A warning for ESO? Another 2014 MMO turning off it's servers next month....

Hateanthem · October 2018

MaxJrFTW wrote: »

Rohamad_Ali wrote: »

Why is this a warning for Eso ? Eso has millions of players .

I seriously doubt that, just based on the low viewership both on twitch and youtube. Still ESO has a healthy population, i don't see it going away any time soon.

I seriously doubt that many ESO players use their time to watch other people play the video game instead of playing it themselves.

theyancey · October 2018

Kolache wrote: »

Anarchy Online · Release date
Jun 27, 2001

Ultima Online · Release date
Sep 24, 1997

Just a reminder of how little is required for some MMOs to keep the lights on. My eyes hurt from rolling so hard.

LOL, thanks for the reminder! Ultima Online was my first modern MMORPG and I still have the original collector's edition box. When you died you were revived back in town. To reclaim your armor, coin, inventory, etc you had to somehow get back to your body to get it. You had to do this naked despite the fact that your body was surrounded by what killed you fully armored. It paid to have friends. In fact there were many mercenary players who hung around town hiring themselves out as armed escorts. Would not want to go back to that!

MaxJrFTW · October 2018

Hateanthem wrote: »

MaxJrFTW wrote: »

Rohamad_Ali wrote: »

Why is this a warning for Eso ? Eso has millions of players .

I seriously doubt that, just based on the low viewership both on twitch and youtube. Still ESO has a healthy population, i don't see it going away any time soon.

I seriously doubt that many ESO players use their time to watch other people play the video game instead of playing it themselves.

That's just a poor excuse. What makes ESO players different than players of any other game?

eso_nya · October 2018

the only thing to learn from that might be "if u exclusively cater to the top 1% of the playerbase, dont be surprised if the other 99% leave."

Hateanthem · October 2018

MaxJrFTW wrote: »

Hateanthem wrote: »

MaxJrFTW wrote: »

Rohamad_Ali wrote: »

Why is this a warning for Eso ? Eso has millions of players .

I seriously doubt that, just based on the low viewership both on twitch and youtube. Still ESO has a healthy population, i don't see it going away any time soon.

I seriously doubt that many ESO players use their time to watch other people play the video game instead of playing it themselves.

That's just a poor excuse. What makes ESO players different than players of any other game?

A poor excuse for what? I didn't make an excuse for anything.

The number of Twitch or YouTube livestreaming viewers isn't a good indication of population for any MMO.

I would also say that ESO has one of the larger roleplaying player bases. I doubt an RP'er is going to sit there and watch a stream of some random player do PvP and talk crap the entire time. And then there are a lot of people just like me, who think it's ridiculous that people are willing to sit there and watch someone enjoy the game instead of enjoying it themselves.

Sorry. Maybe streamer views are a good indication of population for MOBA's and FPS games, but I just don't see it being a good indicator for an MMO.

Athannos · October 2018

While sad to see any MMO die, it's surprising Wildstar even lasted this long.

Cartoonish artstyle, sci-fi setting, only hardcore Vanilla WoW players as a target audience... wasn't it also subscription only at first?

ESO on the other hand managed to beautifully bounce back from its early shortcomings, has gorgeous art, a buy-to-play model, and a MASSIVE IP behind it. It's not dying or slowing down any time soon!

Enemy-of-Coldharbour · October 2018

My worry with ESO is all the free stuff they giving away lately. Developers usually only do that when they are desperate to retain existing players and entice new ones due to declining activity.

Tandor · October 2018

The main difference between the two games is that Wildstar was unsuccessful, while ESO is very successful.

idk · October 2018

mateosalvaje wrote: »

I've never heard of that game.

It launched not long after ESO did. It floundered so hard from the start. OP is just grasping at straws.

Essentially it failed from the start. It was a fail so early it had to go F2P vs B2P as ESO did demonstrating a much greater struggle.

Considering the extremely poor product Zos released over 4 years ago and one year later was still doing so much better than Wildstar this thread is not a warning for anything.

max_only · October 2018

Oh! I remember that game, WoW in space right? Low poly art and everything.

Sad times friend.

ESO’s population skews older in demographics and we old folk tend not to watch streaming as much. Why be a voyeur when I can just go do it myself? Twitch is a marketing tool where the customers are advertisers and the product they are selling are the users/watchers. Don’t look at Twitch numbers to determine anything.

ESO has plenty of life left.

