I believe they have that many players, that end up coming and going and coming back. The game has a special pull on people, been saying that from beta.

I think the biggest mistake they made was making it B2P. They should have kept the faith with subs and once they fixed a lot of the issues people would have returned in full. Just like they did. I remember one quest we couldn't advance for over 2 hours. ZoS employee finally came in brought NPC back and we advanced the quest. During that time we all just BS'ed until we completed it.

Think it was like 2 or 3 months later most of the bugs were fixed, bots were gone and the game ran a lot better 100 times better. Believe me, people would have returned big time and paid the sub.

Yet, the only good thing that came out of all this was the crafting bag. So maybe it was a good thing they went B2P!

A wild guess: Players who are actively playing ESO are probably only 3%-5% of that 11 million figure.
So 330,000-550,000 players who are actively playing ESO in a given month.
Players who are actively playing ESO Daily is probably 100,000-200,000.
According to steam stats:15,582 players played ESO today at peak time.
If steam is 10% of the entire ESO active population, about* 155,820 players play ESO daily at peak time.
All the above are wild guesses but that 11 million players figure is meant for copies sold only.

If ZOS won't revert some of the PTS changes before Update 20 will go live, ESO may lose many many active...players.
I do hope they will revert most of the unnecessary changes before Update 20 goes live.

Nyladreas wrote: »

jcaceresw wrote: »

I really don't believe those numbers. If we were really 11 million players then the zones would be pretty crowded. I only find at most 6 people concurrently.

You do know that despite one giant megaserver, there are still different regional built in servers and phases and regions, right?

There can be a milion players in let's say rawl'kha. But there are 10000 versions of rawl'kha on the mega server each containing a portion of players.

Have you ever invited someone into a group while both of you were in the same zone but invisible to each other despite there being no quest phasing?

That's how eso handles and spreads population.

I did not know this. I thought people said there was only one server so everybody was on that server. So these are like fake servers then? That would explain why I don't see lot of people.

Thank you for the explanation, that does make sense now.

Davor wrote: »

Nyladreas wrote: »

jcaceresw wrote: »

I really don't believe those numbers. If we were really 11 million players then the zones would be pretty crowded. I only find at most 6 people concurrently.

You do know that despite one giant megaserver, there are still different regional built in servers and phases and regions, right?

There can be a milion players in let's say rawl'kha. But there are 10000 versions of rawl'kha on the mega server each containing a portion of players.

Have you ever invited someone into a group while both of you were in the same zone but invisible to each other despite there being no quest phasing?

That's how eso handles and spreads population.

I did not know this. I thought people said there was only one server so everybody was on that server. So these are like fake servers then? That would explain why I don't see lot of people.

Thank you for the explanation, that does make sense now.

Think of each megaserver as being a server farm, not a single server. I don't recall the figures, but I remember back in the early days of EQ players complained about how long server downtime took and we were all staggered when SOE told us how many individual pieces of hardware made up each "server", each of them having to be maintained and patched. I think pretty well every zone was stored on its own server with more where duplicate instances were involved due to population size.

Some people may assume that a megaserver consists of the equivalent of a single hard drive - not remotely so!

@ZOS_GinaBruno Any chance of a bit of clarification on this point please, it might help to have an understanding of what exactly constitutes a "megaserver" hardware-wise!

Danikat wrote: »

This happens on a regular basis for many MMOs (probably all of them but I've never looked) and I never understand it. Someone finds an official or semi-official source saying loads of people own the game or are currently playing it. Good news right? Apparently not. People point-blank refuse to accept it, no matter how reliable the source should be, because they're seemingly desperate to believe that a game they apparently really like (enough to spend time on it's forums) has been abandoned by the majority of people and has barely any players left.

They will reject official statements from the company, data from independent media, sourced and reasoned estimates from other players, anything in favour of believing the game is dying.

All I can think is it's a hipster thing - if other people like "your" game then it's too popular and that's ruined it. (Which would also explain some of the attitudes on this forum, because surely the ultimate hipster move is to convince people even you don't like it.)

