VaranisArano wrote: »

(If someone wants to look at higher badges, Gina Bruno's profile has most of them.)

There's also this page, which lists some of the weirder badges, and even a few that are impossible to earn now.

Asys wrote: »

so just alot of guessing. /rolleyes

Without ZOS releasing their population data for the forums and in-game, all we can do is guess based on the metrics we have available.

I'm not sure what you expected, to warrant the eye rolling.

Though it's somewhat amusing to compare the quoted press release above (2.5 million players added in a year) vs the total number of players with the 1st comment badge over five+ years (157,742 posters as of last look).

FierceSam wrote: »

nafensoriel wrote: »

Mariusghost84 wrote: »

Are there any indicators to how big percentage of the player base uses the forums?

It's generally accepted that for any game the forums account for less than 20% of the player population at best.

I don't think I've ever seen anyone ever actually pull direct figures though. It's just eyeball math with forum figures and player figures.

Dude, I would be stunned if it was more than 1% of the player population. To be honest I’d be impressed if it was as much as 0.5%

The vast majority of players have no idea the forum exists. And of the small minority that do know, most don’t care.

It’s like Marius says, we should all be friends. We could have a meetup. In a phone box.

if we want to know what every one eso community thinks and wants in the game we would have to ask them each one by one in email @Account name.
this forum is just a very very small % of the eso community, and your saying it is between .05% and 1% in my belief is completely accurate and correct.

You don't need hard numbers to know that a very small percentage of the playerbase uses the forums. Look at the number of topics in the six years this forum has been around. It's tiny. On top of that, I'd wager a percentage of people that post on these forums aren't even active players of the game itself.

I worked in the games industry for a little over ten years. Support and infrastructure. I also worked as a forum manager. ... then I met my wife and had a chronic outbreak of common sense and left it all in the dust...

So, about 6 years ago, when I left the mmo that paid my mortgage, the statistics for that game were that 8% of players accessed the forum. We knew that because to access the forum you had to have a forum account and you had to subscribe to the game to have a forum account. Of that 8% perhaps two in a hundred did so regularly and of them about one in ten actually posted. These were mostly the outspoken ones

Now remember that this forum is much less exclusive and so the numbers will vary but my guess is that people who visit represent 15% or so with people that post making up a very small slice of that. If it follows other games that percentage number will normally decline over time leading to a perceived disconnect between developers and forum users with the latter generally unaware of the drop.

Therefore it is impossible to gauge the mood of the player base using just the forums as they represent a vocal minority that almost certainly bears little resemblance to the whole. The developer is forced to use in game data instead which is generated by a population bulk which often wants things that are very different to the tiny forum centric part of the population. Hence the assumption that the developers don’t listen... they do listen... just not exclusively to the forum

I submitted an inquiry and zos got back to me. Turns out the forums represent 100 percent of the player base, and thats what they base game balance on.