Elsonso · October 2018

bearbelly wrote: »

I'm pretty sure anybody working in the gaming business since... pretty much forever... is fully aware of how fast the bottom can drop-out from under them. Ask Atari, way back in the 2600 age, or Gazillion, more recently (and there are others more recent than that -- point being, it's a constant possibility).

Comparing whatever is happening with... *checks notes* Wildstar... to ESO, and couching it as a warning is kind of silly in that regard.

Yet, it always seems like ZOS takes steps that annoy players and push them away. Players are one of the most valuable assets that they have, and really the only reason they do what they do.

The back and forth on combat skills has kept me wondering for a couple years whether they actually have a combat direction. High prices in the Crown store, limited sales, and limited selection have never been popular. I am firmly convinced that everyone from Firor to the lowest janitor has accepted that Cyrodiil lag is what it is and will never be fixed. They have built a reputation for inattentive and distant customer care.

You would think that they would dial this in, at some point, but mixed in with whatever good things they do, come the very pronounced bad things that distract from that.

Don't get me wrong, I love the game, and don't want it to be Wildstar'ed, but sometimes it seems like ZOS is their own worst enemy in all of this.

MaxJrFTW · October 2018

Hateanthem wrote: »

MaxJrFTW wrote: »

Hateanthem wrote: »

MaxJrFTW wrote: »

Rohamad_Ali wrote: »

Why is this a warning for Eso ? Eso has millions of players .

I seriously doubt that, just based on the low viewership both on twitch and youtube. Still ESO has a healthy population, i don't see it going away any time soon.

I seriously doubt that many ESO players use their time to watch other people play the video game instead of playing it themselves.

That's just a poor excuse. What makes ESO players different than players of any other game?

A poor excuse for what? I didn't make an excuse for anything.

The number of Twitch or YouTube livestreaming viewers isn't a good indication of population for any MMO.

I would also say that ESO has one of the larger roleplaying player bases. I doubt an RP'er is going to sit there and watch a stream of some random player do PvP and talk crap the entire time. And then there are a lot of people just like me, who think it's ridiculous that people are willing to sit there and watch someone enjoy the game instead of enjoying it themselves.

Sorry. Maybe streamer views are a good indication of population for MOBA's and FPS games, but I just don't see it being a good indicator for an MMO.

I see. So essentially none of this applies to the other mmos that have more viewers than ESO. Especially WoW, a game that actually has millions of players and currently has 10 streamers with more viewers than all of ESO.

Twitch and youtube viewership are the best possible indicatives of a game's popularity. Denial isn't going to change that.

abigfishy · October 2018

Wildstar was well promoted at launch and was designed to be a serious MMO for hardcore gamers with massive raids and PvP events. Their cartoony Fortnite style graphics did not mesh well with this and the SI-FI setting that didn't ride on an existing IP and many bugs were a problem. When you think about it if you are trying to attract hardcore playerbase and the game is very buggy that is a major problem.

ESO had MASSIVE problems at launch, it was incredibly buggy with some advancement breaking bugs, the endgame was very grindy with little fun to actually do and the game was totally overrun with bots. They were everywhere. I remember if you actually found a node it was a cause for celebration. I actually parked a toon half way through a mission between Bleakrock and Bal Foyen as it was a small area with no bots and I would log in and farm the 5-6 nodes that would appear there. Like most people I stopped playing.

One Tamriel really saved ESO. Now you can play whatever content you like with whoever you like and everyone makes a contribution. I wish other games would learn from this. It is not that the grind is gone (Murkmire Prologue lol) but the game has an incredible variety of stuff to do so you only grind if you want to.

Wildstar did have what was supposed to be the best Housing system in any MMO so maybe the ESO devs should drop in and take a look at that system before the game totally dies and see what they can adapt.

ESO has an incredible content cycle and is doing really well. I don't think Wildstar ever was close to ESO however the ESO devs need to look at its demise and make sure that they do not start to trend down the same path.

Elsonso · October 2018

WhiteCoatSyndrome wrote: »

[snip]

They seem to be doing fine.

[edited to remove quote]

tspecherb14_ESO · October 2018

Athannos wrote: »

While sad to see any MMO die, it's surprising Wildstar even lasted this long.

Cartoonish artstyle, sci-fi setting, only hardcore Vanilla WoW players as a target audience... wasn't it also subscription only at first?

ESO on the other hand managed to beautifully bounce back from its early shortcomings, has gorgeous art, a buy-to-play model, and a MASSIVE IP behind it. It's not dying or slowing down any time soon!

