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.

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.

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.