This, this is why servers are screaming "help me!" on evenings and weekends.

Yes it's great that ESO is growing woopie! I love ESO, it's a great game and I'm glad it's doing so well! ^^

Though it's also a reason the game lags more now and then.

Dominoid wrote: »

Korah_Eaglecry wrote: »

I think the more interesting thing about that announcement was that they are expanding their team. Ive heard rumors of them working on another property. But with the a position as a producer has opened up. Im wondering if the rumors are true and they are ramping up for the next big MMO.

It’s confirmed they’re working on another game. Might not be an MMO though.

Chances are that it is an MMO.

erlewine wrote: »

Korah_Eaglecry wrote: »

I think the more interesting thing about that announcement was that they are expanding their team. Ive heard rumors of them working on another property. But with the a position as a producer has opened up. Im wondering if the rumors are true and they are ramping up for the next big MMO.

well, judging by sales Elswyr seems pretty clearly the final full size expansion for ESO

I am pretty sure that there will be at least 2 more. Growing sales indicates that they should continue down the path they are on. Besides, the Skyrim anniversary is in 2021, and if they don't do a tie-in Chapter that year, they are really missing the boat!

fastolfv_ESO wrote: »

we used to get multiple instances of zones and we havnt had that in ages so where are all these people?

What makes you think we are not? It is easy to tell who is with you in a zone, much harder to tell when people you don't know are not with you. As a matter of fact, some of the EU server issues with overland latency may be due to the fact that they had to bump up the number of players allowed in a zone channel because they had too many concurrent channels running for some zones.

That most of the people you run past in overland are people you have never seen before should tell you something.

ccfeeling wrote: »

If they all play together, what will gonna happen?

Login queues.

ESO has not grown in years. Guys, there are places on the internet you can find daily login data dating back years. It's steady decline overall, while following the usual summer/winter/expansion dips. This doesn't mean the game is going to die anytime soon but I don't really see the point in deluding yourself, either.

edit: somewhat slight decline, to be fair.

erlewine wrote: »

ESO has not grown in years. Guys, there are places on the internet you can find daily login data dating back years. It's steady decline overall, while following the usual summer/winter/expansion dips. This doesn't mean the game is going to die anytime soon but I don't really see the point in deluding yourself, either.

edit: somewhat slight decline, to be fair.

The thing is that MMO games that are in a steady decline don't need multi-platform server capacity upgrades to handle additional players.

erlewine wrote: »

ESO has not grown in years. Guys, there are places on the internet you can find daily login data dating back years. It's steady decline overall, while following the usual summer/winter/expansion dips. This doesn't mean the game is going to die anytime soon but I don't really see the point in deluding yourself, either.

edit: somewhat slight decline, to be fair.

Please show us those sites that show those decline number but you should know that those of us that buy this game on ZoS webpage won't show there and so won't PS4 or Xbox player other and you can't just rely on those number for then WoW would have died out 6 years ago for t. ex. point is what you are saying don't match fact in the game the hell a lot more people online today than for 2 or 3 years ago and we are not talking about peeking time heck if I log in now would easy found random ground to a dungeon with few mins instead of wait up hours 2 year ago

erlewine wrote: »

You're not allowed to post links to anything like that, as they fall under the "Conspiracy Theories" rule. I hear google is still around, though.

Any suggestions on what to google?

If I search for 'Elder Scrolls Online daily log ins' I just get pages and pages of results about the login rewards and searching for 'Elder Scrolls Online Concurrent players' gives me Steam logs - which of course only tracks the minority who bought on Steam and stuck with it through the Steam login issues - and Reddit and forum topics where players are speculating on what they imagine the numbers might be.

I do remember seeing some sites that attempted to track player activity back around launch, but you had to sign up for the site before it was able to track you (and in some cases had to enter the data manually) so it was more of a survey of the people who used that site than actual data on the game as a whole, but if any of them are still around it could still be interesting. But like I said they're not coming up in my google searches, at least not in the first 3 pages.

Elusiin wrote: »

jainiadral wrote: »

Sylvermynx wrote: »

*sigh* Yeah. Nice.

Or not. I'm SO TIRED of bajillions of people everywhere.... I personally liked it better 6/18, when I first started playing. I pay my way, so I really just want to not have people everywhere.

Yeah yeah.... not a popular opinion. I get that.

Proper zone instancing would solve a *lot* of those problems. Cut the max players per map by 50-75% and open new instances and it'll feel like the game is much more manageable.