Didn't Blizzard launch a hardcore vanilla WoW server as well?

Lake · October 2018

MaxJrFTW wrote: »

Hateanthem wrote: »

MaxJrFTW wrote: »

Hateanthem wrote: »

MaxJrFTW wrote: »

Rohamad_Ali wrote: »

Why is this a warning for Eso ? Eso has millions of players .

I seriously doubt that, just based on the low viewership both on twitch and youtube. Still ESO has a healthy population, i don't see it going away any time soon.

I seriously doubt that many ESO players use their time to watch other people play the video game instead of playing it themselves.

That's just a poor excuse. What makes ESO players different than players of any other game?

A poor excuse for what? I didn't make an excuse for anything.

The number of Twitch or YouTube livestreaming viewers isn't a good indication of population for any MMO.

I would also say that ESO has one of the larger roleplaying player bases. I doubt an RP'er is going to sit there and watch a stream of some random player do PvP and talk crap the entire time. And then there are a lot of people just like me, who think it's ridiculous that people are willing to sit there and watch someone enjoy the game instead of enjoying it themselves.

Sorry. Maybe streamer views are a good indication of population for MOBA's and FPS games, but I just don't see it being a good indicator for an MMO.

I see. So essentially none of this applies to the other mmos that have more viewers than ESO. Especially WoW, a game that actually has millions of players and currently has 10 streamers with more viewers than all of ESO.

Twitch and youtube viewership are the best possible indicatives of a game's popularity. Denial isn't going to change that.

I'm on Twitch all the time.

If you went by Twitch popularity (a terrible gauge), you'd think the only active MMO was World of Warcraft.

I mean, look at the average viewership on Twitch for traditional MMOs throughout October:

WoW - 43k
OG Runescape - 6.3k
Black Desert - 3.1k
Lineage II - 2.9k
MapleStory 2 - 2.4k
FFXIV - 1.4k
ESO - 1.4k
Tibia - 1.2k
World of Warships - 800
Runescape 2+ - 700
GW2 - 550

Makes it look like every other MMO not called WoW should pack it up, including FFXIV & GW2.

Numerikuu · October 2018

Never, ever heard of it or them. If what is being said about it being a hardcore game for elitists, then it was doomed from the moment of conception.

Krayl · October 2018

wildstar was a wow clone without a cohesive design or immersive world/lore/art.

Reverb · October 2018

I remember seeing it advertised on IGN and other sites, but never heard anything more about it and don’t not know a single person who actually played it.

Linaleah · October 2018

Enemy-of-Coldharbour wrote: »

My worry with ESO is all the free stuff they giving away lately. Developers usually only do that when they are desperate to retain existing players and entice new ones due to declining activity.

honestly, I think they are doing it to drum up some good will after people being upset over all the stuff they are selling and psijic villa specifically was to entice people upset over how morrrowind was handled - to buy summerset now rather then wait for it to be rolled into next expansion prepurchase/ESO plus.

there are still crown only houses coming. and a whole bunch of other crown only things. occasional free things are just PR morsels. I would get far more worried if content update schedule would thin out significantly both of paid and free variety.

P.S. reply to another post in this thread - ESO housing is actualy somewhat close to wildstar's in implementation, but there are definitely a LOT of things that I would love from wildstar. everything from being able to change size of the items I'm placing, to how item limits were handled, to certain house plot customization options like being able to change the sky, weather, etc and which house you plop down on your plot if you are going with prebuilt. on the other hand - I really like that ESO plots have so much more variety and look integrated into ESO world, so... I guess its a matter of preference here.

Linaleah · October 2018

tspecherb14_ESO wrote: »

Athannos wrote: »

While sad to see any MMO die, it's surprising Wildstar even lasted this long.

Cartoonish artstyle, sci-fi setting, only hardcore Vanilla WoW players as a target audience... wasn't it also subscription only at first?

ESO on the other hand managed to beautifully bounce back from its early shortcomings, has gorgeous art, a buy-to-play model, and a MASSIVE IP behind it. It's not dying or slowing down any time soon!

Didn't Blizzard launch a hardcore vanilla WoW server as well?

not yet. they are working on it and trial should be available for blizzcon ticket holders in a bit. whether it will be successful? who knows. but having a dedicated hardcore server for already successful game - is a bit different from launching a completely new IP with no preexisting fanbase to speak of (something else that ESO has advantage with - ES fans have been here for a while, and contrary to expectations, no, they will not all leave when ES6 will come out, unless ES6 is specifically designed to be an MMO replacing this one, there WILL be an overlap with people playing both or taking a break to play single player game, and then coming back to MMO)

Silver_Strider · October 2018

I recall a Pink Dolphin Mount.

