I'm not sure. Many of my old guildmates quit the game, but on the other hand, I see many new players.

Kinda hard to gauge PVE population, but certainly seems much bigger on NA PC than it was a couple years ago.

On the PVP side, it seemed to drop a lot starting about 1 month after launch (June 2014), dropped again a couple months later, continued to decline during the following year or so, then leveled off.

Starting about 4 or 5 months ago, it seemed to pick up again with an influx of players from Japan. Really grateful for these guys. I play late at night Pacific time and until they joined, PVP was sometimes dead during this time period.

And of course during the Midyear Mayhem week the population skyrocketed - hopefully some of the people new to PVP decide to stick around.

Don't know for sure, but my experience on EU is that the population is healthy. I revisit the starting zones fairly regularly and there are plenty of new players (or perhaps a mixture of new and old players with new characters).

I've seen more and more new players of late. In fact I've had more than a few random players in game ask me to help them with some world bosses in various zones. All low CP, all have added me to a friends list and even gone so far as to ask for help with skills/sets/content. Which is an overall good thing.

That said, I've also lost a fair amount of friends and guildies that have tired of what is still in general mostly the same old content. PvP is mostly the same since launch, obviously there is new content various DLCs/Expansions but most of that content is a one time play through and that's that. I suppose that those of us that have been in game for a long time now are bored with that to some degree (I'm not, but I can see how one might feel that way), where as new players see a huge amount of things still to do.

A bunch more new players, but older players are getting burnt out/tired and leaving. But some of those newer players will take their place. I've done a _lot_ in this game, and sometimes I get pretty bored, but I'll give it a week and come back, or I'll find new people to play with that reinvigorate my interest in the game. I've ran WGT like a hundred times but getting people their first clears/speedruns is still fun for me.

I think the overall population is increasing, but with some absent as always with MMOs during the Summer months and between major updates. I certainly see at least as many players on the PC EU server as always, and it never takes long for at least one player to turn up at a world or public dungeon boss if help is needed but not requested. Of course, a few malcontents have thrown a hissy fit and QQ'd over this or that, but that's nothing new in a MMO especially one that offers PvP or other competitive gameplay. They always return of course, because the bottom line is that they love the game and know there isn't a better one of its type to switch to.

hmsdragonfly wrote: »

http://steamcharts.com/app/306130

The playerbase on steam tripled since One Tamriel, and has been slightly decreasing recently. Steam is just a small part of the playerbase but we can see the trend, well, more or less.

I don't think any "trend" with Steam can be said to be representative of the playerbase as a whole, firstly because it only reflects a minority of the overall playerbase in terms of platform and secondly because very few PC users play through Steam and that is especially true of the diehard players who have been here since beta or PC launch, i.e. long before the game was released on Steam.

Im not sure but I think the population has increased. If we take Cyrodiil PvP (EU) as an example, uhh it's like never empty there. Sure depends which campaign, but standard (Vivec) is never low population. But that also depends on what time during the day, far more people gaming during afternoon and night. And starter areas are also never empty, always teeming with bright and new lvl 3 players.

LadyNalcarya wrote: »

I'm not sure. Many of my old guildmates quit the game, but on the other hand, I see many new players.

This for sure.

Would Inbreeding count as an increase? It would explain the sudden rise in DC power.

Decreased fo sure. I usually back on ESO and each time I see less and less players. But with Morowind, old players back to see,

I would say fluctuation. Population goes up and down all the time.

ESO, as with a lot of other MMO's yo-yo's a lot. The population rises quite a lot with a new DLC, then it slowly drops as people complete the content and wander away until the next content drop. So right now, its dropped a little since Morrowind came out. However with Horns of the Reach, due out in a couple of weeks, there will be an influx of new and returning players. Then it will slowly fall off until Clockwork City releases around Christmas.

Console might see a bigger fall off as TERA and Destiny 2 release, but even then I would suspect people will return.

Tandor wrote: »

hmsdragonfly wrote: »

http://steamcharts.com/app/306130

The playerbase on steam tripled since One Tamriel, and has been slightly decreasing recently. Steam is just a small part of the playerbase but we can see the trend, well, more or less.

I don't think any "trend" with Steam can be said to be representative of the playerbase as a whole, firstly because it only reflects a minority of the overall playerbase in terms of platform and secondly because very few PC users play through Steam and that is especially true of the diehard players who have been here since beta or PC launch, i.e. long before the game was released on Steam.

That's not quite accurate, @Tandor. What you can't do is extrapolate total player counts. However, you can extrapolate overall trends to within a margin for error.

In this case, the Steam population is large enough to be able to calculate overall population trends with less than a 1% margin for error. (To be fair, the margin might be 1.2%, I really don't want to do the math and sort this out in my head right now.)

This is, by the way, something you use in statistical analysis all the time. If you're wanting survey data you, obviously, can't ask every single person, but you can ask a representative chunk of people and estimate out from there.

So, you're correct, Steam is a tiny sliver of the game's overall population, but they're sufficient to estimate the behavior patterns of a much larger group. In point of fact, a sample population of 10k is far more than you need to estimate trending in a group of over 300 million. So, however large ESO's population is, it's fair to assume steam's numbers are somewhat representative of the community as a whole. Specifically, that within the last 30 days, ESO's lost between 7% and 9% of its active user base.

So, yeah, you can use that data for some things. You can't use it to say, "ah, 100k players are on PC/NA," it doesn't tell you that.