only 2000 players on steam

I do have a suspicion that the One Tamriel had a bit more to do with dwindling population rather than providing a benefit to players. The benefit was that it was easier to get groups together with everyone so readily accessible to each other. If a game starts closing down servers and putting all the players together, it usually spells the end of a game altogether. Same thing happened on LOTRO. While the game doesn't really die, the player base diminishes even further and the income along with it. Then people start losing their jobs.

But if you market the movement of the players onto fewer servers as a One Tamriel, then suddenly it isn't closing any servers but is allowing people to play with their friends. it is all in the marketing.

Cloudless

geekboy09 wrote: »

I made a mistake the video said 200000 instead of 3000 but still

MaleAmazon

I'd actually enjoy a low population on overland and cities. It's hugely annoying competing for mobs in public delves and waiting 5 minutes for NPCs to load because 40 players and their annoying ability spams have to be rendered first.

I´m inbetween jobs atm and only work sporadically.. it can make ESO kinda fun since there is a large population difference depending on the time, so you can do different things efficiently.. I get up at 6 AM-ish and can eat breakfast while farming materials and listening to podcasts.. sometimes it almost feels like single player, there are so few players at that time... then in the evening the situation changes completely and I do dungeons and trials.

Wifeaggro13

efster wrote: »

I don't know about all the other players in the population, but I can confirm that I am not dead.

Awesome, that was good

kylewwefan

Why do these threads keep coming up? It’s like really bad timing or something. Did you try getting into Vivec last week? I had a 400 something que every freaking day. The games not dying. Move along.

Wifeaggro13

Earthewen wrote: »

geekboy09 wrote: »

I just saw a YouTube video there was only 2000 players on steam

I do have a suspicion that the One Tamriel had a bit more to do with dwindling population rather than providing a benefit to players. The benefit was that it was easier to get groups together with everyone so readily accessible to each other. If a game starts closing down servers and putting all the players together, it usually spells the end of a game altogether. Same thing happened on LOTRO. While the game doesn't really die, the player base diminishes even further and the income along with it. Then people start losing their jobs.

But if you market the movement of the players onto fewer servers as a One Tamriel, then suddenly it isn't closing any servers but is allowing people to play with their friends. it is all in the marketing.

Interesting, I never understood Tam 1. Because people were not complaining about scaling they were complaining about phasing and not being allowed to help friends in a vast amount of quest progression.i think tam one was a blind man's fix to the power creep , not wanting to spend $$ on emergent vertical progession, and an effort to reduce production cost and time on content. Though the content has good story it offers nothing in the realm of emerging game play. ESOchose a very flat progression system .its fine for new people but it does retain and end game community

Chuck_Finley

geekboy09 wrote: »

I just saw a YouTube video there was only 2000 players on steam

I don't know why but my Steam version of ESO only says I played for 15 hours. I have 4 max level characters and all the story DLC complete and a few other alts below 50. I played well over 15 hours so Steam tracking who is active is not super reliable for this game for some reason.

Wifeaggro13

Chuck_Finley wrote: »

geekboy09 wrote: »

I just saw a YouTube video there was only 2000 players on steam

I don't know why but my Steam version of ESO only says I played for 15 hours. I have 4 max level characters and all the story DLC complete and a few other alts below 50. I played well over 15 hours so Steam tracking who is active is not super reliable for this game for some reason.

steam is not an accurate population tracker. across all platforms id say people who log on more then 3 times a week is 400 to 600 k. ESO found a way to make huge profits of a churn population. i dont think this last chapter sold as well as Morrowind as the population is getting bored with the games core design philosphy. chapters are nothing more then leveling content with no levels and the actuall MMO part of the content is not emerging. weapon ultimates were half a thought ,warden was an actuall beta class they just turned on. the game post 4 plus years launch is actually worse of an MMO then it was in 2016 as they have tried to rework it into a single player RPG with multiplayer options.

ATomiX96

A huge majority of the veteran playerbase is gone, several consecutive disappointing dlc's, lacking endgame (farming 3 trials for 3 months over and over for score runs for a bigger EPenis on esoleaderboards.com), no propper gear progression (farm it once, use it for the next 3 years), the only thing there is left for veterans is PVPing (yeaaa no) and achievement hunting which most of the people couldnt give two *** about.

So most of the people you see right now are just new people running around exploring the game for the first time. If that indicates a dying game, ill keep that up to you to decide.

ATomiX96

Hessen wrote: »

https://mmo-population.com/activity

its a rough estimate dont go by those numbers but there is some correlation between those numbers and the actual playerbase.

Davor

Hessen wrote: »

https://mmo-population.com/activity

Just curious. Under ESO it says about half million players. Didn't Zenimax brag on 10 million? That is a HUGE difference.

Cloudless

geekboy09 wrote: »

I made a mistake the video said 200000 instead of 3000 but still

ForMalacath

Have to say, the game seems more crowded now than ive ever known on Xbox! could be due to Gamepass I guess

Wifeaggro13

Davor wrote: »

Hessen wrote: »

https://mmo-population.com/activity

Just curious. Under ESO it says about half million players. Didn't Zenimax brag on 10 million? That is a HUGE difference.