Quoted for truth

That is why they now need to pis people off cos the server secretly cannot handle it anymore and they have no staff to make it better.

They are great stats!! And who cares if they are inflated or not, we're all here because we love the game right, so let's celebrate its success. It's a fantastic game.

Bit of a 'white knight' comment, but the forums are quite depressing atm

Sylosi wrote: »

There aren't 11 million players playing the game as this thread implies, they've sold 11 million copies, and like every other game on the planet, that means that most of those players this many years into the game are no longer playing it, which is why for example in an interview at the end of last year a dev stated that the active playerbase was about 2.5 million.

Explain adding 1 million NEW PLAYERS LAST MONTH.

as far as i know - this game works with shards (I know that at the height of Traitor's vault farming, I would see half the guild in there in roster, but maybe one person in the same shard as me, and same kinda applies to overworld as well. so just visually seeing people out in a world is not necessarily the best gauge.

I do know that I'm still selling (and fast) stuff you'd think everyone has by now. things like furnishing patterns and motifs and various cooking recipes. that is unless the amount of people playing is larger then you'd expect, so... /shrug

oh and... bear in mind that this game goes on sale often, there is a LOT to do for a new player even if you don't have any DLC's, subscription is optional and I have a feeling that the numbers count multiple accounts actively played by a single person - as multiple people.

MilwaukeeScott wrote: »

@Linaleah

Define shard, please

the world can only handle so many people in it, before framerate issues happen. so open world is sharded - instanced if you will. think of it as a sort of giant public dungeon where only so many people can be at the same time, before new instance is created for more people zoning in. each zone is its own set of shards also (part of the reason why we have all these loading screens). as people leave the zone - the shard that they left has now spaces for new people to fill in. now I'm not 100% sure as to how many people ESO shards are set for. I know that in SWTOR, it was about 200ish before new shards would be created with a room for a few extra people in case say friends in different shards decide to group up and want to play together - it allows them to transfer over, even if technicaly the shard is full.

its possible that good indicator of how many people ESO shards can handle is the amount of players that Cyrodill campaign can support at any given time, before its locked (and since they are trying to more or less make it fair - each faction gets 1/3 of its limit) I guess in a way, different pvp campaigns are basically Cyrodill shards, but they come with extras attached (like campaign duration). (another possibly example is housing and its limits - given those I'd guess each ESO world shard can handle just under 1k people?)

I hope this makes sense.

not sure if you have ever experienced it but have you ever been in a group, where you don't see your group members, even though you are supposed to be next to them? sharding glitches.

another way to say sharding is phasing, at least in this context.

How many of them are bots?

Sylvermynx wrote: »

Linaleah wrote: »

Sylvermynx wrote: »

It's an in-game construct based on an arbitrary setup by ZOS. When I needed help with a boss, I asked an RL friend to help me out. We were on two different "shards". I assume this because the game asked me if I wanted to "join" him in his "instance". Can't remember the exact wording - something about "the player wanting to group with you is in a different version of the game - do you want to move to that version?" That's SO not the exact wording but it was a while back, so I don't remember exactly.

It's just one way of many possible ways to manage population and instancing in online games.

its not just ZoS. most MMO's do that and pretty much for the same reason - their servers and/or engine cannot handle massive amounts of people in the same place at the same time. I believe, the only active MMO on the market right now that doesn't use sharding is EVE online. I could be wrong, but this is as far as I know.

Yah, I just wasn't wanting to haul in "all the years" of other games, as that's not actually germane to the question here - which is just regarding ESO.

Sure they all do it. But perhaps those who are fairly new at this game are also fairly new at MMORPGs too. No point in muddying the water.

well there is a lot of "ZoS sucks at MMO's" out here, so I figured I'd bring up that they are engaging in fairly common practices, so its not a "ZoS doesn't know how to handle player populations" thing

these brag updates just make me more pissed that we dont have stable servers, in game balance- and a dedicateed combat team. like a restaurant that brags serving 10 million customers- when everyone leaves with salmonella.

Boosted sale by banned bot farmers. Nothing to see here.