Probably the only thing I remember about Wildstar.

Ngh · October 2018

Played Wildstar for a short time. As you did content the world view would evolve with better graphics as new content replaced old. This also made helping others a bit problematic as you could not really help them if you had completed it already. The housing did not keep me there as it was heavily monetized and then the F2P killed it further as it does in games bringing in the heavy bot population. I also had thought it was turned off already, never checked to see if it was still going.

The gamer populations are totally different between Wildstar and TESO. The one correlation would be TESO should beware of heavily monetizing the CS with high prices and never go F2P.

TESO at least has a purchase requirement for the game but the low cost during sales has brought them a greater bot problem as it became more profitable to botting with a lower potential loss. I would rather see a subscription on a game so that it has a better game community IMHO, even though I am in a very low income bracket.

Kiralyn2000 · October 2018

Wildstar failed, so they're shutting the servers off.

ESO's not failing, soooo...... what's the connection here? (I mean, ignoring the part where eventually, ALL these MMOs will shut their servers down. Just depends on how long 'eventually" is.)

DMuehlhausen wrote: »

Kanar wrote: »

[snip]

That might the most intense personal opinion I've seen in awhile

Yeah. Honestly, the art style & design was the only thing that attracted my attention about Wildstar before it released. But I never got around to trying it.

(of course, I also think that WoW had great art direction - I mean, look how long it's art style has held up, even on weak computers. But ESO's pretty, too. /shrug)

[edited to remove quote]

danno8 · October 2018

MaxJrFTW wrote: »

Rohamad_Ali wrote: »

Why is this a warning for Eso ? Eso has millions of players .

I seriously doubt that, just based on the low viewership both on twitch and youtube. Still ESO has a healthy population, i don't see it going away any time soon.

Who really knows?

But if you look at the poster above, 15k on Steam on a Tuesday night is pretty solid. Then consider Steam is probably less than half of total PC population, so at least 30k total.

Then Xb and Ps are about 33% each according to devs so the total playing the game on a Tuesday night is probably near 100k.

What do you think a Friday or Saturday night look like? 200k? Average concurrent is normally 10% for MMO's iirc so over a million players is pretty believable to me.

But again, who really knows?

Edit: Oh yah and Wildstar was like Wow but where they doubled down on the cartoony graphics and hardcore content. Who asked for that? No one evidently.

Brittany_Joy · October 2018

Wildstar shutting down is a warning to game developers to not steal from their investors. A Youtube video said Wildstar may have shut down due to poor management that involved Carbine studios withholding earnings from NCsoft. Games like Ultima and Everquest are still running with an average of 100 players a day which shows that you don't need a big crowd to keep an MMORPG alive. A proper managed MMORPG can stay alive for so many years even with a low population.

Wildstar had numerous reasons why it failed. Wildstar couldn't maintain the commitment from its playerbase because players didn't connect with their race or class. The playable races are odd and the classes are too much the same. If a player can't connect with their character who they are expected to spend a lot of time on then the whole experience would just be all-around negative for them which ends up with them quitting the game. Another strong reason why Wildstar failed is that it wasn't properly optimized for most Graphics Cards; AMD and budget GPUs had little to no support on Wildstar. As a result, the game is unplayable for the common consumer simply because not everyone has a beast of a machine. ESO on the other hand, was optimized to be playable on most computers. For example; My old laptop averaged ESO at 30 FPS while Wildstar averaged at 1-9 FPS (I unsubscribed from WIldstar for that reason and multiple people quit as well for the same reason). Carbine studios also spoke in whispers or none at all with their players which resulted in no content and plain ol' maintenance fixes because they didn't have the skill or the time to create content. Everquest still releases content and some other long-living MMORPGs still release content even with their small team because they set up a structure that allowed their workers to continue creating content with a small budget. Wildstar was just managed poorly which is sad because they did have talented workers at Carbine studios but it means nothing if they are not given the tools or the leeway to create content from their management.

Examining ESO's successes is easy, they are still around because they evaluated why they did poorly and set up plans to improve the quality of the game. ESO is not perfect but it has its own charm and lively community. Of course, things can go downhill if ZOS decides to treat players poorly but so far they have a good record with how they manage the community of ESO.