Been noticing a lot more players everywhere at the ungodly hours I play. I had no idea that the Alik'r was so populated at 3AM Nothing like getting massive lag when the dolmen train rides by...

Zone instancing only serves to help with lag on your computer, not server lag. Unless you have a potato for a computer, it's probably server lag that is your issue.

Zone instancing helps get rid of the feeling of overcrowding and too much population. I play at extremely non prime-time hours so I can quest relatively undisturbed. Unfortunately, the ESO's recent population explosion can be felt everywhere, constantly, and the lag is another symptom.

Facefister wrote: »

"Active accounts" doesn't mean steady income, as well as sold copies. The only relevant number would be the amount of ESO+ subscribers.

If you really wanted to know how ESO is doing you'd need a number of statistics. If it was me I'd track:

• Total profit over the reporting period (I assume monthly, or quarterly)
• Number of copies of each version sold (base game, Elsweyr + base game, Elsweyr upgrade etc.)
• Number of subscribers - either a snapshot or an average over the reporting period since it will change all the time
• Number or value of crown packs sold (total profit is probably easier to track and more meaningful than number of packs since one 21,000 pack is worth more than five 750 packs)
• Total unique logins over the reporting period
• Average concurrent uses online (maybe total and broken down by server)
• Highest concurrent users online
• Maybe what percentage of total logins are subscribers...although not sure how you'd count someone who only subbed for part of the reporting period
• Average time spent online

Of course all those numbers are open to interpretation and would need more detail to fully understand. For example if you want to look at why subscriber numbers change you really need to include the cancellation dates, not just how many there are now. Both because that shows you when players made the decision and because it lets you identify and exclude 'anomalies' like me. My sub is due to expire later this month and won't be renewed, which could look like I'm unhappy with the game. But if you include signup and cancellation dates you could see that I did both on the same day and realise I always intended to only sub for 3 months so you can stop worrying about why. (I don't think there's a way for quantitive data to show that I just wanted to buy crowns and it was the best value option in my price range at the time, but ZOS don't necessarily need to know that - just that I didn't cancel it as a result of any changes to the game.)

Then of course different departments will want more detail on their area. For example the people running the crown store will want to know how many crowns were spent, which items sold the best and which made the most profit (not always the same thing) and maybe things like which items were mainly bought with sub crowns vs. ones from packs, which were bought by people buying smaller crown packs (since those make more profit per crown for ZOS) etc. but I don't know how much of that data they can even track.

And the people designing maps will want to know not just how many people logged in and for how long but where they spent their time and what they did there, so they can see what kind of content is most popular...or at least taking up the most time and use that to plan future content and changes to current content. E.g. if everyone always avoids a certain world boss then maybe it needs a nerf, or better rewards, or both.

Tl;dr "How active is ESO?" isn't a question which can be answered easily and informatively, especially not with a single number. It would need a whole report and even then it's open to interpretation and depends on your priorities. I'm sure ZOS do track and analyse data like this, and act on it, they just don't tell us and talking points from an exhibition can't be used to fill in that huge gap.

MajBludd wrote: »

How many are alt accounts? (I knew a player that had 10 alt accounts)
How many are ppl who bought the game on sale, played a week and never came back?

I find it extremely hard to believe that many accounts are currently active.

I don't think there's any practical way for ZOS to work out what's an alt account vs. different people who share an IP address and have their own copies.

It did say in the OPs post that if you've bought multiple copies for yourself you will be counted more than once, but it also said it doesn't include free trial accounts.

(Also when they're tracking sales they don't really care what you do with it afterwards - they get the same amount of money even if you never installed it to begin with. But that's where all the other data I listed in my last post comes in.)

Wildbloom wrote: »

As much as I enjoy ESO, I'm willing to bet that a lot of those numbers are people who bought it on sale for like 10 dollars, logged in, played for an hour and decided they didn't like the combat. It's a touchy subject that you have to experience to understand. You love it or you hate it. But seeing as performance is getting worse with tons of new, consistent players, I think it's safe to say that it -is- growing. How can it not? It's constantly getting better, performance aside.They have a good product on their hands and I think people are just now realizing that it's no longer the mess that it was when it launched 5 years ago.

Not only is the game improving all the time and therefore appealing to more and more players, but as another current topic has demonstrated not everybody suffers from the problems that some posters seem to think are universally experienced.