If you read saw what Matt frior actually said he boasted 10 million accounts were made. Including trial accounts which was a large large number when they offered their free trials. Sales figures for all platforms were reported and that number was around 4 million when console released. So I would guess they have sold more copies but the 500k player base is pretty accurate. Which is a horrible retention for a MMO. But Eso is highly profitable based on their cash shop all they need is 20 k people buying things and gambling to make 3 or 4 million bucks a month. Add in their eso plus revenue with the dlcs sales and they are milking the cow hard.if you look at games like EQ2 (which could have been bigger had they not had huge tech requirements to start the game). EQ2 had sold under 1 million copies its first year and had retained 70% four years in they had 4 full blown xpacs,new races new starting areas 3 layers of AA and so much stuff to do it was confusing. When ruins of kunark released the activity shot up to about 700k plus.but they catered to a long term end game population pretty heavy

Cpt_Teemo

geekboy09 wrote: »

I just saw a YouTube video there was only 2000 players on steam

Game was out like 2 years before Steam

Hungryzombie996

Hi all,

Returning Player here. I tried this game out for a few weeks a couple years ago but didnt' stick with it. Recently I was bored with other games I'd been playing and re-installed ESO and got a + member for a month.

Played the last three nights. The game don't feel dead to me. I'm leveling up a new character and the zone chat is pretty full, only had to wait 10 min for dungeon queue as DPS! at night. People were always fighting those anchor things that drop down across the map. People are everywhere running around me. I don't know the numbers of people playing but it feels full of life to me.

starkerealm

Hessen wrote: »

https://mmo-population.com/activity

Interesting. Not, you know, useful, but interesting. Statistically the jump from Reddit activity to estimating the overall population is mathematically unsound, but as someone who is trained to play with statistics like that, it's interesting to see. Even if there's basically zero confidence in those numbers.

It is useful as a litmus test for how active the various communities are on Reddit. But, if you honestly think the StarCitizen community is larger than the Elite Dangerous community, you should start to suspect something's amiss. Also, the complete absence of Warframe.

Now, having cautioned against using Steam as a reference point for ESO, as the steam population is artificially depressed due to last month's login issues, the current player count is 12.4k, FF14's is 8.3k. However, the link you gave suggested that FF14's population is almost twice that of ESO... so, if that estimate was accurate, the numbers should be flipped.

To it's credit, the BDO active players are at 11.1k, and the site's estimate puts that at slightly smaller than ESO's population. Though, because of how BDO encourages AFK gaming, I'm somewhat hesitant to say, "yeah, see, similar numbers based on active players," because I'm 100% positive some of those players are at work, while their character fishes.

EDIT: Also worth noting that the site doesn't claim to give you the populations for the various games, it's only interested in using Reddit as a gauge to indicate their popularity. The methodology isn't perfect, but within that range, it's sound enough.

Sylvermynx

I'm finding this game pretty busy - lots of toons in cities, and since my girls explore a lot, I'm seeing people out in the wilds too. It's not as busy as WoW when I left (2014), but busier than RIFT was when I left (2017).

xeNNNNN

geekboy09 wrote: »

I just saw a YouTube video there was only 2000 players on steam

Steam is extremely small in terms of actually game pop because a lot of people use the launcher (which honestly is the best idea seeing as steam has had so many problems recently).

Trust me the player count is actually massive, the mid year mayhem event proved that, locked out all of the campaigns at one point and had queues and not to mention the amount of people that are usually in Capital cities and such and questions and dungeons and etc etc you get the idea.

The player pop anything but large, its huge.

leepalmer95

Sylvermynx wrote: »

I'm finding this game pretty busy - lots of toons in cities, and since my girls explore a lot, I'm seeing people out in the wilds too. It's not as busy as WoW when I left (2014), but busier than RIFT was when I left (2017).

Most of those in the wild are likely bots. Game has a big bot problem.

Sylvermynx

Eh, no. These are people with "real names" doing normal stuff players do - dueling, harvesting, looking in bag, looking at map, mounting, using wayshrines etc. I'm pretty sure I haven't seen a bot yet in this game. I may not get to places they go much.

leepalmer95

Sylvermynx wrote: »

Eh, no. These are people with "real names" doing normal stuff players do - dueling, harvesting, looking in bag, looking at map, mounting, using wayshrines etc. I'm pretty sure I haven't seen a bot yet in this game. I may not get to places they go much.

They're usually running around in a loop doing dolmens, repeating loots kill mobs that drop hide or botting mats etc...

Or botting levels to sell the account.

Kalfis

This is one of the most played MMORPGs in the west. Population has only gone up! ESO is at its peak right now.

leepalmer95

Kalfis wrote: »

This is one of the most played MMORPGs in the west. Population has only gone up! ESO is at its peak right now.

It really hasn't. At least on my server, its dropped dramatically.

Thrasher91604

Well the posts on this forum have dropped off quite a bit, if that's any indication.