Katahdin · October 2018

I heard of Wildstar

It was a partnership between Carbine Studios and publised by NCSoft (which also published GW2).
When it was announced it was all the buzz in the GW2 chats

I had absolutely no interest in it for the following reasons

The atmosphere and setting were too sci fi for what I wanted in a game
Too cartoonish looking (reminded me too much of WoW)

The biggest 2 reasons
Was subscription based (I was already an ESO subscriber)
Open world PvP everywhere (I love Cyrodill but I am not a fan of total open world PvP)

Honestly I am not surprised it is shutting down.
ESO has a much bigger and well established fan base. They really are not comparable.
.

UrQuan · October 2018

A look at the comparison of steam concurrent player numbers for ESO vs Wildstar over the past year shows why Wildstar shutting down means nothing to ESO's future.

The specific spot that I was hovering over was the highest the concurrent player count was showing over the past 12 months for Wildstar (note that it is far from the highest for ESO), and it's only showing 443 concurrent players vs. ESO's 14,783.

Now when comparing the 2 MMOs in this way, it's important to remember that neither MMO launched with Steam as an option, so only a portion of the players will show up in the Steam stats. For the sake of argument let's be extremely generous to Wildstar and assume that only 10% of its player base are/were Steam players (I'm sure that percentage is actually higher), and let's be less than generous to ESO and assume that fully 50% of its PC player base are Steam players (I'm sure that percentage is actually lower).

That would mean that in the week of Oct 30, 2017 (remember this is the highest point for Wildstar within the past year, but not a high point for ESO), the average concurrent players of Wildstar would be 4,430 while the average concurrent players of ESO would be 29,566. Remember that this has been intentionally skewed heavily in Wildstar's favour, and yet even doing so ESO would have had nearly 7 times the concurrent players of Wildstar. And that's just on PC. Wildstar on consoles was never a thing, while ZOS has said that for ESO the 3 different platforms (PC, XBox, Playstation) have roughly the same size player bases. So even skewing things very heavily in favour of Wildstar, ESO can be expected to have 20 times the active player base of Wildstar over the past year.

Wildstar's death means exactly nothing to ESO. The only similarities are that both MMOs were heavily hyped at launch, both launched in 2014, and both had quite rocky launches. The big difference is that Wildstar never recovered from its poor reception at launch, and has been in decline/stagnation ever since, while ESO recovered and has consistently been one of the more popular MMOs over the last few years.

danno8 · October 2018

UrQuan wrote: »

A look at the comparison of steam concurrent player numbers for ESO vs Wildstar over the past year shows why Wildstar shutting down means nothing to ESO's future.

The specific spot that I was hovering over was the highest the concurrent player count was showing over the past 12 months for Wildstar (note that it is far from the highest for ESO), and it's only showing 443 concurrent players vs. ESO's 14,783.

Now when comparing the 2 MMOs in this way, it's important to remember that neither MMO launched with Steam as an option, so only a portion of the players will show up in the Steam stats. For the sake of argument let's be extremely generous to Wildstar and assume that only 10% of its player base are/were Steam players (I'm sure that percentage is actually higher), and let's be less than generous to ESO and assume that fully 50% of its PC player base are Steam players (I'm sure that percentage is actually lower).

That would mean that in the week of Oct 30, 2017 (remember this is the highest point for Wildstar within the past year, but not a high point for ESO), the average concurrent players of Wildstar would be 4,430 while the average concurrent players of ESO would be 29,566. Remember that this has been intentionally skewed heavily in Wildstar's favour, and yet even doing so ESO would have had nearly 7 times the concurrent players of Wildstar. And that's just on PC. Wildstar on consoles was never a thing, while ZOS has said that for ESO the 3 different platforms (PC, XBox, Playstation) have roughly the same size player bases. So even skewing things very heavily in favour of Wildstar, ESO can be expected to have 20 times the active player base of Wildstar over the past year.

Wildstar's death means exactly nothing to ESO. The only similarities are that both MMOs were heavily hyped at launch, both launched in 2014, and both had quite rocky launches. The big difference is that Wildstar never recovered from its poor reception at launch, and has been in decline/stagnation ever since, while ESO recovered and has consistently been one of the more popular MMOs over the last few years.

LOL, I give you an awesome for independently coming to the same mathematical conclusion as I did only a few posts above yours.

Katahdin · October 2018

@UrQuan

I also believe Wildstar was released only through Steam(???).

ESO launched on PC without steam way before it was on steam so those numbers arent reallly comparable either.
THe ESO playerbase on PC is much bigger than that.